Photogenic Intensions
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Keywords

ontology of the image
philosophy of photography
photogenesis
photography and event
photography and information
virtual

How to Cite

Burleigh, Peter. 2020. “Photogenic Intensions”. Membrana – Journal of Photography, Theory and Visual Culture 5 (1):60–65. https://doi.org/10.47659/m8.060.art.

Abstract

What is a photograph? What a spurious, redundant start! After all, a photograph is clearly an image, a technical image of something. What a photograph is – such a stupid question! Yet, the casual announcement of the photograph as signification relies on an a priori truth that orients our thinking, our identities, our institutions. For it is “in terms of this self-apparent image of thought that everybody knows and is presumed to know what it means to think.” Collaging Deleuze and Bergson, intuition teaches us that an image is a nexus of force in itself, or as Anne Sauvagnargues suggests, what is crucial to images is how they cut into the world. As real enfoldings of the virtual and actual, photographs are the territories of a multiplicity of sensations – a genesis, the real actual of a diagrammatic structuring of the world in registers of time and space. Roger Fenton’s The Queen’s Target made at Queen Victoria’s opening of the first Rifle Association in 1860 is an entry point to thinking deeper signalisation in photographs. While the 3-D work by Andreas Angelidakis indicates photogenetic zones of intensity, temporal dislodgment, and the event of photogenesis actualized in physical form.

https://doi.org/10.47659/m8.060.art
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References

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