![]() ![]() Reading this extraordinary book, it becomes clear that so much of what we knew or thought we knew about photography is at one and the same time accurate and obsolete. ![]() Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social-media, and bio-politics, On the Verge of Photography offers an invaluable resource for sutdents of visual culture, researchers in the field of digital imagining and artists working with new media. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory - that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive - and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. In this, photography shows to be tightly connected to political ideologies, exemplifying how visual technologies may set forth progressive or regressive potentials of our ways of seeing and representing the world.įrom the back cover: On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on fine art, culture and society. ![]() In this, the need to think the relation between technologies of representation and pictorial traditions, in connection to epistemology and theories of knowledge becomes of prime importance as this articulation shows, ultimately, how photography, exemplified in the cities documented by Fierlants and Azevedo, plays an important role in the ways we perceive the world that surround us. In this perspective, the revolution caused by photography brings attention to the role played by the apparatus in the context of the nineteenth century as, attached to the ruling ideology, progressively turns photography into the main representative of an epistemology grounded on the belief in verisimilitude, realism and truth embedded in visual representation. From a re-evaluation of the emergence of modernity to the inquire on the invention of photography, and from there to the analysis of the works of Fierlants and Azevedo, the research draws a historical perspective focused on the importance of vision and the growing centrality of photography. By addressing a relation dear to visual culture, anthropology, history, urban studies and philosophy anew, the study’s embedded interdisciplinary character aims at expanding, also, the materialist tradition which legacy is attested, still today, in the areas in question. Inquiring into the origins of photography as a simultaneous product and producer of modernity, the study aims at offering a decentred perspective gathered from two cities which, during the moment in question, could be considered peripheral to the great capitalist metropolises. Building on a critical exploration of the opus of two mid-nineteenth century photographers – Edmond Fierlants from Antwerp, and Militão Augusto de Azevedo from São Paulo – the study aims to provide a theoretical and methodological dialogue between the field of visual culture and philosophy, especially through a Benjaminian materialist perspective. The current research focuses on the nexus between photography, modernity, and the city. The chapter concludes with the topic of death caused by the actions of paparazzo, as is portrayed in works by Leif Davidsen, Allan Russell, and Robert M. I describe how the photographer is portrayed in literature as the one who gets under the control of his or her apparatus and acts as a functionary of the machine that feeds on human images. I argue that the fictitious photographer plays the role of a trickster-psychopomp, as the click of the camera’s aperture often accompanies a dying person to the outer world. Such words as “trigger,” “aim,” and “shoot” are used by Ernest William Hornung, Victor Sawdon Pritchett, Margaret Atwood, and Anthony Horowitz to emphasize the danger of being photographed. Special attention is given in this chapter to the linguistic analogy between a camera and a gun. The photographer is often portrayed in literary fiction as the one who witnesses, records, or even causes death. The article presents various ways in which the character of the photographer has been linked to death in literature.
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