This seminar seeks to intervene in critical-theoretical debates on photography in a digital age. Rather than starting from the assumption that the digital follows the analog in photography, one of the its central premises is that it is erroneous to consider the photograph in terms of analogy in the first place. If digitality is about division, the discontinuity is not necessarily between 0 and 1, but between 1 and 2, since the shutter-click is always an instantiation of splicing time. It is the digital image that allows us to revisit and critically to reflect upon the photographic image per se, both in its inherent, for technical, and hence nonhuman qualities and as a life-shaping force that makes up what Joanna Zylinska, in her book Nonhuman Photography (2017), defines as our current, “photographic condition.”

Where Zylinksa’s starting point is the increasing decoupling of the medium of photography from human agency and human vision (e.g., in CCTV, medical body scans, satellite imaging), this seminar sets out to explore the nonhuman aspects of a photographic aesthetics as a practice of life, especially in so-called art photography.

No image showing up on our multiple smart screens today can simply be assumed to inscribe a pre-existing reality, an actualization of a moment- past. Indeed, the simulacrum would appear increasingly to actuate the no-longer-there as the real of perception in the first place. Digital technologies point up the operation of photography not so much in terms of reproduction or representation—or, a pictorialism haunted by the specter of death—but as a mode of making and doing, as act. The digital image sui generis therefore brings into view the event of the photograph—whether analog or digital—neither as the carrier of “dead matter” nor as a mere (chronological) organization of memory, but rather as a creative act that depicts time as unfolding, non-chronologically, and therewith, as the very instant that saves memory itself from death. Photography thus presents itself as an ontological force, a world-making medium that anchors us in the “condition” of contemporary time and space.

Irrespective of genre, from snapshot to selfie, from artwork to news image, from portrait, to street photography, the technical image, to borrow Vilém Flusser’s helpful generic term, operates as an ontological practice, a mode of creative "worlding" that anchors us in contemporary spacetime. Approaching our current photographic condition as a site for theoretical inquiry, this seminar nonetheless seeks to addresses its major critical concerns within distinct photographic modes of art photography, in works that often come as a series, are set in a specific sociocultural spatiotemporal moment, and are made to be viewed in art galleries and museums. Possible guiding philosophical frameworks include theory of art, affect theory, vitalist philosophy, object-oriented ontology, post- or nonhumanist thought, and new aesthetic realism.