From the Photograph to Postphotographic Practice: Toward a Postoptical Ecology of the Eye

Abstract

Since 1839, Western culture has conditioned its constituents to see in terms of photographic images. That conditioning, however, has not been homogeneous. One has only to examine the discourses that permeate photography to become aware of the fissures continually disrupting its practice. Thus, one of the principal dichotomies that continues to influence the historical, practical, and critical debate on the nature of photography involves its 'objective' vs. its 'subjective' foundations. Is photography to be considered a scientific or an artistic tool? Are photographs factual or are they particularly complex fictions? As the history of these debates reveals, the answers to these questions are relative to the practical uses and the discursive formations instrumental to photographic activity. There is, however, another position which can be adopted in relation to photography's historico-epistemological identity that has not yet been surveyed. This position can be identified through an exploration of an alternative culture delineated with reference to photography's modes of production. A culture of photography does not necessarily have to be defined in terms of the images that have come to embody much of its current historical and social value. Photography's historico-epistemological identity can also be defined in terms of the cultural dimensions of its process of production-after all, photographs do not simply appear; they are produced by a complex transformational process which might also be impregnated with symbolic value. In the following discussion, an alternative postphotographic practice will be described, and its strategic and practical consequences will be considered. This photographic 'counter-practice' will be introduced by an examination of a correspondence between a visual classification system and the cultural priorities expressed by the Judaeo-Christian myth of origins as presented in the first ten verses of Genesis. This correspondence will then provide a point of departure for exposing the authorial and deterministic foundations of all photographic images. The remainder of the paper will be devoted to developing a critique of the principal historical priority sustaining a culture of photographic images-a historico-epistemologicalfixation on the photograph as the most valued product