Looking at Photographs

Abstract

It is almost as unusual to pass a day without seeing a photograph as it is to miss seeing writing. In one institutional context or another — the press, family snapshots, billboards, etc. — photographs permeate the environment, facilitating the formation/reflection/inflection of what we ‘take for granted’. The daily instrumentality of photography is clear enough, to sell, inform, record, delight. Clear, but only to the point at which photographic representations lose themselves in the ordinary world they help to construct. Recent theory follows photography beyond where it has effaced its operations in the ‘nothing-to-explain’.