A Knot, A Network, A Thing, A World: Composition as Generative Meaning-making in Still Life Photography

Abstract

Elements move towards, cohere, and separate. It is in this ontogenetic and generative coherence – the composition – that meaning is created. This article positions still life photography as a non-representational, ontogenetic, and generative coherence of thought, matter, and meaning: what Tim Ingold describes as a knot, what Donna Haraway describes as a network, what Martin Heidegger, Bill Brown, and Elizabeth Grosz describe as a thing, and what Kathleen Stewart describes as a world. The photographic images in A Knot, A Network, A Thing, A World present an alternative to photography as representation and/or documentation, instead centring its composition as a moving-towards of human and non-human elements continually coming into being, generating new meanings and compositions.