In his Towards a Philosophy of Photography Vilém Flusser describes a world fundamentally changed by the invention of the "technical image" and the mechanisms that support and define industrialized modern culture. For him, two major events divide history: the first was the invention of writing (supplanting images); the second was the invention of photography (supplanting or beginning the process of supplanting writing). He argues that whereas ideas were previously interpreted by written account, the invention of photography allows the creation of images (ideas) taken at face value as truth, not interpretation that can be endlessly replicated and spread worldwide.

As writing was a way to bust magical image thinking, photography can be a means to bust linear thinking for a fresh approach to making sense by using a new kind of images.

Photography for Flusser is more than a tool in the hands of the individual. He thinks in terms of the camera and its user as the ‘apparatus-operator complex’ that is coded by various programs - for instance, that of the photographic industry that programmed the camera; that of the industrial complex that programmed the photographic industry; that of the socio-economic system that programmed the industrial complex; and so on.

What is of interest here is firstly, the notion that a technology is a bearer of forces and drives, is indeed made up of them. Secondly that it is composed by the mutual intermeshing of various other forces that might be technical, aesthetic, economic, chemical: that might have to do with capacities of human bodies as affordances- and which pass between all such bodies and are composed through and amongst them.