Andreas methods 06-03-19

First Reading: Vilém Flusser – Towards a philosophy of photography

In the chapter The Photograph Flusser works out two intentions of the photographs:

First, photographers are ‘encoding their images to give others information, as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 48)

Second, ‘The camera encodes the concepts programmed into it as images in order to program society to act as a feedback mechanism (…)’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 48)

The author is stating that social systems are based on abstractions to distinguish good from bad and connects this to the abstraction of black-and-white photographs. ‘They translate a theory of optics into an image and thereby put a magic spell on this theory and re-encode theoretical concepts like black and white into states of things.’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 43)

Bibliography: Flusser, V. (2000). Towards a philosophy of photography. 1st ed. London: Reaktion Books, p.12.