Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

Photography and the New Mechanisms of Visuality

This paper argues that new photographic technologies have not only changed the production and distribution practices of photography, but also have great influence on the phenomenological stand of the photographic medium. The paper addresses two apparently contradictory processes which signify contemporary photographic: on the one hand, the aspiration to construct the “Big Picture” of the world (or in Paul Virilio words “The Large Scale Optics), which is apparent with applications such as Google Earth, Google Street View and Google Art Project, and on the other hand, the development of mechanisms which deconstruct the photographic space into its elementary components.
This paper suggests seeing the recent vision mechanisms of photography as embedded in a new kind of affinity between visibility and hermeneutics. This affinity is based on the crumbling of the linkage between visibility and photographic surface in its representative sense, and conditions visibility as a function of what enables its performative aspects. As a result of its linkage to computer metadata networks. This paper will suggest seeing the increasing importance of textual mechanisms in photography, especially at times when new interfaces are becoming more and more visual.