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  5. Volume 16, Issue 1, 2025

Philosophy of Photography - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2025

Volume 16, Issue 1

Volume 16, Issue 1, 2025

Language: English
  • Interview

      • Giving outrageous visual form to nothing: An interview with Daniel Rubinstein

        https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00108_7

        This interview with Daniel Rubinstein was conducted by Bernd Behr and Andrew Fisher over the summer of 2024. It marks the point at which Daniel resigned his editorship of , which he co-founded with Andrew in 2010. The interview covers these events and their relation to the genesis and the continuing development of Daniel’s intellectual project. Since the 1990s, his work has sought to bring the critiques of representation developed in continental philosophies to bear on the understanding of photography, especially in light of its transformation by networked digital imaging technologies. The interview explores these questions in relation to various publications, with a special focus on Daniel’s 2023 book (Routledge).

  • Articles

      • The speculative camera

        https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00102_1

        What if we focused on different camera constellations in order to understand the future and history of photographies, instead of focusing on specific (photographic) representations? This realignment towards the camera would not only take into account the kinds of devices commonly considered to be cameras but also include alternative forms and methods of measurement and electromagnetic sensing – historical and contemporary – which are involved in developing our techno-visual imaginaries. The speculative camera, as described in this article, explicitly addresses the camera as an assemblage that includes not only particular photographic devices but also a range of other techniques, technologies and ways of being which form a backdrop for photographies. This assemblage is held steady via a constellation which may include tens or hundreds of devices. This article presents three cross sections exploring the relationships between photographies and: (1) navigational abilities practised by members of the animal kingdom (notably bat echolocation), (2) human wayfinding, seafaring and astronomy and (3) volumetric mapping (like infrared sensing, Light Detection and Ranging [LIDAR] and photogrammetry). Common to all three is the articulation of temporality through observations, time-stamping and time-synchronicity, which, we suggest, is pivotal to all camera operations. The speculative character of these camera operations lies in the fact that they are all based on models or programmes, that need to be activated to make camera constellations work.

    • The evental archive: Collective mnemonics and post-digital networks

      https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00101_1

      Digital open-access networks, including virtual archives such as search engines, social media profiles and corporate and personal websites, have reconfigured the dynamics of information dissemination. This article introduces the concept of the ‘evental archive’, a new archival form that emerges from multimodal engagement with unfolding events. It considers the cognitive and radical implications of interactive transactions within post-digital networks, with a particular focus on how evental archives preserve and extend the temporality of the original event by transcending its significance. These archives are facilitating a collective reconfiguration of mnemonics by enabling more inclusive modes of participation, largely mediated through the communicative function of the image. Moreover, the increased accessibility and popularity of digital archives influence the perceived truthfulness of their content, which is often aided by photography’s presumed veracity. This article, therefore, also examines how the evolving conditions of digital archives and open-access networks impose new pressures on the traditional role of the photographic document. Furthermore, it considers how the temporal nature of virtual interactions redefines the contested relationship between truth and the image.

  • Photowork
  • Articles

      • Learning from atrocity: When machines regard the pain of others

        https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00105_1

        The images that have emerged from Gaza, capturing catastrophic violence inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, are atrocious, haunting, injurious. Gaza-based photojournalist Motaz Azaiza came to the fore in the early months of the onslaught as a critical source of on-the-ground information, capturing and posting a steady stream of horror to his Instagram account. Social media outlets are replete with images like his, paired alongside pleas to ‘Stop scrolling!’, ‘Keep looking!’ and ‘Don’t look away!’ This article questions what it means to look at images of atrocity within contexts defined by their financialization and instrumentalization, wherein images, now operational, work to fuel online economies and inform developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Reflecting on the images and commentary posted to Azaiza’s Instagram account and building on existing efforts to theorize intersections between spectatorship and photographic representations of atrocity, the article investigates the technical appropriation, financialization and instrumentalization of the atrocious image online, exposing its complicities and identifying how functions of the image that were once lauded are precisely those now being exploited.

    • The sleep of reason produces monsters: Steven Shearer’s

      https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00106_1

      In April 2021, Steven Shearer’s photographs were displayed on billboards along Vancouver’s Arbutus Greenway as part of the Capture Photography Festival. Sourced from his collection of found images, the works pictured individuals caught in the depths of deep sleep. Despite their art historical references, many viewers associated the images with death, sparking public backlash and exposing underlying fears of social precarity. Ultimately, the works were censored two days after their display. This article explores the underlying reasons behind the work’s censorship, underscoring how the images gave expression to societal discomfort with vulnerability and the pressures of a hyper-connected, 24/7 capitalist culture that prioritizes productivity and consumption over rest and reverie, as well as emphasizing the tension between the sacred and the profane in everyday life.

    • Mourning on Facebook

      https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00103_1

      This article questions why we behave the way we do on Facebook when it comes to mourning and associated memorialization. It addresses the everyday use of photography that takes place specifically on Facebook around the cultural and familial mourning practices that have been greatly expanded as a result of the reach across time and space that the platform provides, and the blurring of private and public that follows. This expansion of contemporary visualities is not necessarily derived directly from new technologies of imaging but rather in how we use and re-create the images that we are able to have and share, and the platform that spurs us to do it. If both humans and nations can be driven by unconscious motives, what is happening with Facebook? And what do we get for our performance (our content creation) within it? Solace? Or something more sinister? How can this kind of content, with its many built-in, algorithm mandated twists and turns, be interpreted? And what does it mean – this way of being human experienced through screens in a simultaneous present?

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