Photography

Review of “Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia,” Saatchi Gallery, London, England, and “Calder After the War,” Pace Gallery, London, England, April 2013. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 157-60.

An essay on non-discursive forms of knowledge that inhabit art photography. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 209-26.

This brief examines the ontological shift in photography caused by the transition from the absolute qualities inherent in a tangible film negative to the mutable digital RAW image file born from the womb of the digital photography revolution. Though the film negative and RAW image file, in general, serve as a causal history of the exposed subject, their ontological paths diverge markedly: traditional chemical development of the registered subject yields a film negative whose foundational architectural features remain absolute. In contrast, (...) the digital format allows for the effortless generation of endless, mutable clone variants from a single RAW image file. That is, the digital photographic “register” (Wilson 2021) can be manipulated to alter the inscribed features of the exposed subject. This modern-day capacity to infinitely rearrange and engineer foundational characteristics inscribed on a register alters the ontology of the photographic print, shifting the medium away from the structural veracity associated with the negative toward the boundless realm of traditional graphic illustration. (shrink)

Kendall Walton has (in)famously argued that photographs fundamentally differ from handmade pictures such as paintings and drawings in a crucial respect: unlike the latter, photographs are transparent in that looking at them allows one to literally see the objects they depict. Walton’s explanation for this alleged contrast appeals to the different ways in which the depictive content of a photograph and that of a handmade picture counterfactually depend on the depicted scene, and to the similarity between the dependence profiles of (...) photographs and experiences of seeing an object. I argue that, even if photographs are indeed transparent and handmade pictures are not, it is a mistake to think that what grounds the transparency of the former and the non-transparency of the latter concerns the counterfactual dependence profiles of these different pictorial kinds. The dissimilarity between the dependence profiles of photographs and handmade pictures stems from some merely accidental features of certain types of cameras. Further, the dependence profiles of photography and ordinary object-seeing are not at all analogous in the way Walton supposes. Thus, even those who are convinced by photographic transparency need an alternative account of it. (shrink)

Der Begriff der Glaubwürdigkeit begegnet uns heutzutage in vielen verschiedenen Kontexten. Aber wer oder was ist eigentlich glaubwürdig? Was bedeutet es, wenn wir Glaubwürdigkeit zuschreiben? Diese Fragen sollen im folgenden Beitrag im Hinblick auf die Fotografie in ihren verschiedenen Verwendungskontexten näher untersucht werden. Das Problem der Deepfakes hat im digitalen Zeitalter zu einer wahren Glaubwürdigkeitskrise geführt, wie einige Forschende anführen. Was können wir dem Einfluss solcher Bilderzeugnisse entgegensetzen? Hier werden wir auf einen Gedankengang von Catherine Z. Elgin (2025) zurückgreifen, nämlich (...) die Idee einer epistemischen Ökologie. (shrink)

The question of how to deal with photographs from the colonial period and photographic archives is one of the most pertinent in the fields of art history, critical museology and critical heritage studies today. This article approaches these issues by focusing on the role of photography in a novel. It discusses Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), highlighting intersections between photography, literature, history and memory; interrelations between histories of photography, violence and war; histories of Italian colonialism and the military occupation (...) of Ethiopia. And it pays particular attention to the role of women in these regards. While much emphasis has rightly been given to questions of the restitution of cultural belongings and ancestral remains, this article approaches the issue of photographs and photographic archives, as well as Mengiste’s written photographs, through the lens of the ‘restitution of dignity’, a concept discussed by the Savvy Contemporary collective in 2022. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how photographs that depict violence and suffering (PVS) may morally impact us, and what we should do with them in the present age. Specifically, through a critical discussion of the works of Susan Sontag, I argue that we have two imperfect duties towards PVS. Firstly, I argue that we have a duty to keep our exposure to PVS to a moderate amount. I echo the early Sontag’s worry that overexposure to PVS may desensitize the viewers, but (...) I also argue, by analogy to Nussbaum’s account of moral novels, for Sontag’s later view that some familiarity with PVS is important for our moral development. Consequently, I maintain that we have an imperfect duty to make ourselves familiar with some PVS, but we also ought to prevent ourselves from being overexposed to PVS. Secondly, I discuss Sontag’s skepticism of the ethical capacity of PVS to change our moral beliefs. I first argue in support of Sontag’s claim that photographs lack any inherent moral meaning. I then claim, in partial agreement with a recent objection to Sontag by Susie Linfield, that if photographs have no inherent moral meaning, then it is plausible to claim that the viewers have a moral duty to actively engage with PVS and construct their moral meaning. Pace Linfield, however, I argue that this duty can only be an imperfect duty, as such a perfect duty is too demanding. (shrink)

Contemporary art circulates through ‘installation shots’. Overwhelmingly, artworks are viewed through eye-level photographs of depopulated exhibitions. Yet the historical affordances and limitations of the genre have seldom been theorized. This article addresses the ascendance of the installation shot as a process of industrial standardization shaped by market pressures. Departing from considerations of precedents in 1850s France, the article considers the rise of twentieth-century installation shot photography in the context of art’s declining self-evidence. The form, I argue, afforded a legible publicity (...) photograph through which to advertise and disseminate exhibitionary appearances in the absence of other socially expedient means. A technique through which to achieve extra-artistic imperatives, the installation shot predominates within contemporary art. But it has been contested and negated. The article concludes with some reflections on how autonomy might be wrested from the circulation of art images today. (shrink)

There is, it is claimed, a long-standing link between photography and the realist novel. Nancy Armstrong in particular argues that the pictorial veridicality of literary realism is at least partly premised upon the rapid propagation of photographic images through late 19th century culture. In doing so, Armstrong argues that photography and realist fiction were mutual participants in an epistemological project wherein the horizons of the ‘real world’—at least within the context of literary fiction—were continuously and unconsciously drawn and redrawn. Meanwhile, (...) within the context of science and technology history, it is often taken for granted that late 19th century science photographers assumed that photographs provided direct, untrammelled access to an entirely different notion of the real: a real unviolated by the messy business of human perception and agency. While this notion is a gross misrepresentation of the facts of the matter, this is not to imply that late 19th century science photographs were ‘fictive’, at least in the sense intended by Armstrong, Novak, Helen Groth, and others. Although it might be the case that non-scientific applications of photography in the late 19th century were conducted in a fictive register, science photography proves a rather more challenging case. In the wake of this observation, this chapter first demarcates and define these conflicting notions of realism, in which I will demonstrate that the epistemic commitments of literary and metaphysical realism (specifically Cartesian realism) are categorically incompatible, though they share a common intuition. Subsequently, I then explain the value of photography to scientific practitioners by appealing to the formal properties of photographs. Third, I argue that although photographic processes guarantee that photographs are traces of the world, there is no further guarantee that those traces will be isomorphic to experience; whilst 19th century science photographs were undeniably visions of the world, they are parts of the world hitherto unseen by human eyes. Finally, I contend that science photography in the late 19th century anticipated key developments in philosophical realism—not least the transition from 18th and 19th century Cartesian realism to 20th century scientific realism. By revealing an invisible universe entirely unlike the one of our phenomenological experience, late 19th century science photography helped reintroduce humanity to a world in which we lack ontological rank or priority. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of how videographic public announcements (VPAs)---i.e. videos that a wide swath of the public sees and knows that everyone else can see too--- have functioned to mobilize people politically, and how the presence of deepfakes in our information environment stands to change the dynamics of this mobilization. Existing work by Regina Rini, Don Fallis and others has focused on the ways that deepfakes might interrupt our acquisition of first-order knowledge through videos. But I point (...) out that even where every audience member takes a video to be veridical, where first-order knowledge acquisition is secure, an audience aware of deepfakes in their environment will not acquire higher order knowledge in the way that has erstwhile been characteristic for audiences of VPAs. Engaging with ideas from the literatures on public announcement logic, common knowledge, and convention, I enumerate a variety of ways in which we should expect this absence of higher order knowledge to throw up barriers to political mobilization. I go on to apply my analysis of VPAs to the mechanisms by which an uptick in publicly available videos of police brutality over the last decade, mediated by camera phones and social media, was responsible for the largest mass protests in US history in summer 2020. This makes vivid the stakes of the transformation in our mobilizing environment that I've claimed deepfakes effect: where we lose the common-knowledge-generating effects of VPAs, there are fresh obstacles to this sort of mass mobilization. (shrink)

This book presents a sustained philosophical and critical inquiry into Sudanese art under conditions of war, displacement, and historical fragmentation, advancing Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) as an ethical alternative to dominant interpretive frameworks in contemporary art discourse. Rather than treating artworks as objects to be decoded, explained, or culturally translated for external audiences, this study repositions the critic as a witness in proximity—one who resists extraction, narrative closure, and symbolic appropriation. -/- Through a series of close encounters with Sudanese visual practices—ranging (...) from material craft traditions and domestic forms to contemporary expressions shaped by exile and rupture—the book develops a methodology grounded in restraint, presence, and moral adjacency. It argues that conventional art criticism, particularly within post-1950s interpretive paradigms, has produced a condition of interpretive saturation, wherein artworks are reduced to vehicles for meaning rather than approached as sites of lived continuity and fragile coherence. -/- Drawing on the philosophical architecture of Post-Interpretive Criticism—including concepts such as viewer-as-evidence, ethical proximity, and the refusal of interpretive closure—the text examines how Sudanese art operates not as representation but as survival infrastructure: a means of carrying memory, dignity, and cultural continuity through conditions of systemic disruption. In doing so, it reframes aesthetic experience as an ethical encounter shaped by limits, rather than an opportunity for discursive expansion. -/- The book further situates Sudanese art within broader discussions of archive politics, institutional mediation, and the epistemic violence of interpretation, arguing that acts of naming, framing, and explaining often function as forms of displacement. Against this, it proposes a discipline of witnessing that privileges silence, material attention, and positional awareness over interpretive authority. -/- Positioned at the intersection of aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy, Threads of Sand, Scar, & Scripture contributes to emerging post-hermeneutic approaches to art criticism by offering both a theoretical framework and a series of applied analyses. It establishes Post-Interpretive Criticism not merely as a method, but as a necessary ethical recalibration in the face of cultural fragility, where the role of criticism is no longer to extract meaning, but to remain answerable to what survives. -/- Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. -/- Post-Interpretive Criticism, Stillmark Theory, Message-Transfer Theory, MTT, Misplacement, Displacement, Aesthetic Displacement Theory, Theory of Misplacement, Absential Aesthetics, Witness Aesthetics, Hauntmark Theory, Spiritual Criticism, Presence-Based Criticism, Custodianship of Art, Art as Ontology, Aesthetic Recursion Theory, Aesthetic Recursion, Viewer as Evidence Theory, Restraint in front of art, Moral proximity, Interpretive silence, Erasure as ethics, Temporal scarcity, Silence as method, Ontology of beauty, Aesthetic mercy, Language as violence, Art encounter ethics, Epistemology of witness, Philosophy of Art, Aesthetics, Art Theory, Contemporary Aesthetics, Comparative Aesthetics, Phenomenology and Art, Ethics in Art Criticism, Interpretation and Meaning, Criticism and Reception Theory, Epistemology of Art, Visual Culture Studies, Dorian Vale, Founder of Post-Interpretive Criticism, Post-Aesthetic Critic, Independent Philosopher of Art, Museum of One, Art Writer and Theorist, Aesthetic Philosopher, Custodian of Witness Aesthetics, Spiritual Aesthetics Movement, The Doctrine of Post-Interpretive Criticism, The Custodian’s Oath, The Canon of Witnesses, Art as Truth, Art as Presence, The Viewer as Evidence, Interpretation vs. Witnessing, Language as Custody, Erasure as Afterlife, Museum of One Manifesto, Alternative art criticism, New art criticism movement, Ethical art theory, Criticism beyond interpretation, Slow looking philosophy, Quiet philosophy of art, Radical art restraint, Witness over interpretation, Interpretive Restraint, The Journal of Post-Interpretive criticism, The Journal of Post-Interpretive criticism ISSN 2819-7232), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Epoché Fidelity Index (EFI) (Q138018710), Phenomenological Phase Alignment Score (PPAS) (Q138018807), Residue Engagement Restraint Ratio (RERR) (Q138018901), Quasi-Subject Agency Recognition Index (QSARI) (Q138018929), Dialectical Circulation Index (DCI) (Q138018950). (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Still-images of videogames, discussed in this paper as ‘videogame photography’, have increasingly found a home in gallery exhibits. This contrasts with other forms of media derived from videogames, such as ‘livestreams’ and ‘let’s plays’, which have been characterised by communal spectatorship facilitated through online platforms. Through the work of Vilém Flusser, I argue that this is because what links videogame photography to real-world photography is its use of photographic conventions, and that adherence to these conventions allows galleries to integrate these (...) images into a pre-existing canon of art photography. For the same reason, however, videogame photography has struggled to find a home in spectator gaming. By analysing videogame photography and its separation from spectator gaming in this manner, I demonstrate how videogame photography becomes socially ingrained in the conventions and the canon of real-world photography, something that approaches which focus solely on the aetiology or ontology of videogame photography miss. (shrink)

Review of: The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI, Joanna Zylinska (2023) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-26254-683-6, p/bk, USD 45.

This article examines the current state of photography education in Australia amid neo-liberal restructuring, government disinvestment and the emergence of generative AI. It reflects on what is at stake when photography loses its disciplinary purchase, as well as the educator’s contradictory position working within systems that actively dismantle space for critical reflection. Prompted by the closure of a university photography programme and the wider decline of institutional support for photography as a discipline, this article examines the political and institutional factors (...) that have made photographic practice and education increasingly uncertain. Drawing on the work of bell hooks and Ariella Azoulay, this article raises questions about what is lost when photography is instrumentalized for market outcomes and what it might mean to teach photography otherwise, if teaching it at all remains possible. It reflects on ‘unteaching photography’ as a potential way forward, using the camera’s ‘click’ as a contested gesture. It asks, most urgently, if photography education offers a space to think creatively and critically about images and their entanglements with power, what occurs when that space disappears? (shrink)

Design is an omnipresent, aesthetic-functional phenomenon, one that is culturally loaded and broadly influential. Since ancient times, design has played a crucial role in shaping both our intimate daily experiences and broader societal structures. It influences behavior, preferences, cultural norms and movements, political or personal identities, and economic systems. Today, design is not only a thriving field of practice but also an evolving area of academic inquiry, one that is becoming a self-standing discipline. It is, of course, important to define (...) ‘design’ . But, in developing our understanding of it, we also need to analyze its relationships to associated fields, such as ontology, cognition and perception, ethics, politics, social conduct, fine or popular art, everyday aesthetics, and science and technology. The special issue Design and its Relations takes up this mission. We aim to reveal and study the interactions between design as an aesthetic-functional field and various auxiliary concepts, ideas, phenomena, and disciplines. The essays in the special issue thus address a range of design affiliations. These include both (a) relatively abstract affiliations—such as aesthetics, perception and appreciation, beauty, ethics, science, rationalism, and the idea of abstractness itself—and (b) more direct topics, including design’s relations to photographic systems and even cultural views of parenthood given through the evolution of crib shapes (which is a typical substantiation of design’s impact on humanity’s foundations). ARTICLES Introduction Michalle Gal -/- Design and Definitions: Reflections on the Question of “What is Design?” Thomas Leddy -/- Design and Tacit Aesthetics: Design as the Art of Objects-in-Use Pauline von Bonsdorff -/- Design and Aesthetic Appreciation: Form, Functionality, Performativity Matilde Carrasco Barranco -/- Design and Beauty: Functional Style Jane Forsey -/- Design and Value: The Ethical Nature of Beautiful Design Panos Paris -/- Design Science and Aesthetics Saul Fisher -/- Design and Rationalism: A Visualist Critique of Instrumental Rationalism Michalle Gal -/- Design and the Constitution of Semantic or Conceptual Meaning Gregory Galford and Jeremy Barris -/- Design and the Modern Crib: Hygiene, Configuration, Materiality, and Social Status Gal Ventura -/- Design and Photography: Pinhole, Perpendicular, Programmatic Yanai Toister -/- Design and Abstraction Jeffrey Strayer -/- Notes on Contributors . (shrink)

Review of: Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo, Amanda K. Greene (2024) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 212 pp., ISBN 978-0-26255-082-6, p/bk, USD 39.53.

Images do more than represent the world; they help create it—guiding aesthetic expectations, influencing behavior, and shaping the material design of landscapes. Drawing on Heidegger, post-phenomenology, and environmental ethics, this paper examines photography as a mediating force that co-authors our experience of nature. In the age of social media, this dynamic intensifies: personal identity becomes entwined with environmental experience within hybrid spaces that blur digital and physical boundaries, merging self-expression with place-making. Tracing this shift from early conservation photography to contemporary (...) image economies, this paper advances a hermeneutic analysis of photographic world-building and calls for an ethic grounded in ecological responsibility and poetic dwelling—one that recognizes our active role in shaping environments and embraces the co-creative entanglement of self, image, and world. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence has given us synthetic media that are increasingly easy to create and increasingly hard to distinguish from photographs and videos. Whereas an existing literature has been concerned with how these new media might make a difference for would-be knowers—the viewers of photographs and videos—I advance a thesis about how they will make a difference for would-be communicators—those who embed photos and videos in their speech acts. I claim that the presence of these media in our information environment (...) reduces our ability to show one another things, even as it may increase our resources for telling. And I argue that this has consequences beyond the disruption of knowledge acquisition; showing is a way that we preserve relational equality through superficial asymmetries in political communication, and thereby express respect for our audiences. If synthetic media reduce our options for showing, they then interfere in the way that we manage our relationships in the context of collective political action. (shrink)

-/- Aktuell scheint die Geschichte der Bilder (und allgemeiner: der visuellen Medien), die seit den den 1990er-Jahren einen bemerkenswerten Aufschwung in Gesellschaft und Wissenschaft erlebten, in eine neue Phase zu treten und weitere Ambivalenzen zu Tage zu fördern. Das betrifft zum einen die enorm beschleunigte Distribution von Bildern in den sozialen Medien, zum anderen die mittels KI eröffneten Möglichkeiten der Bildgenerierung, deren Effekte sich bisher noch gar nicht absehen lassen. Insbesondere haben sich die technischen Möglichkeiten der Bildmanipulation in einem Maße (...) erhöht, dass sie die uns bisher bekannten Verfahren der Bildbearbeitung (etwa im Rahmen der digitalen Fotografie oder mit Hilfe von Bildbearbeitungsprogrammen wie Photoshop) als harmlose Spielerei und die ehemals übertrieben wirkenden Bilddystopien bei Vilém Flusser oder Jean Baudrillard als aktuelle Gesellschaftsdiagnosen erscheinen lassen. -/- Bilder im Aufbruch: Herausforderungen der Bildwissenschaft versucht, diesen neuerlichen Entwicklungen nachzuspüren. Dafür nehmen die Autor*innen in interdisziplinärer Weise eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme theoretischer und terminologischer Fragen zu Bildern einerseits sowie zu neuen Bildphänomenen und -formen andererseits vor. (shrink)

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? (shrink)

There is a history of thinking that photographs provide a special kind of access to the objects depicted in them, beyond the access that would be provided by a painting or drawing. What is included in the photograph does not depend on the photographer’s beliefs about what is in front of the camera. This feature leads Kendall Walton to argue that photographs literally allow us to see the objects which appear in them. Current generative algorithms produce images in response to (...) users’ text prompts. Depending on the parameters, the output can resemble specific people or things which are named in the prompt. This resemblance does not depend on the user’s beliefs, so generated images are in this sense like photographs. Given this parallel, how should we think about AI-generated images? (shrink)

Review of: Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, Kimberly Juanita Brown (2024) Cambridge: MIT Press, 184 pp., ISBN 978-0-26254-764-2, p/bk, $18.95.

Review of: Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain, Joy Gregory (ed.) (2024) London: Mack and Autograph, 448 pp., ISBN 978-1-91362-075-2, p/bk, £60.

The article explores the relationship between photography and generative AI, discussing whether AI-generated images that appear photographic can be considered photography or if they represent a distinct medium. To address this question, the article proposes drawing on the media-theoretical concept of ‘automatisms’, as advanced by Stanley Cavell and David N. Rodowick. Focusing on the emerging practice of ‘generative re-photography’, the article examines the ways in which artists Anja Engelke and Craig Ames deploy photographic automatisms in their works. By appropriating found (...) photographs and recreating them synthetically, both artists demonstrate how multimodal generative AI is fundamentally dependent on the medium of photography and its history – particularly the photographic automatism of documentary recording. Rather than contrasting traditional photography with synthetic images, the works reflect on both their continuities and discontinuities, emphasizing the cultural automatisms embedded in technological automatisms. (shrink)

This photowork presents extracts from a conversation between myself and Andrew Fisher, discussing two interconnected bodies of work: Counterfactual Departures (Bangkok Winter Gardens) (2023) and The Mute (2025). Both series use generative imaging platforms, Midjourney and ChatGPT as a form of speculative imaging practice. Counterfactual Departures is a series of synthetic images reimagining my Thai mother’s migration from Bangkok to Sydney as an event undocumented in photographs, drawing on prompts that capture a fragmented migration story with images that fails to (...) fill a familial archive. The Mute expands from this personal specificity to the broader historical context of Thai women’s migration during the late 1960s and 1970s, drawing on archival resources. The dialogue examines the implications of using generative imaging as a technology of memory within the limitations of statistical aggregation and ethical safeguards set by imaging platforms. Our conversation considers the limitations of prompting historical trauma and its erasure or replacement while covering creative strategies used in both of the works. This includes a reflection of the way style, whether documentary or staged photography, functions as a referent in generative systems, determining the visualization of historical subjects, along with synthetic imaging’s speculative ‘what-could-have-been’ as a structure for collapsing personal and collective histories. We foreground how the qualities of AI imagery become part of an aesthetic strategy to consider the collapsing of cultural, historical, and personal narratives in datasets and the enduring influence of photographic conventions on how bodies, especially women’s bodies, are represented when mediated by generative AI. (shrink)

In 'The Aesthetics of Phenomenal Presence,' Seel presents thirteen theses concerning the image and its manifestation, postulated under the influence of contemporary discourse and drawing on the contributions of Nelson Goodman and Gottfried Boehm. The author of this article focuses particularly on Seel's first three theses, discussing them in the context of potential interpretative issues. They subject them to critical analysis, referencing, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein's concepts, which Seel rejects in his initial assumptions. The author endeavors to reconstruct the proposals (...) of the German philosopher, highlighting the problems that thesetheses may overlook or inadequately problematize. The article examines the phenomenological approach to the material image, especially focusing on its mode of existence and the process of constituting meaning. The author also underscores Seel's attempt to encompass material images in all their forms, such as photographs, mirror reflections, or pictographic signs. (shrink)

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 Philosophy of Photography, 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 How Photography Changed Philosophy (Routledge). (shrink)

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. (shrink)

I reconsider key arguments in and about Camera Lucida in order to clarify their philosophical origins. Focusing on three interrelated issues, I aim both to do justice to Barthes’s book and to enable a more nuanced critique of his work. First, I revisit his understanding of the problem of the referent, or of the real in the image, an issue still subject to divergent interpretations but crucial for understanding his methodological choices. Second, I argue that Camera Lucida is even more (...) phenomenological than Barthes acknowledged, shaped not only by Sartre but also, implicitly, by Heidegger, whose influence is absent from both the text and its theoretical reception. Third, I address the problem of semiology and semiotics. Against the view that Camera Lucida marks a rupture between Barthes the semiologist and Barthes the phenomenologist, I propose that there is, in fact, a continuity of thought on photography despite its shift in method. This involves comparing Camera Lucida with index theories of photography and engaging controversies related to C. S. Peirce. Ultimately, I suggest that photography led Barthes to the limits of both semiotics and phenomenology, limits that opened the possibility of a new notion of art. (shrink)

Compte-rendu du numéro Photographie et politique, sous la direction de Christophe David et Joan Grandjean, Tumultes, n° 60-61, Éditions Kimé, oct. 2023, 408 pages. -/- Le titre en dit tout : il ne s'agit pas simplement d'un volume consacré à la photographie, mais de cette intrication spécifique entre le photographique et le politique, ou encore, de ce que la photographie peut faire à la politique et vice-versa. D'une certaine façon, tous les textes de ce numéro posent la même question : (...) la photographie peut-elle être politique et comment ? Ou, pour reformuler cette citation (en réalité une question rhétorique) de D. Levi Strauss : comment l'image en tant qu'apparition pourrait-elle détourner son inclination inhérente à l'illusion vers un engagement politique ? (shrink)

This article investigates the challenges confronting contemporary photography education through an analysis of technological disruption, institutional limitations and epistemological shifts. Using Latvia’s first undergraduate photography programme (2013–24) at Riga Stradiņš University as a case study, the research assesses photography’s fragile standing within academic institutions. The analysis explores photography’s evolving historical role across scientific, artistic and commercial fields; the contradictions caused by computational imaging technologies; the restrictive nature of the technical–artistic dualism in educational frameworks; and the constraints imposed by neo-liberal institutional (...) policies. Instead of promoting traditional teaching methods, this article suggests rethinking photography education to develop ‘critical photographic consciousness’ – the ability for reflective engagement with visual environments influenced by algorithms and political conflicts. This shift moves photography training away from just technical skills towards critical participation in current visual culture, combining technological literacy with ethical and political awareness. (shrink)

This article details the author’s exploration of alternative perspectives in photography, in particular parallel projections that eliminate the single viewpoint created by a lens. It considers how new imaging technologies such a 3D spatial photography have reopened the question of perspective in the visual arts, making many new types of spatial representation available, through point clouds and the hybrid perspectives now often used in video games. It shows how perspective was known and debated in ancient Greece and demonstrates why it (...) was rejected in both Byzantine and in Chinese art, with which the author discovers a particular affinity. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

It is widely believed that photography is a ‘transparent’ medium: by seeing through a photograph we directly perceive the world itself. For this reason, photographs are thought to be an especially objective means of representation, and war photography relies on the ideal of objectivity to communicate the surreal horror of distant goings-on. -/- But the aims and practice of war photography, I argue, are at odds with the ideal of objectivity and the resulting image’s transparency. War photography cannot be transparent, (...) lest it be merely documentary. Instead, war photography’s primary aims are perlocutionary: it aims to convey the horrors of war and spur action to end the conflict. Its proper subject is therefore neither identical to, nor really similar to, the objects it depicts; instead, these objects represent the photograph’s subject. (shrink)

Feminist photography in Turkey operates at the intersection of artistic expression and political resistance, navigating a landscape shaped by patriarchal norms, authoritarian governance and a rigid educational infrastructure. This article explores how such visual practices challenge the dominant photographic education system in Turkey – one rooted in technocratic modernism that privileges technical mastery over critical, embodied and inclusive approaches to image-making. The work of emerging photographer Cansu Yıldıran, whose practice is shaped by feminist and queer sensibilities, enables an analysis of (...) alternative photographic aesthetics and methods which suggest modes of resistance. In voicing personal and collective forms of marginalization in this context, Yıldıran’s photographs implicitly critique its conventions of photography education. This, I argue, offers a counter-model that emphasizes performativity, vulnerability and lived experience and opens a critical space that invites more inclusive pedagogical possibilities. (shrink)

With the arrival of image generators based on artificial intelligence (AI), human image creation has been increasingly supplemented by machine-driven, automated technological operations. Drawing on sources from media theory (McLuhan, Flusser) and philosophy of technology (Heidegger, Anders), this chapter queries what an image is, analyses technology-based image generation, proposes a new understanding of ‘imagistic’ images, contextualises them in the debate about truth and kitsch, and finally sketches an idea of the changed anthropological role of humans as ‘shepherds of objects’ in (...) processes of technological image generation. The latter appears as a program that we can call an affordance, i.e., a human−technology relationship based on imperatives that are gradually setting in and get normalised through habituation in everyday life-worlds. For humans, the shame of having ceded command to machines that are so highly proficient in pasting together and churning out images so highly unreliable might be persistent. (shrink)

This interview with Joanna Zylinska was conducted by Alex Fletcher on 8 July 2025. It focuses on Zylinska’s recent study The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (2023), which investigates the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI. The interview explores the critical affordances of key concepts developed in the book – including ‘a philosophy of after-photography’, ‘the perception machine’ and ‘planetary micro-vision’ – as well as Zylinska’s own media practice.

Photography has always been associated with the physical activity of the human body: capturing, editing and viewing photos are all activities that involve the user’s spatial interaction with the technology used. With conventional photography, one aspect of spatial relation with technology is the viewer’s ability to recognize the camera’s location in the photographic scene through visual indications, such as the relative location of objects in the frame to the camera’s point of view, combined with a basic familiarity with the functionality (...) of conventional cameras, relating to the notions of ‘in-front’ and ‘behind’ the camera. Some instances of interactive photography, such as 360-degree imagery and three-dimensional photogrammetry, challenge the spatial connection between the photographer (represented by the camera location) and the viewer due to unique usability and innovative interactions, such as the viewer’s ability to ‘move’ freely in all directions of the three-dimensional, photographic space. The technological affordances of interactive photography create a distinct corporeal experience that challenges the traditional associations between the photographer, the viewer and the photographic imagery, evoking with the viewers the notion of technological uncanniness and, consequently, questioning some of the traditional preconceptions regarding the prime characteristics of the photographic medium. (shrink)

Arising out of the heightened sensory perceptions of extended lockdown, this creative investigation began with contemplation of flowering street-trees. Through 262 days of lock down, residents of Melbourne retreated to the hyper-local, often reinforced by a 5-km travel bubble and a one-hour daily time limit outdoors. The sublime ephemeral springtime flowers of street-trees were amplified by the extreme sensory and social constraints of social distancing. Drawing us into a suspended moment of slow encounter, we attuned to the contained glowing pulse (...) of plants. The works were created using photogrammetry, a technique for generating 3D models from a large set of photographs taken from all angles of the botanical specimen. Whilst the point-cloud models remain the central artefact of vegetal/digital, it has been presented in a range of formats throughout 2022–23, including multichannel video loops, augmented reality, webXR, gestural interactive works and still prints. This work invites an embodied experience of attuning to both the vegetal and the digital. This is consistent with my alignment with queer and autistic politics, of siding with the object. Increasingly, queer cultural practices are employing new materialism and posthumanism to interrogate the agency of things and the culturally constituted hierarchies of objects and subjects. The reconfiguration of embodied relations is necessary in order to reconceive a viable future. (shrink)

Many recent visual and technological changes in photography are related to the fact that it is increasingly connected to space through computerization and digitization. Photographs no longer appear as framed 2D images, but rather resemble a cloud whose viewing and operating mode necessarily involve navigation. My purpose in this article is to think about photography’s ontological and epistemological status through its contemporary spatial uses. Using two projects by Forensic Architecture, I examine two methodologies of spatial photography – photogrammetric point clouds (...) and the Image-Data Complex – and claim that, whereas with the emergence of the internet, digital photography has primarily been perceived as a networked image, today we should think of it in terms of clouds. Both projects rely on a posthuman multiplication of perspectives and a vertical conceptualization of photography as navigable space. Both also represent and demonstrate the medium’s contemporary political potential for documenting, creating evidence and organizing data. Finally, both challenge traditional definitions of photography and outline new alternatives for interrogating human rights violations. (shrink)

This article looks at the emerging technology of the neural radiance field (NeRF) and suggests that this means of digital image production, when used by a creative practitioner, produces an emergent aesthetic – a result of the affordances inherent in the digital materiality of the NeRF and its processes. The use of this machine-learning technology as a material for creating images can lead to an entirely new way of creating photographic representations that provide us with a way of seeing and (...) recording how we phenomenologically experience seeing. The processes and the emergent aesthetic are explored with examples drawn from the author’s own practice. (shrink)

Through her revision of Ansel Adams’s analogy between classical music and fine-art photography, Dawn M. Wilson arrives at a compelling idea: we can identify photographs by asking if an image contains a ‘photographic event’ in its causal history. This test provides a basis to accommodate a broader range of photographic practices than previous philosophical accounts of photography have allowed. In her discussion of Adams’s analogy, however, Wilson also makes it clear that accommodating first-order practice does not mean accepting every claim (...) made by photographers as true. In this paper, I will argue that these competing tendencies are indicative of a tension in the ‘multi-stage’ account of photography that informs much of Wilson’s work, including the test she derives from her revision of Adams’s analogy. This tension, I will argue, is foregrounded by ‘videogame photography’: static images produced using videogames that have recently enjoyed increased popularity among photographers and photography institutions. Despite its increasing presence in the photographic art world, it is unclear whether videogame photography can be viewed as photography proper using Wilson’s test, without substantially diluting the theoretical commitments of the multi-stage account. I will conclude, therefore, that videogame photography presents a dilemma for the account: it either compromises its theoretical rigour to accommodate videogame photography, or it rejects this artform, thereby compromising its ability to accommodate first-order practice. (shrink)

Deepfakes are extremely realistic audio/video media. They are produced via a complex machine-learning process, one that centrally involves training an algorithm on hundreds or thousands of audio/video recordings of an object or person, S, with the aim of either creating entirely new audio/video media of S or else altering existing audio/video media of S. Deepfakes are widely predicted to have deleterious consequences (principally, moral and epistemic ones) for both individuals and various of our social practices and institutions. In this introduction (...) to the Topical Collection, I first survey existing philosophical research on deepfakes (Sects. 2 and 3). I then give an overview of the papers that comprise the Collection (Sect. 4). Finally, I conclude with remarks on a line of argument made in a number of papers in the Topical Collection: that deepfakes may cause their own demise (Sect. 5). (shrink)