"Photography and Ontology"

Photography has two distinctly appealing properties. On the one had, it has mechanically-enhanced artistic powers: it can capture a moment, or orchestrate an intricate arrangement, or populate an empty frame with the blink of an eye. We might call this its vertical or qualitative axis, and plot any given photograph according to its degree of artistic success according to whatever criteria we might choose--exhibitions, say, or reviews, or individual judgment of its mastery. On the other hand, photography has mechanically and electronically-accelerated powers of distribution like computers and promises something like a factory in every pocket or handbag. We might refer to this as its horizontal, or quantitative axis, plotting the spread of photographicization by the picture, say, or camera, or megapixel, or ISO sensitivity. Both of these properties makes its own claim to universality, to ontology, to the meaning of being, one idealist, the other materialist, one metaphorical, the other metonymical. Because of its uniquely ingrained connection with art and its broad appeal as non-art, photography's ontology is defined to an exceptional extent by a dynamic tension between the one and the all. This presentation will explore some of the sociopolitical effects and opportunities arising from that distinctive tension.