Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Black Box of Religion,

Archival Inkjet Print, 14x21”,

$444

 

At the center of mecca sits a giant black box, the Kaaba. At the center of Saturn sits a giant hexagonal storm (there is also some sort of black cube there that represents the illuminati and satan ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Belief is a strange and impenetrable thing, like a black box.

 

“Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings ‘ex-ist’, i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible. However, as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings. They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create. Human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world ‘out there’, which meanwhile itself becomes like an image – a context of scenes, states of things. This reversal of the function of the image can be called ‘idolatry’; we can observe the process at work in the present day: The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our ‘reality’ and turning it into a ‘global image scenario’. p.9-10