Reflexions on an Ontology of the Photographic Act: Suspension, Glimmer and Creation

Abstract

The study’s approach starts from the fully creative consideration of the photographic act and its expressive virtuality, in open conflict with certain pejorative understandings of it and its immediate product, the photographic image. Faced with the valuation of this act as a traumatic mutilation of the unity of space and time, the study proposes an analysis from the opposite perspective, considering it as the availability and putting into practice of an eminently formative vision. With this intention, we first and foremost attend to the complex interaction that arises between the elements participating in the process —individual, matter and instant— in order to determine what procedures come into play and what their potential is. Contrasting this interrelation with other similar ones, characteristic of phenomenology or basic linguistics, we find a comparability of the photographic act with poetic enunciation and its symbolic implication. Therefore, the general conclusion of the analysis could be that the photographic act, like the poetic act, would work as a methodological alternative to instrumental reason and the a prioris, manipulations and disorders that imply —at least in an ideal sense— the designation of what is visible as valuable in itself.