Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Key Quotes:

"It is a mistake to decipher images as if they were "frozen events." On the contrary they are translations of events into; situations; they substitute scenes for events."- 2

"The function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the need to think conceptually". - 6

"Technical images thus suck all of his-tory into their surfaces, and they come to constitute and eternally rotating memory of society." - 7

Research: 

"For Flusser, photography is not only a reproductive imaging technology, it is a dominant cultural technique through which reality is constituted and understood". - Taken from wikipedia which is quoting Becker, Claudia, "Image/Thinking", POP, 2 (2), p. 251

"The photographer’s gesture as the search for a viewpoint onto a scene takes place within the possibilities offered by the apparatus. The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm’s-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc. The Gestalt of space–time surrounding the scene is prefigured for the photographer by the categories of his camera. These categories are an a priori for him. He must ‘decide’ within them: he must press the trigger." - Flusser (Taken from Wikipedia)

My thoughts/Notes:
Oral History (Magical)> 
Linear Texts (non- Magical)> 
Traditional Images (Magical) > 
Technical Images (Non-Magical) 

    Yields the desire to create Magical Texts


This abundance of photos/videos leads to a "mass civilization" that has a core bank of similar reference points. For example I can meet anyone my age and we know exactly what was happening to us and remember the video footage from 9/11. But all of us might not have read the same texts.


I think that the magical oral history still exists as a part of family history. You can hear stories about ancestors where a photograph for that event didn't exist; will this still happen in the future? 

Critique 8/24

Here is a list of the artists that were mentioned last night:

Duane Michaels

Thomas Struth

Vivian Maier

Mariko Mori

Carmen Freudenthal and Elle Verhagen

For those of you looking to learn some video techniques, Fabain created a series of videos that shows all of the skills we learned last semester. They are on the right hand column of this website.

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~fwinkler/AD61600_S16/