Comment and Afterword: Photography and Placing the Past
| Autor: | Philip J. Ethington |
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| Rok vydání: | 2010 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Visual Culture. 9:439-448 |
| ISSN: | 1741-2994 1470-4129 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1470412910380342 |
| Popis: | This essay asks: what is photography to the past, such that a photograph offers knowledge about the past? In an extended commentary on Katja Zelljadt’s account of early Berlin photography, the essay presents two broad positions on the quality of photographic knowledge. The ‘assimilative’ position seeks to equate photographs with all other signs in a semiotic universe, and to derive their meanings primarily from this context. The ‘exceptional’ position holds that photographs are indexical signs that carry a direct impress of the world, and thus carry true knowledge of the world. It is argued that the two positions can be collapsed in a radical spatialization of visual knowledge by expanding Gombrich’s thesis on the ‘primacy of meaning’ to include the powerful neuronal pathways through visual field maps and processing centers. The embodied mind requires that each interpretive event, each ‘reading’ of a photograph takes place in a perspectival position. The essay then considers cartography and the Google-powered HyperCities geohistorical platform as an example of the latest networks knowledge in the hyperspatial internet. Emplacing photographic artifacts in wider and wider networks of contextualization can expand the universe of interpretive meaning, while also deepening their inscription into the terrestrial locations of their production. Rejecting the radical skepticism of the assimilationist position, the essay concludes that photography’s exceptional qualities in the circulation of signs anchors interpretation as we build historical knowledge by clearing pathways to perspectival nodes in the bottomless semiotic-embodied topology of the past. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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