American Photography as Technical Art: Ontological, Cultural and Linguistic Aspects

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of the present research deals with the interdisciplinary approach implementation regarding such compound phenomenon as photography via clarifying its ontological, cultural and linguistic integral components. The ontological layer presupposes the accomplishment of the existing philosophical concepts’ analysis with a focus on visuality, image and the photography’s essence, as well as the reasons of the pictorial turn development, which will certainly impact such scientific trends as cognitive linguistics, concept, discourse and anthropocentricity. On the cultural level the author examines the photography, revealing its fine-arts features and points out the art movements of the American photo-art. In the end we examine the American photographic discourse via analyzing the “concept” constructions, actualized within the American photograph’s titles and their visual contents. In the present paper the author uses the contrastive-comparative analysis of the philosophical, cultural and linguistic concepts, method of interpretation, methods of discourse and semantic analysis. The author specifies that the ontological, cultural and linguistic peculiarities of the American photography are (being) in the state of interdependence due to their complex multidimensional characteristics: for example, the philosophical “iconic turn” may have influenced the linguistics’ cognitive shift, and the lack of knowledge in the sphere of the American culture makes it practically impossible to interpret such photographs as Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 by Dorothea Lange and The Flatiron, 1902 by Alfred Stieglitz because of their additional metaphoric complexity and the necessity to use specific background knowledge. In the end the author comes to the conclusion, that photographic discourse is a complex communicative phenomenon, a special reflective language, having inherited the Western-European artistic-aesthetic tradition, comprising linguistic and extralinguistic elements, by which American culture is recognized through a technological medium that functions like art – the American photography.KeywordsAmerican photographyTechnical artVisual artsOntologyCultureThe American photographic discourseConceptUSA