Vilém Flusser, in his 1983 text Towards a Philosophy of Photography, defines a “photographer” as “a person who attempts to place, within the image, information that is not predicted within the program of the camera.” (2000, p.84) With this definition in mind, this paper will revisit and develop arguments I originally advanced in my PhD thesis (2018 – Glasgow School of Art) to consider how my own desire to expand the denotative range of my photographs might be reformulated as a desire to break from, or to extend, the program of the camera apparatus. Born of a sense similar to that expressed by Brecht’s famous comment that a photograph of the Krupp works does not attest to conditions within the factory (Benjamin, 2015), I have proposed my artworks combining digital photographs with real-time and recorded data in custom software programs represent an attempt on my part to express a quality of the depicted site or subject I personally find to be compelling but cannot capture in an indexically-iconic photograph. Drawing both on Flusser’s writing and that of his commentators, I will reflect on these artworks, and the creative coding techniques employed in their making, both as a challenge to the program of the camera apparatus, and as a potential means to produce “informative” images (Flusser, 2000, passim): photographs that do not simply document the world but add something to how we see it.

References:

Benjamin, W. (2015) ‘Small History of Photography’ in On Photography, ed. and trans. Leslie, E. London, UK: Reaktion Books, pp. 53 – 106.

Flusser, V. (2000) Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Mathews, A. London, UK: Reaktion Books.