My contribution to the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Photography Theory\u00a0has the working title “Out of Language: Photographing as Translating”. \u00a0The essay emphasizes Flusser’s conviction about communication making worlds–generating meaning–by various means, e.g. drawing, speech, writing–and photographs . \u00a0He particularly emphasised photography’s potential as a means of translating concepts–the products of writing–into images.<\/p>\n
Could his two very playful sketches of two theories of photography be considered translations? \u00a0In one, a council of angels is debating the existence of human beings. \u00a0The author-angel has submitted a camera in support of his argument that human beings are qualified to be angels. \u00a0The second sketch is in the voice of vampyrotheutis infernalis<\/em>, a deep-sea squid. \u00a0He proposes that a kind of photography should be developed for undersea conditions. Squid would be able to record the light from their own tentacles, and so be able to fix and share their thoughts, hopes, fears and dreams.<\/p>\n The image shown here is Boyd Webb’s Trophy<\/em>, from 1989, from an exhibition Flusser reviewed for European Photography<\/em>. \u00a0Flusser points out that the possibility of a cosmic “scene” is always ridiculous (and photographs, in his view, are always scenes.) \u00a0In this sense the image “translates” from the concept of a cosmic image being ridiculous, that is, from someone saying or writing it, into an image that “says” the same thing far more quickly and economically.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My contribution to the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Photography Theory\u00a0has the working title “Out of Language: Photographing as Translating”. \u00a0The essay emphasizes Flusser’s conviction about communication making worlds–generating meaning–by various means, e.g. drawing, speech,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[214,235,216],"tags":[7,113],"class_list":["post-1228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flusser","category-flusser-on-photography","category-photography","tag-flusser","tag-photography"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1230,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}