Strangeness. Doesn’t the experience of strangeness, of feeling and seeing the world, or any particular element within it, as strange, invalidate ‘the photographic’, which we elsewhere associated with the experience of recognition? If I am looking at a photograph and experience the seen as strange, then I clearly cannot invoke ‘the photographic’. Indeed! It’s just a photograph in this case! (At least it seems so.) But if I now replace the photograph with a painting and come to experience the same sense of strangeness while looking at the painting – yes! it’s just a painting! – but I am clearly seeing it! It is only the assumed understanding of the ontological status of a photograph that prohibits one from discoursing about seeing seeing in the first example we gave. The act of perception is an act of alterity. Only language can speak on behalf of all other languages seeing that all other languages are mute. Alterity or nothing.
Featured Image:
Il-Loki. December 2025 at Ħad-Dingli, Malta. Photograph by the author.