The photograph shows without seeing. The photograph is dependent on the photography apparatus, which in turn is dependent on the photographer, who, thanks to his seeing, shows it what to show. The photographer can do this because s/he has language capacity. The photographic act is primarily a linguistic act. The world is the palette loaded with paint ready for the photographer to make use of to depict her/his mind, which always ends up being the world. Since we are speaking about photography, this depicting act is necessarily a non-action – nothing is or needs to be done. The photographic act is another instance of the cogito.
Art is the act of induction through artifice. Beauty is contingent on this act but is in an arbitrary relationship to it. How is it one sees when one sees nothing?
It is impossible to contradict or to discredit the deception or the truth of a photograph – you cannot deceive its deception; you cannot truthify its truth – this not because of some capability inherent to the photograph (or to the machine that produces it, the photography apparatus), but because the photograph is photographic, holds that which we call ‘the photographic’. But does this mean that ‘the photographic’ necessarily suggests or summons up image? No! …because, in any case, it will end with the way we are.
‘The photographic’ lies in something happening to appear in the manner it happens to appear. But being and ‘the photographic’ are not causally linked, nor correlated. That something happens to appear in the manner it happens to appear is purely coincidental. But it always happens that something happens to appear in the manner it happens to appear. Call ‘the photographic’ fact! (As an aside, photography is not reductionistic. A photograph may appear flat, but in actual fact there is nothing flat about it. And isn’t that a verity of verities?)
‘The photographic’ is not an act, nor an action, nor a doing. ‘The photographic’ is not a neatly wrapped thing, like a little sweet – it is not a thing. Neither is it a memory; nor a qualifier, a modifier, a descriptor, an attribute… It is not meaning; neither is it sign and all paraphernalia associated with sign. It is all powerful, the All Powerful – the wind – a dynamic, neigh, the dynamic, just like the word ‘manicure’. Infinity awaits.
Knowledge is nothing.
The only measure is temporality, and memory and time are dissociated (memory records not timepoints in its metadata). Memory is such because ‘the photographic’ happens to operate as an operative function of ‘the photographic’.
Featured Image:
Study of hands (Italian School, 18th Century, oil on canvas). MutualArt [online]. Available at: https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Study-of-hands/8DBD2EA6618E1F37836CE4E18FE59A47 [accessed 6 May 2025].