writing and translation
The photographs sent back to earth from Mars have a kind of “signature,” something that both acknowledges the colossal technical achievement of the mission and clearly signals its photographic limits. In particular, many of...
Flusser used the phrase “black box” to describe at least two very different objects: a camera (in Towards a Philosophy of Photography) and the postal system (in “Letters,” Does Writing Have a Future?). As radically...
Opportunity Rover was a very engaging robot. It “lived” on Mars for nearly 15 years, gathering and transmitting data back to earth; it “died” or, as NASA put it, completed its mission on 13 February 2019. In...
“Apparatus” is Flusser’s unavoidably cumbersome term for the mesh between humans and devices, an interface so familiar we rarely notice. When the enmeshed devices also mesh with one other, the resulting structures shape —...
This essay, “Out of Language: Photography as Translation” has been accepted for publication in the Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, only it isn’t clear when the volume will be in print. One of the editors thought it would be OK to share...
My essay for The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory traces Flusser’s engagement with photography–or more exactly, of his concern with the human-device mesh he called the apparatus. The idea of photography as an alternative...