The past and the pending : photography, phenomenology and intent as perceptual experience

As a practising artist/photographer I utilise photography as a reflexive practice that explores aspects of attribution theory, perception, memory, and intent. This paper criticises and debates current arguments based on the role and practice of the photographer in relation to the medium and its technical limitations through experimentation. Although ‘photography’ and ‘seeing’ are not self-explanatory, they are ultimately a designed entity based completely on the self, explained through the personal act of reflecting one’s self. The paper further addresses photography within various contexts and concepts of both philosophy and psychology. The specific areas addressed 1) Attribution theory (and its various interpretations) as it relates to behaviour, and 2) Perception and the conception of the phenomenological aspects of photography, with emphasis being the contextual awareness created by perceptual and behavioural experience from a photographer’s point of view i.e.: the ‘photo-conscious’. In Flusser’s Toward a Philosophy of Photography, he states that photographers are distinguishable from people taking ‘snaps’. People taking snaps are consumed by their camera, their ‘plaything’. Unlike photographers they do not look for information, for the improbable (Flusser, 58), though it is improbable matter that creates a consciousness that is directly related to one’s behaviour within the making of photographs.