Archive for 2017

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[ecrea] New book: Nonhuman Photography

Tue Nov 21 09:03:37 GMT 2017




New book
*NONHUMAN PHOTOGRAPHY* by Joanna Zylinska (MIT Press, 2017)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nonhuman-photography

Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In her book /Nonhuman Photography/, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent. Zylinska argues further that even those images produced by humans, whether artists or amateurs, entail a nonhuman, mechanical element—that is, they involve the execution of technical and cultural algorithms that shape our image-making devices as well as our viewing practices. At the same time, she notes, photography is increasingly mobilized to document the precariousness of the human habitat and tasked with helping us imagine a better tomorrow. With its conjoined human-nonhuman agency and vision, Zylinska claims, photography functions as both a form of control and a life-shaping force.

Zylinska explores the potential of photography for developing new modes of seeing and imagining, and presents images from her own photographic practice. She also examines the challenges posed by digitization to established notions of art, culture, and the media. In connecting biological extinction and technical obsolescence, and discussing the parallels between photography and fossilization, she proposes to understand photography as a light-induced process of fossilization across media and across time scales.

*Joanna Zylinska* is Professor of New Media and Communications and Co-Head of the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of six books – including /Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene/ <http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html> (Open Humanities Press, 2014, e-version freely available <http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html>) and /Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process/ (with Sarah Kember; MIT Press, 2012) – she is also a photographic artist and curator. In 2013 she was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 'Biomediations', the biggest Latin American new media festival, which took place in Mexico City. Her own practice involves experimenting with different kinds of photomedia.


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