Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

From Photographic representation to Photographic genotype”

New photographic practices reorganize space in its broad contexts and create a new kind of affinity between the photographic act and the world’s material and informative components. They extend the boundaries of photography far beyond the limits imposed by biology on human vision, and strip it of any attachment to the real in its traditional manifestations. They take part in ‘the intertwining and co-constitution of the organic and the machinic, the technical and the discursive, in the production of vision, and hence the perception of the world.
This chapter refers to concepts from the fields of biology such as life, phenotype and genotype, memory, neural networks, emergence and camouflage in order to discuss the role of contemporary photography in the potential deconstruction and reconstruction of images in general, and of the human image in particular. In addressing these concepts, it explores the ways in which new photographic practices fragmentise space, disconnect photography from the specificity of the moment, and present optional concepts for past, present and future. It shows how photography relates to ‘the real’ through the subject’s ‘photographic genome’, but at the same time deals with the fictitious, predictive, relative and fleeting reality of the post-truth era.