‘To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions’ (Sontag, 2004).
This week’s reading ‘Photomediations’ provided introductory insight to uses of photography, types of photographers, the notion of photomediation and technology’s role in the evolution of photography itself.
Photography can be categorised into two main rubrics; photography as art or photography as social practice.
As an art form, photos are analysed objects under aesthetic and semiotic terms. They can even be considered auteuristic artefacts (for example ‘canon’ photos set exemplar). Exhibition, content, authorship and context are all factors which add up to constitute the artistic value of photography (such as a commodity).
As a social practice, photography is considered not in how people take photos but what they choose to do with them. Documentary/photojournalistic traditions and street/fashion photography falls in between art and social practise. Whereas portrait and wedding photography is considered social practise as it conforms to a photographic program.
The ‘contamination’ of media in the current photographic landscape poses as artistic and conceptual opportunities.
Photomediations aims to cut across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today, as well as its kinship with other media – and also, with us as media. It therefore offers a radically different way of understanding photography.
The framework of photomediations adopts a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of data that produce photographic objects.
Photography can therefore be seen as an active practice of cutting through the flow of mediation, where ‘the cut’ operates on a number of levels: perceptive, material, technical, and conceptual. In other words, photography can be described as a practice of making cuts in the flow of imagistic data, of stabilising data as images and objects. Performed by human and nonhuman agents alike, with the latter including the almost incessantly working CCTV cameras, Google Street View equipment and satellite telescopes, those cuts participate in the wider process of imaging the world.
The recognition of the on-off activity of the photographic process, which carves life into fragments while simultaneously reconnecting them to the imagistic flow, may allow us to conclude not only that there is life in photography, but also that life itself is photographic.
As Claire Colebrook puts it, ‘All life … can be considered as a form of perception or “imaging” where there is not one being that apprehends or represents another being, but two vectors of creativity where one potential for differentiation encounters another and from that potential forms a relatively stable tendency or manner’ (2010: 31).
