Publication date: 30.09.2013. Publisher: ARTicle Press. ISBN 9781873352021
Cover Image: Igor Vasiliev To buy “On the Verge of Photography” click here. From the back cover:On The Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on fine art, culture and society. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory – that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive – and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social-media, and bio-politics, On the Verge of Photography offers an invaluable resource for students of visual culture, researchers in the field of digital imaging and artists working with new media.
“Reading this extraordinary book it becomes clear that so much of what we knew or thought we knew about photography is at one and the same time accurate and obsolete. With digital photography the image can no longer be discussed or defined for what it is conventionally assumed to be – a distinct visual unit. This is not a crisis, claim the editors of this timely volume, but an opportunity to step away from the representational terminology that has over-determined the discourse of photography in order to address the image’s actual modes of being and becoming: being digitally-born, constantly transmitted, mutated and shared. When images are “digitally networked” they cannot be isolated and viewed as distinct or unique. This book is a must read for anyone who shares with the authors collected in it an urge to acknowledge the contemporary image as a kind of living organism that intervenes in the world we share not only by and through the ways we share them.”
– Ariella Azoulay, Media/Comparative Literature and Modern Culture, Brown University.