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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

photography + the concept of a medium « Previous | |Next »
June 2, 2011

In Infinite exchange: The social ontology of the photographic image in Philosophy of Photography (vol.1/ no.1) Peter Osborne says that the photographic present is, clearly, digital.

He then asks:

'What, if anything, does digitalization tell us about the nature of photography?’ and more specifically, ‘What does digitalization tell us about the nature of photography as a form of art?’ Please note, I say ‘form of art’ and not ‘medium’ because I wish to problematize (indeed, to reject) the assumption that what may legitimately be called ‘photography’ today displays the unity of a ‘medium’, in the sense adopted and developed by modernist formalism: namely, a specific combination of material means and conventions governing practices of production.

He adds that in the light of this, the critical-philosophical task wouldbe to update or redefine our conception of that medium under the changed technological conditions of ‘digitalization’ .

The problem with the concept of medium is that it mortgages discussion of the relationship of photography and art to a particular problematic critical tradition (modernist formalism). Not only is this tradition inadequate to the comprehension of nearly all the most significant developments within the visual arts over the last fifty years (as well as in the second and third decades of the twentieth century); it has also come to function philosophically as the historical ground for the revival of a (broadly Kantian) aesthetics of contemporary art, and thereby, the perpetuation of a fundamental conflation of ‘aesthetics’ with the philosophy of art (a conflation which, historically, photography played a central role in breaking up).

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:03 PM |