“The Gesture of Photographing”


“The Gesture of Photographing,” the essay in which Flusser proposes a phenomenology of photography, appears for the first time in English in this month’s (December, 2011) issue of the Journal of Visual Culture. The article was first published in German, in 1991–the year of Flusser’s death, as part of a collection called Gesten (Gestures).  Assembled from many times and places in Flusser’s past, the articles, each entitled “The Gesture of ..,” testify to the conviction and the daring of his engagement with phenomenology.  Some of the Gestures he selected for analysis are  associated with specific media e.g. the gesture of painting, of filming, of writing–and the gesture of photographing.  But others, such as the gesture of listening to music, or the gesture of smoking a pipe, are not.

Flusser never  separates a writer from the typewriter, a painter from the brush and canvas, or a photographer from the “apparatus.” Ever the phenomenologist, he is unwilling to separate an object from the consciousness that intends it.  He observes the movement — in this case the movement of a photographer around a human subject — as a dynamic interplay between subject and object.  He arrives at the conclusion that photographing is a way philosophising, without language.

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