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Thierry Zeno: Thailande. 1977
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When once the availability
of one great primitive agent is thoroughly worked out, it is easy to foresee
how extensively it will assist in unraveling other secrets in natural science.
Elizabeth Eastlake, Photography, 1857.
A philosophy of photography
could be taken to mean the act of philosophizing on the subject of
photography. That is to say, one can examine photography by using the
concepts philosophers have accumulated over a period of two thousand five hundred years. One could inquiry into its links with perception, imagination, nature, substance, essence, freedom and consciousness. The
danger of such an approach is the
projection onto photography of concepts
created long before photography's emergence, concepts which might prove to be ill-suited. In effect, many respectable philosophers following this path
concluded that photography was a form
of painting or minor literature. This
judgment was foreseeable since the
concepts of western philosophy precisely subscribe to a pictorial,
sculptural, architectural and literary outlook.
But the philosophy of the
photograph can also designate the philosophy emanating from the photograph itself, the kind of philosophy the photo suggests and diffuses by virtue of its
characteristics. All materials, tools
and processes employ, through their
texture and structure, a specific mode of constructing the space and
time around them. They engage "to a
greater or lesser degree" specific parts of our nervous system. They induce
certain gestures or operations, while
excluding others. As such, they endow
those who use them with a certain lifestyle. There is no reason why film,
devices or photographic paper should be deprived of such action. Undoubtedly, they suggest an unforeseen space and time, a distinct manner of
capturing reality and the real,
action and act, event and potentiality, object and process, presence and absence, in brief, a specific philosophy.
Evidently, the term
philosophy is here taken in its most
common meaning. A psychology, sociology or anthropology of the photograph would
have been equally suitable. And why
not an epistemology, semiotics or indicialogy of the photograph? It is vital to ask what the photograph itself imposes or distills, rather than what we demand from it.
This undertaking will
therefore be anything but easy. Because not simply our philosophies, but more importantly our languages were originally forged to speak about painting, architecture and literature. On different
occasions, God was a painter, a sculptor, an architect or a poet, only because
man had been. We therefore do not have the words to describe a photograph
adequately. But specialized
terminology would be even more
fallacious, as only common language has the power "through its bricolage" to re-encode itself so as to touch on new
objects. That is why one should
forget all jargon here, and
particularly that of linguistics. When encountering terms such as signifier and
signified, reality and the real, indices and indexes, perception and sensation or act and action, the reader is called upon to rediscover a naive
English that will define and redefine itself according to circumstance.