Within an illustrated box : ontology of a photography in demise. An extract from the exegesis Photography : the dominant aesthetic

This paper is an extract from a larger body of research that is concerned primarily with the ontology of a photography in demise – that is to say, traditional film-based photography. Inevitably it proceeds to examine more than the recent industrial shift from analogue to electronic technology by reviewing what the original status of photography essentially was and how perceived from a phenomenological view of photography’s affect, value and persistence as a global and culturally dominant way of seeing and communicating. Review and analysis undertaken proceeds on the premise of the author’s practice as an artist, thinking about and making photographs leading to a functional understanding of the convergence of contemporary art processes with philosophical method and particularly existential phenomenology. What surfaces out of an examination of historic ontologies of photography, tracing the industrial shift from analogue to digital photography, is a larger, discernible ontology of a photography in demise and the promise as well as hazards of its electronic ‘palingenesis’. This reshaping of photography tracks a decades long, irregular shift in post-modern perceptions of photography from a discourse locked in dichotomy between ‘formalist’ and ‘contextual’ theorizing that ended in reconstituting materiality to the image. However, it is the socio-perceptual affect on seeing and understanding in photographic terms, of perspectival and monocular views of the world, truth in detail, meaning in focus, mimesis and beauty in photogenic form and all of it as anodyne and slender as the paper upon which it is printed.