Projects
Theoretical reasoning on photography must necessarily include philosophical discourse on the topic; this is particularly needful when discussing phenomena that are indeterminate and hard to define. When studying the phenomenon of photography, it is especially imperative to apply to it the basal philosophic questioning as to the essential nature, or quidditas, of a thing, precisely because it is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to say with clarity exactly what photography is in itself: a technical means for reproducing images, a tool of knowledge, a kind of media, an art form, a manipulative strategy, or something else? The dramatic quality of this question has been particularly enhanced in the age of digitalization, when it becomes increasingly difficult to remain within the boundary of the traditional quasi-etymological definition of photography as "drawing with light".
Moreover, the comparatively meager theoretical literature of the last decades tends, as a rule, to bypass, or treat if only incidentally, this precise issue, i.e. the essence of photography. Instead, the relevant works, despite their occasionally deceptive titles (such as "Philosophy of Photography"), have focused mostly on the functioning of the photographic image in a globalized and utterly technicized social and media environment. Contrary to this, the present study sets itself an initial question - "what is it?" (ti esti), what is photography as such? (Further issues derive from this question, such as the means used and the ways of functioning of photography.) The answer is sought by tracing the common traits of a photographic image that define its uniqueness and distinguish it in principle from other representations (such as painting, cinematography, etc.). The leading assumption in undertaking this research is that the inclusion of a photographic representation in a fundamentally syncretic visual environment is justified and effective only if that image succeeds in confirming once again and preserving the specificity that marks it, i.e. if within the whirl of an endless variety of transmissions, overflows and merging, it remains just that - a photographic representation.
The initial hypothesis, around which the study is organized, can be stated thus: Although it is a comparatively new art (the "discovery" of photography was officially announced in the year 1839 by Dominique François Arago in his celebrated report to the French Academy of Sciences), photography is based on, and legitimated through, certain pre-modern (but together with this hyper-modern, transcending the boundaries of classical European modernity) worldview attitudes regarding the status and value of the world that surrounds us, the essential defining features of this world (time, space, movement, light), the regulative characteristic of truth and the acceptable limits of deviation from the truth, authorship and the role of the creator, the nature and purpose of art, the role of technical intermediaries between Man and the world, the dynamic interaction between the image and verbal narrative, the vitality of memory images, and the justifiability of "archives", etc.