User:THY/ Towards a philosophy of photography
For Vilem, photography is not a reproductive image technology, it is a dominant cultural technique through which reality is constituted and understood.
Linear writing vs Non-Linear writing: Linear writing is when a writer starts at the beginning and ploughs through the end without going back to change and fix things Non-Linear writing is when the story is written out-of-order
'Images are mediations between the world and human being... images are needed to make the world comprehensible'
However, if we forget that we create an image for better orientation in the world, if we lose our ability to decode images, our lives will instead become a function of the image, and our imagination instead turns into a form of hallucination.
Idolatry: the reversal function of the image.
"The Technical Images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our 'reality' and turning it into a 'global image scenario'".
Technical Images: was invent during the crisis of texts, to make it comprehensible again. It signifies concepts. It alters our concepts about the world.
Subliminal message:
"All events are nowadays aimed at the TV screen, cinema screen, photograph, to be translated into a state of things'.
Apparatuses' intention is not to change the world but to change the meaning of the world.
The camera function on behalf of the photographic industry, which functions on behalf of the industrial complex, which function on behalf of the socio, economic apparatus, and so on.
Apparatus of the camera as being a tool that has its own 'program' that take precedence over human control. That photographers are playing. a game of operating the camera, but always within the programmed rules of the apparatus.
Cultural objects: objects that are intentionally produced.
Not just in the case of documentary and photojournalism. Criticism of the photograph should be able to construct these cultural conditions from the photograph.
Photographer involves in the process of adjusting the combination of time-and-space category.
"The choice is limited to the category of the camera, and the freedom of the photographer remaining programmed freedom".
=> Whatever objects photographers wish to photograph, they have to translate them into states of thing.
It is not a matter of adopting a perfect viewpoint but of realising as many viewpoints as possible.
"Photographers act in a post-ideological way even when they think they are serving an ideology" - Photographers can only act within the program of photography => Programming is post-ideological manipulation
Photographers intend to inform others and through their photographs to immortalise themselves in the memory of others.
The photographic universe: Challenge for a photographer to oppose to the fluid of redundancy with informative images.
Visual pollution: Images passes through our eyes and our consciousness without being noticed. It penetrates to our unconsciousness and programs our actions.
To be in the photographic universe means to experience, to know and to evaluate the world as a function of photographs.
=> The photographic universe and all apparatus-based universes robotize the human being and society
=> To critic apparatuses: one first see the photographic universe as the product of cameras and distribution apparatuses (advertising apparatus, political apparatus, economic apparatus, etc.)
The photographic universe can serve as a model for post-industrial society
Image - Apparatus (automation and play) - Program(Chance necessity) - Information (Symbolic improbable)
How to raise photographic practice to the level of consciousness.
There is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed and programming apparatuses
=> It is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom
The task is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom.