| This body of practice and research is concerned primarily with the ontology of photography in demise, that is to say, traditional film-based photography. Inevitably it proceeds to examine more than the recent industrial shift from analog to electronic technology by reviewing essentially what the original status of photography was and how perceived from a phenomenological view of photography's affect, value and persistence as a global and culturally dominant way of seeing and communicating.;Investigation proceeds on the premise of the author's practice as an artist, thinking about and making photographs leading to a functional understanding of the convergence of contemporary art processes with philosophical method and particularly existential phenomenology.;What surfaces out of an examination of historic ontologies of photography tracing the industrial shift from analog to digital photography is a larger, discernible ontology of a photography in flux and the promise as well as hazards of its electro-digital palingenesis. This reshaping of photography tracks a decade's long, irregular shift in post-modern perceptions of photography from a discourse locked in dichotomy between 'formalist' and 'contextual' theorizing ending in a reconstitution of materiality to the image.;However, it is the socio-perceptual affect of photography that dominates contemporary imagination and impels this inquiry into a world of perspectival and monocular views, this dominant aesthetic: truth in detail, meaning in focus, mimesis in diegesis, the ideal and the beautiful in photogenic form. We all end as photographs now, as anodyne and slender as the paper onto which the image is sealed or bright and sharp as the luminous screen upon which its shadow is cast. |
