Psychosomatic Imagery: Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders by Ali Shobeiri & Helen Westgeest

Author:Ali Shobeiri & Helen Westgeest
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031227158
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Frame, the Photograph, and the Trap

One of the sixteen intentional movements analyzed by Flusser in his suasive work Gestures (2014) is the gesture of taking a photograph. In this essay, he unpacks why the gesture of photographing is an inherent philosophical movement. He explains that because of the invention of photography, which came from a need for a tool that allowed one to look objectively, it became possible to philosophize in the medium of both words and photographs. However, a switch occurred making us try to observe photography itself by looking photographically (74). This is because the intentional movement involved in photographing is, in fact, a gesture of seeing, engaging the maker in what ancient Greeks called “theoria” (action of viewing), which produces an image nominated “idea” that can be shared and discussed (76). Flusser frames photographing as an intentional gesture. Because a body holding the apparatus knows what they are doing, they are involved in a transitional movement, and here philosophy and photography share a distinct feature: they both pursue a specific position (78). The gesture of the contemplative photographer helps one to see a tension between intervening dialectics. It is a movement in search of a position. Revealing both an internal and external tension, the gesture drives the search forward. This gesture, in other words, involves a movement of doubt, and to observe the photographer’s gesture from this perspective is to watch unfolding methodical doubt: a philosophical gesture par excellence (79). From Flusser’s notion of doubt, we move to meet my first photograph, a medical portrait from 1918, ironically entitled Cavallier (side view) (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1Anonymous photographer, Cavallier (side view). (France, 1918. https://​www.​loc.​gov/​item/​2007676079/​)

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