CONCERNING PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography necessarily defers emotional response, delays psychological affect, derails personal connection. As a practice of mechanized fetishism it is always already impersonal in product while also absolutely irredeemably social in process. A photograph reveals nothing about the person that captured it and deceivingly portrays the subject of focus. The camera is a clumsy, brittle, excessively logical machine that functions more as a prophylactic of capitalism and prosthetic of the eye; desacralizing metaphor, devaluing symbolism, denaturing the environment, degenerating direct human experience.

While the photographic mechanism is the quintessential propagandist hologram of authenticity, the temporal-social experience of taking the photograph has become an essential component of the techno-social paradigm of digital culture. The world in its entirety -- in all of its myriad terrestrial and celestial parallax perspectives -- has become mundane to the mind and banal to the blogosphere. The photograph as process -- rather than product -- can and should be employed as an (admittedly artificial) mechanical process of social injection, to produce scenarios of social extraction (rather than the illusion of exchange), and as a resourceful response to the contemporary excesses of dissociated and disenfranchised social engagement.