Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
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Walden, Scott (Ed.). Photography and Philosophy – Essays on the Pencil of Nature. Victoria – Australia, Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 344 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4051-3924-3. US$ 79.95 (Hardback)
Reviewed by
IEL – Unicamp
It is curious fact about the photography critical literature: the sluggish time to consolidate its research basis and emerge as a specific, independent field. On the other hand, after consolidating itself, the resonance of the technological impact, in the paradigms exchange, seems much stronger in the field of photography. In the quotes and fragments collection that closes the Susan Sontag essay On Photography, the quotes from authors of the nineteenth century are not very common and without a clear approach in the phenomenon itself but speculation – an furious aphorism by Kierkegaard, a annotation of William H. Fox Talbot, a Schopenhauer meditation or a letter of Elizabeth Barret – with a heavy emphasis in the fascination, horrified or not, about the photographic phenomenon. If we establishes a quick comparison with the criticism production surrounding the Cinema, established and rapidly consolidated a few decades after the first projections of brothers Lumière, we see that the picture has a more disturbing element, an excess that establishes its essence: stop the flow of time, confuse the representation areas, overcast differences between animated and inanimate. In this respect, there are some character or essence in perpetual movement and dislocation. This is an over contemporary and the mythical trend about photography in its representational function. More than that: this trend recreates in the realms of technical innovation some mythical aura of "the brush of nature.”
In the situation outlined above, makes all sense the central hypothesis that guides the great volume – edited by Scott Walden – with essays and studies on the photographic image Photography and Philosophy - Essays on the Pencil of Nature: the changes and paradigmatic shifts in photography techniques, technology and meaning produces complex changes in other spheres of the phenomenon so that a way or another of “canonical” culture critique demands, necessarily, some new and fresh discussions to open new paths and destabilizing the course more or less set of critical aesthetic / political / ethics. Thus, the criticism came not only with technological changes, but establishes itself in the matrix of instability that brings photographic representation in itself, upgrading critical reflection in the field of that excess as mentioned above. Obviously, this kind of critical task can only occur by the multitude, heteronomy, complexity and contradiction, hence, the range of views, approaches, issues and analytical body that we have in the Photography and Philosophy, a real polyphony that works perfectly to surpass the irregular surface of the phenomenon. In this context, it is particularly rich moment – a climax in the theoretical trajectory – with the discussions around the famous Roger Scruton essay "Photography and Representation." From the arguing started by Scruton about the value of the photographic image itself as a form of artistic representation, the essays by David Davies and Patrick Maynard move the discussion to much wider fields that the original article, located in accepting canonical conceptions on Art and Non-Art. Extends up the representation debate, rejecting the dichotomy simplification by extending the basic phenomenon of the very idea of representation and perception of the subject correctly represented and the supposed inherent reality that this object can load. But this is only the climax; other interesting moments also appear to be in place as a matter being investigated the ethics of the portrait, the additional burden of meaning that each image carries information beyond the obvious references system, the accuracy and objectivity of the photographic act, etc.
At the very beginning of the book, in the introductory essay, Scott Walden presents a brief excursus of the canonical reflection on the photo – some authors who have focused the phenomenon over the past 40 years (Barthes, Sontag, Sekulla – it might be important add the name of Walter Benjamin). If you think about photography as a contemporary thing, it may be very quick its obsolescent. The “Pencil of Nature” will be transformed and moved up so quickly as following a artificial skyline, perhaps impossible to stop. But the attempt to freeze the displacement of the Photography (as a concept, as a “thing”, as a way to see) plays the same mechanism of the photography itself and this is the best way to study and approach on this phenomenon so loaded with mythical aura in the 21st. In this manner, the volume Photography and Philosophy fulfills its function and poses itself as a reflection not definitive or categorical, but open, wide, complex and necessary.