Can photography describe its own event? : the dissolving of the classical perspective in the concept of photography

• Main Author: Jenkins, Laura
• Published: University of Wales Trinity Saint David 2016
• Subjects: 770
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.704090

The thesis title "Can photography describe its own event?" is purposefully designed to ask very complex questions of the medium of photography in it's present moment. It is a question, which employed under differing conditions of thought throughout the thesis tests photography against the fields of difference and creativity. Gilles Deleuze threw down a challenge to the medium by neglecting to include consideration of the photographic in his process led philosophy of difference, He purposefully ignores photography and seemingly locates it firmly within a system of representation and identity that his work was designed to systematically dismantle. Whilst presenting photography as a form of spatialised stasis, often consisting of pictorial clichés reproducing fixed bytes of information, his vitalist thought alternately seeks to interpret temporal continuity and constant variation in service of the power of creativity. The thesis asks, how can a concept invented in the service of facts and positivism contribute to a new world of speculative uncertainty. To describe its own event, photography must partake of difference and temporal paradigms such as a performative process-seriality. It must perceive itself as being an immanent practice consisting of all uncertainties and intensities of variation of any other event in the world. A temporal cryptography. The denouement of the thesis seeks to tentatively locate photography as working in an emergent fashion in the service of process-reality rather than representational model and copy. This new zerography strips away the well-worn conventions of photographic syntax and imagines resetting itself to zero. Moving past the informational and the symbolic and beyond the binary subject / object position it emerges into a world of quantum indeterminacy where it is no longer interested in defining other events but of contributing to a new speculative creativity and invention. The world as if rather than as is.