Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography

Derrida, Jacques; Amelunxen, Hubertus von; Wetzel, Michael; Richter, Gerhard; Fort, Jeff

doi:10.1515/9780804775014-003

Cited by 18 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…It is in pursuing this line of question that we need to explore further the way photographs saturate the idea of city as not just an archive, but 'an archive of the present'. As Derrida (2010) reminds us, the archive of the photograph is constituted by the present itself where, even as the present is lost, the archive remains. Elaborating on the idea of city-as-archive, Rao (2009) goes beyond common sense understandings of archives to use the notion of archive as a way of navigating the voids of the present, as a practice of intervening into and reading the urban fabrics created by these voids.…”

Section: Photography As Ethnography/epistemology: Archive Of the Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While photography, as paraphrased in a conversation with Derrida (2010), can be seen as the first optical medium to enter the domain of writing and to bring writing into the very essence of the image, the dialectical relationship between the two creates tensions that are not easily resolved. Till then, in acknowledgement of the generic incompleteness or rather an in-progress status that marks the way we write the city in text or in images, and contrary to Benjamin's (1972) belief that there is a point when the caption must step in without which photographic construction would remain stuck in the approximate, the photographs presented here are deliberately left uncaptioned.…”

Section: Codamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Photography as urban narrative

Arabindoo

Delory

2020

City

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Questioning whether we think as much about how we write as to what we write, I undertook recently a more rigorous reflection on what I saw as an exercise in 'writing the city into the urban'. As I encountered the risk of writing the city out of the urban, I sought to write the city (creatively) back into the (critical) urban. It involved a gesture where photographic images of the city offered new meanings to the textual abstraction of the urban. It is no small act, nor an innocent one. It is also a longstanding one in the representational practices of writing the city. The simple task of juxtaposing photographs with a text while offering new ingenious forms of 'writing', opens up questions of not only how these images could very well question the validity of the text but also how photography's ability to generate an archive of the (city's) present draws attention to its own ethnographic (im)possibilities and epistemological crisis.

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Section: Photography As Ethnography/epistemology: Archive Of the Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Codamentioning

confidence: 99%

Photography as urban narrative

Arabindoo

Delory

2020

City

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“…Even without the strong indexical trace that we see in the traditional photograph, various other kinds of digital image can be revealed as similarly spectral by interrupting and unearthing the hidden data that underlies them. Unlike Barthes, Derrida didn’t see such spectrality as unique to photography, that all forms of media have the power to haunt us, and that ‘every culture has its phantoms and the spectrality that is conditioned by its technology’ (Derrida et al, 2010: 39). Once the illusion of presence of media is disrupted, we can experience a haunting and uncanny effect, but the ‘realist mode’ of their artifice generally hides their ‘ghostly and phantomatic aspects’ (Wolfreys, 2015: 614).…”

Section: The Camera Is Now the Ghostmentioning

confidence: 99%

Camera Phantasma: Reframing virtual photographies in the age of AI

Schofield

2023

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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The recent advent of virtual photography and artificial intelligence (specifically AI photography and diffusion models), presents a major challenge to both photographers and photography theory. All our common-sense assumptions about the ontology of the image now seem to be falling apart. Are these interlopers really photography? Can we hear the final death knell for the erstwhile medium in this era of ever-increasing media convergence and virtualisation? This practice-led investigation of these new media forms draws on the author’s recent creative work in virtual photographies, and similar interventions by other photographers and new media artists, seeking to augment and expand their practice using these new tools, whilst querying what photography really means today. From in-game photography to virtual exploration using Google Street View, to AI photography using the latest denoising diffusion models (such as Midjourney), there are surprising commonalities to explore between them, linking these new practices of image-making firmly back to traditions of lens-based photography. Rather than seeking a detailed map of this difficult new terrain, or a definitive ontology of emerging virtual photographies, the author reframes the discourse around practice, examining both photography as an evolving set of practices and also notions of media hauntology – specifically the spectral ways in which new media technologies are always haunted by prior practices and modes of communication. The importance of the frame to both traditional photography and new practices of virtual photography, is suggested as a vital and persistent dimension in photographic authorship. With that authorship increasingly contested by new generative methods, easy appropriation and AI image-making, the act of framing may become the best litmus test we have, for whether or not a photograph should be considered ‘real’ or valued.

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“… 2 Published under the title La Chambre Claire in 1980, Barthes’s study was written, coincidentally, as a homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire . For what Gerhard Richter terms Barthes’s ‘thanatographical reflections on the photographic image’ (Derrida, 2010: xxx), see especially Barthes (1993: 87 and 94–96). …”

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confidence: 99%

The ‘Heron’: Nine steps for a past life

Gilloch

2023

Journal of Classical Sociology

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In Farewell to the Working Class,1 (1982), a book dedicated to his wife Dorine, André Gorz (1923–2007) offers the reader ‘Nine Theses for a Future Left’. Here, I borrow and play with this nomenclature for a series of reflections on the two volumes which constitute Gorz’s most personal writings and which book-end, so to speak, his oeuvre: The Traitor and Letter to D. A Love Story. More precisely, this is a viewing of the former text through the lens of the latter. The ‘steps’ presented here are not those of a linear path and progression but rather, like steps in a dance, move backwards and forwards, turn and circle, trace and retrace ephemeral patterns. In following in such steps, I contrast Gorz’s account of the self with another set of explicitly non-autobiographical autobiographical writings, those of the German Critical Theorist Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Central to both writers is an understanding of particular traumatic experiences and past catastrophes, and an abiding concern with overcoming contemporary alienation through play and dance, love and eros.

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Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Photography as urban narrative

Photography as urban narrative

Camera Phantasma: Reframing virtual photographies in the age of AI

The ‘Heron’: Nine steps for a past life

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