It is a product of human labor, a cultural object whose being – in the phenomenological sense of the term – cannot be dissociated precisely from its historical meaning and from the necessarily datable project in which it originates. The photographic image does not belong to the natural world. To consider a document of this sort like any other image is to claim a bracketing of all knowledge – and even, as we shall see, of all prejudice – as to its genesis and empirical functions. The reluctance one feels, however, in describing such images as photographs is a revealing indication of the difficulty of reflecting phenomenologically – in the strictest sense of an eidactic experience, a reading of essences – on a cultural object, on an essence that is historically constituted. Theoretically speaking, photography is nothing other than a process of recording, a technique of inscribing, in an emulsion of silver salts, a stable image generated by a ray of light.This definition, we note, neither assumes the use of a camera, nor does in imply that the image obtained is that of an object or scene from the external world. ![]() ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image’ October, 5, Summer 1978, 70-72
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