On the Scales of Photographic Abstraction

Abstract

This article explores three key ways in which questions of abstraction have been and continue to be closely associated with photography: the tradition of photographs that desire to “be” abstract; the invisible but determining forms of abstraction central to capitalism and shaping of photography as a technical-historical form; and the technical-conceptual abstractions embedded in and structuring of photographic apparatuses. The exploration of these themes is pursued through analysis of Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of photography, Lambert Wiesing’s analysis of abstract photography and Allan Sekula’s critique of capitalist modes of equivalence and exchange as these impact on the photographic. These analyses are pursued through exploration of the issues, processes and operations of “scale”, “scaling” and “scalability” entailed in these three modes of abstraction and in their critical and theoretical reflection. The aim of this strategy is to outline and to analyse the complex web of abstractions that are central to photography and the modes of scale that are crucial to abstraction in this context. The article suggests that to encounter or to think about abstraction photographically is to operate within some modulation of scale and that this may in fact be the closest one can get to envisioning the complexity of abstraction in the photographic context.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The discussion here draws closely on Peter Osborne’s recent theorisation of the photograph as a “distributive unity”.

2 See John Roberts’ gloss on these terms in relation to photography in Photography and its Violations (94). Roberts devotes much of this book to a discussion of the modes abstraction takes in photography and, in particular, to the “catachreisistic relationship between the figural and the nonfigural” as this is mediated by the “overlapping forms of social abstraction (the material and symbolic structures of domination expressed in the heteronomous character of the built environment, the social divisions of the landscape, and the repetitive, inertial logic of commodity relations) and real abstraction (the organization of production and consumption through the discipline of the value-form, the internalization and naturalization of the value-form as ‘free competition’)” (93).

3 One exception is the following gloss on Flusser’s conception of the apparatus from Matthew Fuller: “Here, iterations of multi-scalar relations of causality and interpenetration are compiled layer upon layer. Base and superstructure shot through a kaleidoscope. Programs and metaprograms are never clearly defined as distinct. The relation is simply one of scale, or of order” (2).

4 Lambert Wiesing remarks on Alvin Langdon Coburn’s use of the term in “The Future of Pictorial Photography” in 1916 as probably the first explicit use of the term abstract photography (60).

5 A canonical reference in this context is Lázló Moholy-Nagy. In “A New Instrument of Vision” from 1936, for instance, he writes: “the photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography”. Here, a familiar claim emerges, namely, that the relative “directness”, the lack of mediation characteristic of the process of making photograms and the uniqueness of its results combine to suggest that the photogram can be taken as photography in its most reduced and thus in its purest form. This reference highlights other ways in which abstract photography might be analysed in scalar terms and which there is no space to explore here, as, for instance, with associations between the 1:1 ratio common to the minimalised representational possibilities of the photogram and the suggestion that this marks a “zero degree” of photography (see 92‒96). See also Sandra Plummer’s discussion of these issues from a Heideggerean point of view (173‒183).

6 Gottfried Jäger is a key example here (see Jäger et al.).

7 For a recent appreciation of the continuing critical resonances of this essay, see Alberto Toscano’s “Photography Against the Flow”.

8 An interesting example of this tendency is Nathanial Cunningham’s, Face Value: An Essay on the Politics of Photography.

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Fisher

Andrew Fisher is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a founding editor of the journal Philosophy of Photography. His recent publications include the anthology On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation (co-edited with Daniel Rubinstein and Johnny Golding, Article Press, Birmingham, 2013). Current projects include a book-length study of the inter-related technical, phenomenological, geographical and political senses of photographic scale and Visual Cultures as Document (co-authored with Nicole Wolf, Sternberg Press).