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December 14, 2009
In Towards A Philosophy of Photography it is argued by Vilém Flusser that there are two interweaving programs in the camera. One of them motivates the camera into taking pictures;the other permits the photographer to play. Beyond these are further programs - 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.
In the Introduction Vilém Flusser says that:
If images are to be deciphered, their magical character must be taken into account. It is a mistake to decipher images as if they were "frozen events." On the contrary, they are translations of events into; situations; they substitute scenes for events. Their magical power is due to their surface structure, and their inherent dialectics, their inner contradictions, must be appreciated in light of this magic they have.
Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man, but, meven as they do so, they interpose themselves between man and the world. They are meant to be maps, and they become screens/ Instead of pre-senting the world to man, they re-present it, put themselves in place of the world.
The world becomes image-like, a context of scenes and situations.We forgets that we produce images in order to find our way in the world; we now try to find our way in images. The purpose of text is explain or decode images and to decipher texts is to find out what images they refer to.
The struggle between texts and images poses the question of the relationship between text and image. In modernity conceptual thinking analyses magical thinking in order to do away with it, magical thinking infiltrates conceptual thinking in order to imagine its m concepts. In the course of this dialectical process, conceptual and magical thinking mutually reinforce themselves: texts become more imaginative, and images become more conceptual.
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