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tags:photographyphilosophyaiy2025
rel: Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography - Barthes On Photography - Susan Sontag
Why I am reading this
Continuing to read Flusser works. This philosophy of photography, is much more outsider compared to the related tags and takes on the subject extremely abstractly. I found less to like with Susan Sontag’s book than Barthes’ but suspect I’ll like this the most.
It does seem prescient from what I’ve read on it, but I also wonder if that is the nature of something that is so abstract, in that various implementations can be placed in the correct feeling grooves.
Flusser’s pronouncements are so extreme at times that I can’t help but laugh, but I enjoy this and see the lining of truth in each.
Flusser considers the invention of photography to be as earth-shattering an event in the history of humankind as the invention of writing.
Flusser was no Luddite; he did, however, press for a criticism of apparatuses whose production serves the interests of social power and whose aim was that ‘the human being would be ruled out’.
‘Freedom is playing against the camera,’ even though the human beings taking the photographs cannot escape the state of dependence that they have brought upon themselves, their positive ‘theatre of the absurd’. Their job must be to use images to create spaces running counter to those that are programmed within apparatuses.
Telematic society would be defined by simultaneous isolation and interconnectivity; life in such a society would be equally boring and chaotic
In 1983, the philosopher and essayist Vilém Flusser wrote a book called Towards a Philosophy of Photography. In less than a hundred pages, he sketched out a bizarre and counterintuitive definition of photography as a kind of world-spanning artificial intelligence, using human beings as tools to realize its sole directive: the production of more, and more varied, photographic images. 1
Introductory Notes
We observe two fundamental turning points in human culture
- In the middle of the second millennium BC we invented linear writing
- We invented The Technical Image The structure of culture - and therefore existence itself - is undergoing a fundamental change.
The Image
Images signify - mainly - something “out there” in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions (a reduction to a 2D surface.)
We scan and feel the superficial image to reconstruct the abstract dimensions, forming a complex path.
It follows that images are connotative (ambiguous) complexes of symbols: they provide space for interpretation.
Scanning gives a temporal element (before and after) and produces relationships between elements in the image (returning gaze again to elevate significance).
Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a func- tion of their own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination.
Humans were alienated from their images, and they invented linear writing. With writing, a new ability was born called ‘conceptual thinking’ which consisted of abstracting lines from sur- faces, i.e. producing and decoding them.
In other words, images become more and more conceptual, texts more and more imaginative.
Nowadays, the greatest conceptual abstraction is to be found in conceptual images (in computer images, for example); the greatest imagination is to be found in scientific texts.
rel:Where New Words Come From
History, in the precise meaning of the word, is a progressive transcoding of images into concepts, a progressive eluci- dation of ideas, a progressive disenchantment (taking the magic out of things), a progressive process of comprehension. If texts become incomprehensible, however, there is nothing left to explain, and history has come to an end.
And so the technical image is made, to overcome this crisis of history.
The Technical Image
The Technical Image is an image produced by apparatuses. As apparatuses themselves are the products of applied scientific texts, in the case of technical images one is dealing with the indirect products of scientific texts.
Traditional image - painters work out symbols of the images in their heads so as to transfer them by means of a paintbrush to a surface. If one wishes to decode a painting, they have have decode the encoding that took place in the head of the painter.
With technical images this is not so clearly evident (the camera gets between the photographer who is operating it.)
The magical fascination of technical images can be observed all over the place: The way in which they put a magic spell on life, the way in which we experience, know, evaluate and act as a function of these images.
The fascination of a television is different than that of a cave painting or fresco of a tomb.
Prehistoric image is ritualization of models named ‘myths’. Current magic is ritualization of models known as ‘programs.’
Myths are models that are communicated orally and whose author - ‘a god’ - is beyond the communication process. Programs, on the other hand, are models that are communicated in writing and whose authors - ‘functionaries’ - are within the communication process.
Technical images are surfaces that function in the same way as dams. Traditional images flow into them and become endlessly reproduceable. Scientific texts flow into them and are transcoded from lines into states of things and assume magical properties (for example in the form of models that attempt to make Einstein’s equation comprehensible). Technical images absorb the whole of history and form a collective memory going round in circles.
Nothing can resist the force of this current of technical images - there is no artistic, scientific or political activity which is not aimed at it, there is no everyday activity which does not aspire to be photographed, filmed, video- taped. For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.
Thought
How could you have a job at an office with zero record? Like zero physical record, but still having an impact on the company.
Minimization of email etc.
My day is spent producing text and producing record. Research and code. Hopefully useful text. All around me papers with notes. None of these notes are directly absorbed into the function of my work.
Certain office configurations will not have desk assignments, and you freely move. But the cloud hosts your record.
The Apparatus
Apparatus is derived from the verb apparare meaning ‘to prepare.’ The photographic apparatus lies in wait for photography.
Tools are extensions. An arrow simulates the fingers, a hammer the fist, a pick the toe. But they are no longer limited to empirical simulations. They became ‘technical.’
The humans were once surrounded by tools, afterwards the machine was surrounded by human beings. Previously the tool was the variable and the human being the constant, subsequently the human being became the variable and the machine the constant.
The number of such possibilities is large, but it is nevertheless finite: It is the sum of all those photographs that can be taken by a camera. It is true that one can, in theory, take a photograph over and over again in the same or a very similar way, but this is not important for the process of taking photographs. Such images are ‘redundant’: They carry no new information and are superfluous. rel: Recording, records and streams
Photographers endeavour to exhaust the photographic program by realizing all their possibilities. Basically, cameras are in search of information but according to Flusser they do not want to change the world.
Writers can be considered functionaries of the apparatus ‘language’ that plays with the symbols contained within the language program- with words- by combining them. Their intention is to exhaust the language program and to enrich literature, the universe of language.
All apparatuses (not just computers) are calcu- lating machines and in this sense ‘artificial intelligences’, the camera included, even if their inventors were not able to account for this.
In short: Apparatuses are black boxes that simulate thinking in the sense of a combinatory game using number-like symbols; at the same time, they mechanize this thinking in such a way that, in future, human beings will become less and less competent to deal with it and have to rely more and more on apparatuses. Apparatuses are scientific black boxes that carry out this type of thinking better than human beings because they are better at playing (more quickly and with fewer errors) with number-like symbols. Even apparatuses that are not fully automated (those that need human beings as players and functionaries) play and function better than the human beings that operate them.
The Gesture of Photography
To summarize: The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information. The structure of the act of photography is a quantum one: a doubt made up of points of hesitation and points of decision-making. We are dealing here with a typically post-industrial act: It is post-ideological and pro- grammed, an act for which reality is information, not the significance of this information. And the same is true not only of the photographer but of all functionaries, from a bank cashier to the American President.
If one observes the movements of a human being in possession of a camera (or of a camera in possession of a human being), the impression given is of someone lying in wait.
In the act of photography the camera does the will of the photographer but the photographer has to will what the camera can do.
In choosing their categories, photographers may think they are bringing their own aesthetic, epistemological or political criteria to bear. They may set out to take artistic, scientific or political images for which the camera is only a means to an end. But what appear to be their criteria for going beyond the camera nevertheless remain subordinate to the camera’s program.
NOTE
But the modern “photography” projects of photoshop and auto-applied edits (in phone cameras) to lean towards a popularly attractive shot. Still subordinate to the camera, but more aligned with the software than the physical mechanisms (lens). Future Camera Process
He continues:
They discover the multiplicity and the equal- ity of viewpoints in relation to their ‘object’. They discover that it is not a matter of adopting a perfect viewpoint but of realizing as many viewpoints as possible
The Photograph
Summary
Like all technical images, photographs are concepts encoded as states of things, including photographers’ concepts such as those that have been programmed into the camera. This gives photography critics the task of decoding these two interweaving codes in any photograph. Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information, so as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others. The camera encodes the concepts programmed into it as images in order to program society to act as a feedback mechanism in the interests of progressive camera improvement. If photographic criticism succeeds in unravelling these two intentions of photographs, then the photographic messages will be decoded. If photography critics do not succeed in this task, photographs remain undecoded and appear to be representations of states of things in the world out there, just as if they reflected ‘themselves’ onto a surface. Looked at uncritically like this, they accomplish their task perfectly: programming society to act as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras.
Black and White State of things
The first photos were black and white.
There cannot be black-and-white states of things in the world because black-and-white cases are borderline, ‘ideal cases’: black is the total absence of all oscillations contained in light, white the total presence of all the elements of oscillation. ‘Black’ and ‘white’ are concepts, e.g. theoretical concepts of optics. As black-and-white states of things are theoretical, they can never actually exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do actually exist because they are images of concepts belonging to the theory of optics, i.e. they arise out of this theory.
Thought
Color itself/qualia. It reflects reality, but it isn’t accurately representative of reality. We can never truly experience light, we can only imperfectly sense it with our imperfect senses.
But I do like this concept of light never being seen in a Survey of Shadows kind of way, or the idea of a black and white photo being a concept.
Thought
A black and white photo doesn’t even just mean one thing, as if every color image has a single black and white representation.
If you apply a threshold, and have 1 bit representation (black or white) you have to make a decision on where that threshold (flipping) occurs. This decision makes images (and can represent a loss of data where a large swath of complex shapes are cast in undifferentiated black.)
Also a grayscale image would rely on one channel (like R or G or B) and you can get different distributions in each.
Many photographers therefore also prefer black-and-white photographs to colour photographs because they more clearly reveal the actual significance of the photograph, i.e. the world of concepts.
Decoding
Putting the question in this way, there is no satisfactory solution to decoding. One would be drawn into an endless process since every level of decoding would reveal another one waiting to be decoded. Every symbol is just the tip of an iceberg in the ocean of cultural consensus, and even if one got right to the bottom of decoding a single message, the whole of culture past and present would be revealed. Carried out in this ‘radical’ fashion, criticism of a single message would turn out to be criticism of culture in general.
Distribution
Photographs are silent flyers that are distributed by means of reproduction, in fact by means of the massifying channels of gigantic, programmed distribution apparatuses. As objects, their value is negligible; their value lies in the information that they carry loose and open for reproduction on their surface. They are the harbingers of post-industrial society in general: Interest has shifted in their case from the object to the information, and ownership is a category that has become untenable for them. The distribution channels, the ‘media’, encode their latest significance. This encoding represents a struggle between the distribution apparatus and the photographer. By concealing this struggle, photographic criticism makes the ‘media’ totally invisible for the receiver of the photograph. In the light of standard photographic criticism, photographs get an uncritical reception and are therefore able to program the receiver to act as if they are under a magic spell; this action flows back in the form of feedback into the programs of the apparatus. This becomes evident as soon as we start to examine the reception of photographs closely.
Reception
Cameras demand that their owners (the ones who are hooked on them) keep on taking snaps, that they produce more and more redundant images. This photo-mania involving the eternal recurrence of the same (or of some- thing very similar) leads eventually to the point where people taking snaps feel they have gone blind: Drug dependency takes over. People taking snaps can now only see the world through the camera and in photographic categories. They are not ‘in charge of’ taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of their camera, they have become an extension to the button of their camera. Their actions are automatic camera functions.
Photographs are received as objects without value that everyone can produce and that everyone can do what they like with. In fact, however, we are manipulated by photographs and programmed to act in a ritual fashion in the service of a feedback mechanism for the benefit of cameras. Photographs suppress our critical awareness in order to make us forget the mindless absurdity of the process of functionality, and it is only thanks to this suppression that functionality is possible at all. Thus photographs form a magic circle around us in the shape of the photographic universe. What we need is to break this circle.
Photographic Universe
We are surrounded by redundant photographs.
We have become accustomed to visual pollution; it passes through our eyes and our consciousnesses without being noticed.
Necessity
The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.
Select terms and definitions
rel: Words
Concept: a constitutive element of a text.
History: the linear progression of translation from ideas
into concepts.
Thought
This history definition. Are ideas part of history? The nature of ideas makes them more difficult to record. Ideas seem lost. A written idea is part of history, in the same way an edit of an original work might be missed out of preserved history.
Maybe there’s some confusion in me with the difference between past and history. History seems a practice and discussion. Ideas are part of the past.
In the definition, it reads like a process that includes ideas (the translation is the history) but also I’m not quite sure. I know Flusser said something about history starting when things are being written. You write a thought and there’s a semblance of it on the page that can be part of history.
Game: an activity that is an end in itself. Photographer: a person who attempts to place, within the image, information that is not predicted within the program of the camera. Object: a thing standing in our way. Reality: what we run up against on our journey towards death; hence: what we are interested in. Textolatry: the inability to read off concepts from the writ- ten signs of a text, despite the ability to read these written signs; hence: worship of the text.