Category: photography

Photographic Translation

My contribution to the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Photography Theory has the working title “Out of Language: Photographing as Translating”.  The essay emphasizes Flusser’s conviction about communication making worlds–generating meaning–by various means, e.g. drawing, speech,...

Family Photographs Online

It did seem reasonable to me, for a long time, that a website showing family photographs would be a way of stimulating an exchange among family members (the only viewers to whom the images...

The Blind Photographer

I recently reviewed this book (in Source: The Photographic Review 87).  The information–both the images and the slight details about the photographers–is more than sufficient to provoke a rethinking of vision itself.  I would...

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...

Photographic Seriality: Sameness and Difference

Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth are three very prominent contemporary art photographers.  All three were students of Berndt and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, all work in series.  They often–not always–work...

Epistemology Engine

Fine turn of phrase!  It’s a device that people of a given time and place recognise as a metaphor for knowledge. The “engine” bit implies that  the image drives the acquisition of knowledge.  In...