Nonhuman Photography

by Joanna Zylinska

Overview

A new philosophy of photography that goes beyond humanist concepts to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent, as both subject and agent.

Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent. Zylinska argues further that even those images produced by humans, whether artists or amateurs, entail a nonhuman, mechanical element—that is, they involve the execution of technical and cultural algorithms that shape our image-making devices as well as our viewing practices. At the same time, she notes, photography is increasingly mobilized to document the precariousness of the human habitat and tasked with helping us imagine a better tomorrow. With its conjoined human-nonhuman agency and vision, Zylinska claims, photography functions as both a form of control and a life-shaping force.

Zylinska explores the potential of photography for developing new modes of seeing and imagining, and presents images from her own photographic project, Active Perceptual Systems. She also examines the challenges posed by digitization to established notions of art, culture, and the media. In connecting biological extinction and technical obsolescence, and discussing the parallels between photography and fossilization, she proposes to understand photography as a light-induced process of fossilization across media and across time scales.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262552622
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King's College London. The author of Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press) and many other books on art, technology, and ethics, she is also an artist and curator.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Capturing the End of the World 1

1 Nonhuman Vision 13

2 The Creative Power of Nonhuman Photography 51

3 Phography after the Human 81

4 Photography and Extinction 103

5 Ecomedia between Extinction and Obsolescence 129

6 We Have Always Been Digital 167

Conclusion: Postphotography? 195

Notes 203

Bibliography 239

Index 253

What People are Saying About This

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Wherever Joanna Zylinska is, there's the cutting edge.

Endorsement

The twenty-first century has found many ways to turn back, often uncritically, to life, bodies, matter, affect, and the real. Joanna Zylinska, having already contributed in profound and challenging ways to our understandings of ethics, media studies, and animality, now offers this remarkable book on nonhuman photography—a text that is as mindful of the camera's place in deep time as it is of the nonhuman eye's capacity to generate futures. This is an important and provocative book that will change the way we think about images.

—Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women's and Gender Studies, Pennsylvania State University; coauthor of Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols

From the Publisher

Wherever Joanna Zylinska is, there's the cutting edge.

—Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU; author of How to See the World

The twenty-first century has found many ways to turn back, often uncritically, to life, bodies, matter, affect, and the real. Joanna Zylinska, having already contributed in profound and challenging ways to our understandings of ethics, media studies, and animality, now offers this remarkable book on nonhuman photography—a text that is as mindful of the camera's place in deep time as it is of the nonhuman eye's capacity to generate futures. This is an important and provocative book that will change the way we think about images.

—Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women's and Gender Studies, Pennsylvania State University; coauthor of Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols

Claire Colebrook

The twenty-first century has found many ways to turn back, often uncritically, to life, bodies, matter, affect, and the real. Joanna Zylinska, having already contributed in profound and challenging ways to our understandings of ethics, media studies, and animality, now offers this remarkable book on nonhuman photography—a text that is as mindful of the camera's place in deep time as it is of the nonhuman eye's capacity to generate futures. This is an important and provocative book that will change the way we think about images.