May 2012
9 posts
“If one considers the camera (and apparatuses in general) in this sense, one sees that the camera produces symbols: symbolic surfaces that have in a certain way been prescribed for it. The camera is programmed to produce photographs, and every photograph is a realization of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera. The number of such possibilities is large, but it is nevertheless finite: It is the sum of all those photographs that can be taken by a camera. It is true that one can, in theory, take a photograph over and over again in the same or a very similar way, but this is not important for the process of taking photographs. Such images are ‘redundant’: They carry no new information and are superfluous.”
—Vilem Flusser - Towards A Philosophy of Photography
“I bought a new camera, it’s very advanced, you don’t even need it.”
—Steven Wright
“Instant historicization does two things at a time, one is perpetuation of the now in the visual flow, and, two the immortalization of the past as an eternal relic. These two historical concepts, move in two different directions, nevertheless present a singular image. In the face of contemporary machinery of destruction, the location of history has shifted to the instant past and immediate future and as such it is collapsing on the present. While before one could look back at history from the vista point of the present, that vista point now looks at its visual echo, with the delay of broadcast time. The historicization of presence responds to an impulse to secure a spot outside of history. This is achieved by removing the self from the site of the event, but turning the event into the subject of visual investigation, by recounting it not as the affected subject, but as a narrator, and as a historian. The eternity that was assigned to the represented subject, now is conferred to the producer of the image; it is the absence from representation that is immortal. But the fate of image that is emptied from eternity remains obscure. To have no agency in determining one’s position vis-a-vis the view finder, is the position of the victim. A hero commands the representation of his annihilation, a victim who defines the conditions of representation.”
—Sohrab Mohebbi - Presence Documents
“What is this incredibly bizarre, preemptive attitude that the people in power have? Why do they take us more seriously than we take ourselves—basically, the entire Iraq War was designed around heading off an effective antiwar movement. It seemed much more important to head off an effective antiwar movement to get over the Vietnam war syndrome than it was to win the war. They had these rules of engagement, they had all these formulas: how many dead bodies, how many protestors? They came up with these rules of engagement which guaranteed that lots and lots of Iraqi and Afghan civilians would get killed, but very few of our soldiers. This ensured that they couldn’t possibly link… But they didn’t care, because it was more important to be allowed to have a war successfully than to win the war. The key thing is to preempt the resistance at home.”
—David Graeber in conversation with Rebecca Solnit
