Mikhail A. STEPANOVSaint Petersburg State University of Industrial Technology and Design
18, Bolshaya Morskaya st., Saint Petersburg, 191186 Russian Federation
Head of the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the Institute of Business Communications
D. S. Likhachev Russian Institute of Cultural and Natural Heritage, Russia
2, Cosmonauts st., Moscow, 129301 Russian Federation
Senior Researcher of the Center for Fundamental Research of Culture
PhD (Philosophy)
Associate Professor
e-mail: michail.stepanov@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0002-8793-5874
Photography’s ImaginationAbstract: The text is caused by the publication of a new book by the St. Petersburg art historian Ekaterina Va-silyeva "36 Essays on Photographers", but the purpose of this article is not a review. This article deals with the question of how the photographic imagination works. The book is suggestive of modernity, cultural memory and the workings of the imagination. Photography appears to be technologically defined, but existentially indefinite "extra-logical form", as the author previously interpreted it. Photographers are not fixators, but informative, more accurate interpret-ers of the world than artists. They are capable of creating the imagination of an era, forming patterns of perception of events and topics, transforming the na-ture of individual identity. A photograph can be both a description of the world and a simulation of events endowed with meaning, serving a specific social, political, economic or other purpose. And each viewer is able to understand this by taking into account the circumstances of the photograph and his own encounter with the photographic image. Identification and self-identification of social groups, cultures and individuals through photographic images turns out to be a way of self-awareness of the individual as a subject capable of accepting or reflecting identification through an image. Photographic images document and represent the state of affairs, give an idea of the behavior of people. The plethora of photographic images, with their tendency to capture each subject, supports the constant drive to make distinctions. To see means to distinguish, to understand this complex single world composed of many elements without attempts to colonize it, to give it the only true picture of the world and the rules of behavior.
The book is structured in such a way that the external form, the order of personalities, is subordinated to the alphabet, but not to the time of life or the styles of photographers. Thus, instead of a single linear perspective, the reader gets a lot of constellations, intersections of life lines, techniques, plots, and there is no longer any history of photography that develops over time, but there are many forces that constantly act on the viewer/reader himself.
Key words: Ekaterina Vasilyeva, photography, photographers, history of photography, imagination.
References:
- Vasilyeva, E. (2019). Fotografiya i vnelogicheskaya forma.[Photography and non-logical form]. M.: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye. New Literary Review, 2019. 312.(In Russian)
- Vasilyeva, E. (2022). 36 esse o fotografakh [36 issues about photographers: [collection]]. St. Petersburg; M.: RUGRAM Palmira, 2022. 255. (In Russian)
- Damish, J. (2016). Iskhodya iz fotografii[Proceeding from photography]. Krauss, R. Fotograficheskoye: opyt teorii raskhozhdeniy. [Photographic: Experience in the theory of discrepancies]. Moscow: Ad Marginem. 6–14. (In Russian)
- Deleuze, G. (2004). Kino: Kino-1 Obraz-dvizheniye; Kino-2 Obraz-vremya [Cinema: Cinema-1 Image-Movement; Kino-2 Image-time]. G. Deleuze; [per. from fr. B. Skuratov]. M.: Ad Marginem, 2004. 622. (In Russian)
For Citation: Stepanov, M. (2022) Photography’s Imagination. International Journal of Cultural Research, 4 (49). 148–151. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2022_4_148
DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2022_4_148
