World without colour and its photographs and optical images

Photographs and optical images, whatever their contents, are imprints of the electromagnetic waves in the (human) visible range of wavelengths, we refer to as light. Furthermore, they are designed to portray different parts of the visible light in terms of different colours, in analogy with the human eyes, however imperfectly. The world outside our eyes and cameras, however, is permeated by electromagnetic waves with much wider spectrum of wavelengths than those in the visible range. Importantly also, colour is a construct of our eye–brains: the Universe itself has no colour, independently of us. I ask how does the knowledge of these facts change the way we perceive the colour in optical images and photographs, whatever their relationship to the world in a representational sense may be? By employing three images, with very different origins and vistas – one a direct photograph, the other two synthetically constructed images using real cosmological observations – I demonstrate the extent to which colour in such images can hide the underlying phenomena of which they claim to visually speak, both due to its nature as a coarse-grained visual index, and by being restricted to the visible range. The aim is not to belittle the important role that our (restricted) vision together with our perception of colour have played in the evolution of our species, and still play in the way we relate to the world informationally, aesthetically and emotionally. But rather to show that recognizing the limitations of our vision and complementing it with the knowledge of the phenomena underlying optical images and photographs can allow us to perceive them anew and provide additional tools (both conceptual and visual) to imagine and envision such images outside the bounds of the visible range and colour.

Theory of the Image, Thomas Nail (2019)

Review of: Theory of the Image, Thomas Nail (2019) New York: Oxford University, 432 pp., ISBN 978-0-19005-008-5, p/bk, £19.99

Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine, Yanai Toister (2020)

Review of: Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine, Yanai Toister (2020) Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, p/bk, 215 pp., ISBN 978-1-78938-156-6, p/bk, £37

Photographocene: The past, present and future in the photography of the environment

Photography has an important place in picturing and documenting environmental changes, especially when they occur in distant areas, or are inaccessible from ground level and/or imperceptible to the naked eye due to their scale. As the invention of photographic technology was officially registered only 55 years after the invention of the steam engine (which is commonly taken as the starting point of the Anthropocene era), most subsequent transformations of the environment have been well documented. One needs to distinguish the time of human changes to the environment, the Anthropocene, from images of the era this term names, which are the way humans learn of their own environmental deeds. Such images may be dependent, yet they are also distinct insofar as they influence the perception as well as the production of the Anthropocene itself, framed by limits of the static, fractioned, subjectivized and perspectival medium of photography. In this vein, the article risks proposing yet another in a long series of neologisms that aim to define the unstable or extreme times we live in: the Photographocene. The Photographocene marks various phases of the human relationship to the environment in which photographs have documented, directly communicated and announced impending environmental processes directly caused by human actions. Yet, this is also an era marked by photographic images of the environment that report but also pollute our relationship to the environment by forming an alternate reality. Thus, this concept enables one to articulate the role that images have in our understanding of the past–present–future human impact on the environment.

Roy DeCarava: Eyes to hear

This article examines the belated reception and occlusion of the photographic work of Roy DeCarava by evaluating two recent publications: The Sound I Saw: Improvisations on a Jazz Theme (2019) and Light Break (2019). In the article, I attend to the ways in which DeCarava’s closely cropped photographs delve into the sensual, private textures of everyday life but also track as well the collective anguish and social discontent that still burns on today.

The assassination of experience by photography

This article suggests that when the engagement with photography is limited to questions of recognition and resemblance, such approach stifles our experience of the world and directs us towards monotonous homogeneity in which everything can be represented in a photograph, and a photograph is always a representation of something or other. And yet, a photograph has the potential to move our gaze beyond representation of events and situations in a way that allows us to penetrate the appearance of things and to sense their inner reality, rather than act as a mere illustration.