Burning Bread
“Prepared” by having been in a slow oven overnight, the loaf that appears in Charlie Sinclair’s fine image Burning Bread is perhaps nearly incredible but not quite. In fact it’s perfectly “straight” photography: the bread has become...
Category: fiction
science fiction
I became a bit unruly at a dinner party recently when my hostess asserted that science fiction was “license to just do anything you want, no rules”. I guess it’s a common enough bit...
Plausible Fictions
Suppose photographing is, as Flusser contended, an act of projecting, rather than “capturing” extant meaning. Rather than constituting records, then, photographs propose possibilities, sometimes in tremendously persuasive detail. Photographs are what comes of reaching...
Is fiction “theory”? is “theory” fiction?
Suppose Flusser is “wrong” about most things. He could only be wrong in the sense of someone working within a scientific model–probably a rather narrow one at that, someone who expects to predict something,...
Flusser the Writer
Flusser is usually described as a philosopher. By “trade,” he was a critic — of language, photography, film, art, design, and social practice. He was also a teacher and someone who wrote critically...