Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Londres, Reaktion Books, 2014).

First published in German in 1983, Towards a Philosophy of Photography begins with a bold statement: the invention of “technical images” shaped the emergence of human history in the same magnitude as the invention of writing itself. According to Flusser, photography—the first method for creating technical images—displaced the agency of creating an image from humans to the apparatus: the camera. As a technique, the camera became the ultimate device to reproduce reality without apparent distortions. The photograph as an object, however, has no value. We can print them a million times and anyone can squeeze the trigger to make them. It is only as information, as encoded parts of reality, that the photograph claims its value. Photography displaced the authority and meaning of representing the world from the artist to the camera:

[The] Power [of representing the world] has moved from the owner of objects to the programmer and the operator. The game of using symbols has become a power game—a hierarchical power game. Photographers have power over those who look at their photographs, they program their actions; and the camera has power over the photographers, it programs their acts. The shift of power from the material to the symbolic is what characterizes what we call the ‘information society’ and ‘post-industrial imperialism’.

This monumental shift of authority and focus—from the human to the apparatus, from the material to the informational, from the importance of objects to the importance of their content—requires a philosophy, a way of thinking the world after (and through) photography.

The conflict between the camera and the operator drives Flusser’s argument toward a discussion on agency, knowledge, and freedom in the age of mechanical reproduction. The apparently non-symbolic, objective nature of the photograph leads observers to look at them as straight-forward representations of the world, as pieces of it, instead of decoding them and unpacking their content. Without referencing other works or authors (which makes the book feel like a lonely, still familiar, island of knowledge), the essays of the book reflect on the politics and meaning of the camera, the photographer, and the world that receives the photographs. To understand the world of images we inhabit today, thinking about what the structures and meanings that lie behind the medium becomes indispensable—Towards a Philosophy of Photography is a great starting point.