Towards a Philosophy of Photography

by Vilém Flusser

Overview

Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781861890764
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	12/01/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	4.25(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Vilém Flusser was born in Prague in 1920. After emigrating to Brazil and then to France, he embarked on an influential career as a lecturer and writer on language, design and communication. He died in 1991.

Table of Contents

Introductory Note
The Image
The Technical Image
The Apparatus
The Gesture of Photography
The Photograph
The Distribution of Photographs
The Reception of Photographs
The Photographic Universe
Why a Philosophy of Photography is Necessary
Lesson of Basic Concepts
 
Afterword, Hubertus von Amelunxen

Editorial Reviews

In Flusser, we’ve found our Wittgenstein. By that I mean, in the ways that 1960s conceptual artists found his Philosophical Investigations as granting them the necessary permission to see the world around them with fresh eyes, Flusser’s forays into media have framed, theorized, and unpacked the new complexities of our digital world. By empirically questioning received knowledge and recasting it within crisp lines of history and logic, he’s made the digital legible in a time when its theorization is occluded and murky to say the least. Like de Kooning’s famous statement: ‘History does not influence me. I influence it,’ it’s taken Flusser’s analog-based investigations in the twentieth century to show how to be in the digitally soaked twenty-first.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Kenneth Goldsmith