Philosophy of Photography - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011

Using an image taken by Reuters’ photographer Nicky Loh during the 2009 earthquake in Sumatra, this article rethinks in positive terms the experience of being captivated by photographs, including ‘disaster’ photographs that are often described as problematically spectacularizing. In order to do this I bring together two propositions, that of the photograph as a uniquely articulated prosthetic stare on the one hand, and as an inorganic but powerful ‘agent’ or ‘actor’ on the other. My main theoretical resources come from Donna Haraway’s well-known 1988 essay ‘Situated knowledges’ and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 essay ‘Eye and mind’.

This article focuses on the interpretative complexities encountered in the work of Lidwien van de Ven. First, it aims to map out the always porous nature of the relationships between aesthetics, politics and religion that make up her palimpsest-like images. Second, it aims to tease out a three-part analytics of photography. Third, it attempts to flesh out a difficult notion of spectacle that is inherent to her wide-ranging practice, and which distinguishes her project from liberal photojournalism with its obeisance to identity politics and its weak notion of ethics. Finally, it aims to isolate, within the dialectical machinery of spectacle that is so often put to work by western democracies, a pragmatic moment in our encounter with her photographs that has real political purchase. With a variable notion of close reading at the crux of the operation, the article probes the efficacy of this moment so akin to philosophical aesthetics.

This article takes as its starting point an exhibition of photographs of May ’68 by photojournalist Bruno Barbey at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2008, in order to consider the role that photography has played in shaping the memory and the forgetting of May ’68, 40 years on. The article examines the problematic of the documentation and display of protest photographs, focusing on how compositional decisions by the photographer have come to facilitate his photographs’ subsequent institutional framing. On this basis I argue that the predominant representational modes support hegemonic narratives of the events of May ’68 and highlight questions regarding the current difficulty of attending to the representation of collective political action.

This article discusses how the use of mobile media in digital culture is ushering in a new set of conditions for the realization of the social reception of art. This is to say that mobile media practices present a renewed challenge to major national art museums in their organization and practices of display and exhibition. The problematic explored here is that between the art museum’s continued attachment to aesthetic abstraction in the modernist trope and the clamouring and tumultuous world of image reproduction. The article seeks to define an intersection between the academic discourses of media and technology on the one hand, and aesthetics and cultural policy on the other, through a focus on subjectivities and narration. It does this by way of a particular fieldwork example from the research project Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture (2006–2009).

This article considers tropes of fragmentation and immersion in photographs made by Frederick Sommer (1905–1999) in the 1940s. It problematizes Kant-derived conceptions of the sublime, arguing that the radical nature of Sommer’s work of this period challenges dyadic relationships of the figure/ground that are associated with depictions of the Kantian sublime. Reviewing some of the writing on Sommer’s work to date, the article draws upon a close reading of his photographic prints and technique in the context of his wider practice, and alongside work done over the past four decades in Literature Studies, Feminist Studies, Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Classical Studies, to propose that a model of the Sapphic sublime is appropriate to Sommer’s work of this period.