Philosophy of Photography - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014

For Situationist, theorist and film-maker Guy Debord, the aerial view reproduced the falsely objective world-view he called ‘the spectacle’. To counter its myth of an infinitely expandable, omniscient perspective, Debord focused on reducing views from above to ‘derisory documents’ of the social and the environmental through détournement in the two films he made while the Situationist International was in existence. The films engage critically with aerial photography as a hegemonic mode of indexical media, with the aerial view’s application as information image and ornament, and with the formal phenomenon of ciné-mapping. This analysis suggests that the détournement Debord performs in and across these films can be best conceptualized as a critical optic that constitutes a practice of seeing, a mode of reception and a call to action in the social space beyond its aesthetic employ. As such, the optic of détournement is the contestational counterpart to the optic of the aerial view. This remains the case despite the contemporary complexity of photographic views from above and their increased abstraction of social agents and spaces. An alternative to the testimonial function of embodied photographic views, détournement as optic represents an indexical civil contract founded upon representational inadequacy.

Exposure is key element of photography as well as in the relationship between the category of regime and the subjects it entails. This article sets out to re-examine the characteristics of exposure across these different contexts and on the basis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought. The article focuses on the relation between the practice of photography and civil actions pursued by human rights organizations. Combining theoretical ­considerations, analysis of photographs and interviews with human rights workers, the article points to the key role that exposure plays in civic action and seeks to articulate its complexity. Adopting an ­interdisciplinary methodology, the article argues that exposure is no simple relation between an ‘exposer’ and that which is ‘exposed’, but, rather, that as a process exposure reveals complex social political dynamics which defy ­conventional binary determinations of such relations.

This article examines photographic self-portraiture and investigates what happens when the genre’s proximity to conceptual borders – between the centre and the margins, self and other, normal and deviant behaviour, consciousness and unconsciousness – are crossed. Drawing on psychoanalytic and semiotic theories, and the history of the self-portrait, this article investigates the negativity ascribed to self-portraiture, its association with identity politics and social media, and problems of reference arising in contemporary artworks. The article starts out from the premise that the objectification of one’s body image is inherently linked to narcissism. This idea is useful for understanding the meaning of the photo-album/photo-diary, the therapeutic aspects of self-portraiture, and the rhetoric applied to images produced to bring visibility to marginalized and under-represented groups, which also serve to challenge the art establishment. However, the prioritization of art as a context for photography, the popularity of the genre, and the changing ideas related to definitions of ‘the centre’ in these contexts, demand that the conceptual character of the representation of selfhoods be redefined.

Photography and Social Movements: From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalisation (2001), Antigoni Memou (2013) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 176 pp., ISBN: 9780719097424, h/bk, £65.00

Feeling Photography, Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu (eds) (2014) Durham: Duke University Press, 408 pp., ISBN: 0822355264, h/bk, £72.00; ISBN: 0822355418, p/bk, £17.29