Mediated by the Medium

(above) I Don’t Know [American Typologies] — Pine Woods  (this and more can be found on Luminous Lint)

… photography is not concerned with simple mimesis, but with a mimesis of mimesis, with the meaning of meaning: photography duplicates the image of reality.

That quote and the quoted text that follows are from an essay, Photography as the Medium of Reflection, by Bernd Stiegler (translated from the German by Elizabeth Kieffer and Mary Christian) in the book of essays, The Meaning of Photography, eds Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (2008):

… In photography, reality becomes visible. Photographs construct forms of reality, an accepted truth of the visible; they are constructions of reality by means of a medium. Photography represents a will to see reality; it is a materialization of certain conceptions of reality in images. … Photographs continue to be visual reflections of reality; they are realism mediated by the medium and concentrated in images — even if this reality is a radically constructed one, at times consisting of nothing more than visual material generated and manipulated by a computer. Even then, photography is an abbreviation of a specific concept of reality, which indeed can be, and at times has been, grasped as a radical construction.

… Through photographs we secure those truths we inhabit and regard as our reality.

This is to be understood dynamically as well as historically, so at no point is photography a matter of a naïve realism. … A different conception of reality applies to the studies after nature from the mid-nineteenth century than to the digital experiments of recent decades, but for each, photography is not concerned with simple mimesis, but with a mimesis of mimesis, with the meaning of meaning: photography duplicates the image of reality. It is neither a matter of naturalism nor of constructivism, but rather of reflection on constuctivism as well as on naturalism conveyed by means of this medium. Photography makes implicit presuppositions explicit, visualizes conceptions of reality, and, consequently, visualizes an always already-present but not necessarily explicit “naturalism.”

Photography, thus can be defined specifically as a “reflective medium.” In photography it comes down to rendering self-evident what at specific times and in specific contexts can be understood as reality and visual truth. This is one of photography’s outstanding societal functions. Through this perspective, the history of photography not only becomes decipherable as history of visual constructions of truth, it also reveals the history of perception as something that is itself historically encoded.

(above) Not His Madness [American Topologies] — Pine Woods (see more at Luminous Lint)

“… reveals the history of perception.” Felix Grant posted recently about his own sequenced photographs. He said (among other things):

A sequence, on the other hand, adds a longitudinal sense of change but without sacrificing the photograph’s opportunity to dwell on momentary expressions and gestures which would, in a video or real life, pass too fleetingly to appreciate.

It’s interesting to consider his type of sequence (one photographer, one location, one span of time — see the images in his post) to those shown above. They are by multiple unknown photographers, multiple perspectives, and are from multiple unknown times. They share only some commonality of subject/meaning. “Pine Woods,” from their Luminous Lint biography, is actually:

A collaboration between the American photo-based and conceptual artists Gail Pine and Jackie Woods. They use found photographs to create typologies of American culture and lifestyles.

The picture captions include this description; “Typology of multiple vernacular photographs.”

(above) Time is a Fiction [American Topologies] — Pine Woods

For yet another variation on sequencing, this time with a single photographer (not Felix), multiple locations, and a (relatively) continuous span of time, see Felix’s follow-up post with pictures.

What do you think? Are the above, shown and linked, “realism mediated by the medium and concentrated in images” ? Mimesis of mimesis?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/