Wie das Fotografische sein Unwesen treibt.

Die Fotografie im Kontext des agentiellen Realismus. Eine Exploration.

Abstract

Photographs and other sensually related media are of existential importance for our contemporary social formation. They circulate through the internet or lend vividness to scientific data. This fundamental assumption will be discussed in this paper from a neo-materialist perspective. To this end, the author's sympoietic becoming-with-photography is first observed autoethnographically. Here, the constitutional conditions of myself as subject and human-object and the objects (camera, lens, landscape, etc.) are analyzed. Subsequently, the moment will be illuminated, in which a photograph is created. This is a simultaneous and co-located material reconfiguration of local space-time, in which a photograph emerges from the interplay of semantics and sociality of the field, of operability and the technical capturing of physical properties of light, as well as bodily and conscious processes. It is then shown that optical data are generally understood as objective witnesses of our understanding of reality, although it is they themselves that generate our view of the world. Concerning the technology and medium of photography, we are not dealing with an unsocial being, but with a social non-being that sympoietically influences our becoming conscious and sociogenesis. Photography is an example of this joint becoming from a technical and a media point of view.