Abstract

This radical and provocative book outlines a philosophy of photography in the age of the digital: a philosophy of photography that reacts with the increasingly fragmentary, no longer dualistically comprehensible world, the description of which the familiar thought models of representation are no longer suitable. Rubinstein argues that until recently, critical discussions of photography had one thing in common: They all started from the implicit and irrefutable assumption that photographs are media that one has to approach visually; they took it for granted that photographs were meant to be viewed, and they all agreed that it is only through the practices of viewing that the secrets of photography can be unlocked. Whatever interpretations followed, it did not affect the priority of seeing in relation to the image. The triumph of the digital image as a contemporary form of photography, however, forces a reassessment of visibility. Because the digital image makes it clear to everyone that the visible cannot stand for everything that happens to images that begin their life as binary data, then processed algorithmically and sent to various points in a network not as individual images but as data packets.