Why we must forget photography and reject the frame of reality it
prescribes and delineates.
The central paradox this book explores is that at the moment of
photography's replacement by the algorithm and data flow, photographic
cultures proliferate as never before. The afterlife of photography,
residual as it may technically be, maintains a powerful cultural and
representational hold on reality, which is important to understand in
relationship to the new conditions. Forgetting photography is a strategy
to reveal the redundant historicity of the photographic constellation
and the cultural immobility of its epicenter. It attempts to liberate
the image from these historic shackles, forged by art history and
photographic theory. More important, perhaps, forgetting photography
also entails rejecting the frame of reality it prescribes and
delineates, and in doing so opens up other relationships between bodies,
times, events, materials, memory, representation and the image.
Forgetting photography attempts to develop a systematic method for
revealing the limits and prescriptions of thinking with photography,
which no amount of revisionism of post-photographic theory can get
beyond. The world urgently needs to unthink photography and go beyond it
in order to understand the present constitution of the image as well as
the reality or world it shows. Forgetting photography will require a
different way of organizing knowledge about the visual in culture that
involves crossing different knowledges of visual culture, technologies,
and mediums. It will also involve thinking differently about routine and
creative labor and its knowledge practices within the institutions and
organization of visual reproduction.
