The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object

09Apr12

Flusser, Vilem. ‘The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs’ Leonardo, 19:4, 329-332, 1986 p.329 The Latin term ‘objectum’ and its Greek equivalent ‘problema’ mean ‘thrown against’, which implies that there is something against which the object is thrown: a ‘subject’. As subjects, we face a universe of objects, of problems, […]

Filed under: Analogue - Digital, Banality & Photographs, Camera culture, Content vs Materiality of Photographs, Essays, Leonardo, Post-photography Theories, Vernacular Photography, Vilém Flusser   |  Leave a Comment

Landscapes without memory

31Jan12

Fontcuberta, Joan. Landscapes without Memory (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2005) 4-7 Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘Photography by the Numbers’ Landscapes without Memory (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2005) 9-13 p.9 [referring to Joan Fontcuberta new landscape images and the first pictures sent from the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon] Worlds apart, the two pictures nevertheless share a common conceptual infrastructure. […]

Filed under: Ambiguity and Photography, Analogue - Digital, Anonymity/Authorship & Photography, Banality & Photographs, Essays, Geoffrey Batchen, Images and reality, Indexicality & Photography, Joan Fontcuberta, Photography and Place, Photography's Art History, Post-photography Theories, Review essay, Vernacular Photography   |  Leave a Comment

in almost every picture #9

05Mar11

in almost every picture #9 is the latest addition to the long running series of found photography. This time around, we are presented with the peculiar story of one family’s attempts to photograph its black dog. “Attempts” being the operative word. Unfortunately, their camera’s limitations mean that the canine appears, time after time, as only […]

Filed under: Banality & Photographs, Erik Kessels, Found photographs, using found photography, Vernacular Photography   |  Leave a Comment

Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the bourgeois imagination

05Feb11

Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the bourgeois imagination’ Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Oxon: Routledge, 2009) p.80-97 p.80 […] the search for imagination in the carte-de-visite must be directed elsewhere, away from the usual focus on photographer and subject, and instead onto the minds eye of their viewers.[?] p.82 Compared to earlier processes such as the daguerrotype, […]

Filed under: Banality & Photographs, Essays, Geoffrey Batchen, Identification & Photography, Mechanical Reproduction, Observer & the Photograph, Photography's Art History, Touch/Tactile Perception, Vernacular Photography, Walter Benjamin   |  Leave a Comment

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

23Nov09

p.3 Barthes ‘wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was “in itself,” by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images. p.4 What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. p.5 The Photograph is never anything but […]

Filed under: Banality & Photographs, Books, Chemical Photography, Content vs Materiality of Photographs, Familial relations & Photography, Identification & Photography, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Memory & Context, Memory & Photography, Memory Objects, Observer & the Photograph, Personal Responses to Images, Phenomenology, Photograph as Document, Photograph as object, Photography and Unconscious, Photography as Historical Witness, Photography's Art History, Photography's Materiality, Post-photography Theories, Postmodernism and Memory, Roland Barthes, Studium/Punctum, Vernacular Photography   |  Leave a Comment

Camera Lucida: Another little history of photography

22Nov09

Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘Camera Lucida: Another little history of photography’ Photography Degree Zero ed. by Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT, 2007) 259-273 p.260 [Batchen proposes] that Camera Lucida is best read not as a book of critical theory but as a history of photography. p.261 [describing the lack of illustration of the winter garden photo] […]

Filed under: Banality & Photographs, Essays, Geoffrey Batchen, Photography's Art History, Studium/Punctum   |  Leave a Comment