Next, I explore the productive-or photogenic-attempts that the images make to generate ethical futures and collective change (Guattari, 1995). Pierre, 2014) through a series of images from an urban neighborhood area known for its irruptions of folk art. I then take up the concept of photogeny as method (per St. To begin, I provide a brief overview of how the term 'photogeny' emerged and evolved. Revisiting the concept of photogeny provides an opportunity to reconsider what images are, how they create, and how they have the capacity to activate others in everyday environments. To explore how, I return to photogeny (Talbot, 1839), a past concept that involves the production of images (and how after-images can continue to produce affects, emotions, ideas, and wonder). In the process, images can influence what we think, how we feel, and when and where we act. As images shape our daily settings, they choreograph the thoroughfares and backdrops that shape us. It would seem to be much harder, however, to find an equivalent for the argument’s structure in pictures, let alone in visual reality.Ībstract: Images can be photographs, but they also can be the visual surroundings of everyday life. Scientific images, traffic signs, and other pictures used mainly to convey information are of the latter type. Pictures, however, have at least two additional advantages: 1) they are necessarily both similar and different to what they depict, and this difference implies a kind of statement about the object depicted (this is the homogeneous transformation according to Groupe µ) and 2) unlike perceptual reality, they can be reduced to what is essential at this point, though the reduction must be realized in much bigger chunks than in verbal language (this involves some of the heterogeneous transformations according to Groupe µ). Shop windows and installations, in the artistic sense, come closer to being visual statements. The act of attention may be said to imply such a judgement, though only a transitory one. Pictures can do this because they feature a point of view and a frame. Pictures contain statements/judgements, in the formal sense of ascribing a property to an object, but they do so by emphasizing the property in the totality of the object, not by adding this property to the object. Here we intend to take a more judicious stand. On the other hand, from the Peircean point of view, vigorously defended and extended by Frederik Stjernfelt, the whole world of our experience is perfused with statements and, beyond that, arguments. The psychologist Rudolf Arnheim makes a plea for visual thinking, and even visual concepts, but he says nothing about statements and the whole point of recognizing an “iconic code” in memory seems to be to deny this code any function as a statement. The Greimas School, and French structuralism in general, use such terms, but without inquiring into what is meant. It is often claimed as a matter of course, even in widely different intellectual currents, that there can be no pictorial or, more generally, no visual statements.
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