Andrew Fisher

From publisher's description: "On The Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation" is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on art, culture and society. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory – that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive – and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social media and bio-politics, 'On the Verge of Photography' offers an invaluable resource for students of visual culture, researches in the field of digital imaging and artists working with new media. Rubinstein, Golding and Fisher co-edited this volume

As we settle further into the era of digital media and globalized visual culture, it might be tempting to think that photography holds no more than historical interest. Yet it continues to feature in debates with considerable significance for the present.1 The terms by which it was negotiated in the twentieth century – the print, the negative and the mechanical-optical apparatus, the affective experience of a moment stilled, and any truth that its rendering promises – have been technically and culturally displaced and expanded. New instabilities have become familiar and have distanced us from how photography was understood, even in the fairly recent past. The current historical conjuncture is marked by a widespread suspicion that existing theories – including those that turned, in the 1970s, to Marxism, feminist critique, semiotics or psychoanalysis so as to politicize and contest mainstream photographic culture – might no longer be adequate to photography’s contemporary situation. That photography still matters, however, can be evidenced, prosaically and contingently, by noting the increasing number of new scholarly journals and exhibitions devoted to its past, present and future in recent years.2 There is, in this – as Fred Ritchin is only the latest to note – a sense that the undoing of photography’s prior certainties constitutes an ending and an enlargement. The fate of photography provides an ‘expansive filter’ through which to chart the ‘chaos of possibilities that emerge and recede, back up and move forward, crisscrossing each other.’3 Expectations of the new and the old, the obsolete and as yet only anticipated, are thrown into temporal disarray as its openness to reformation gives the photographic past a futural slant.

This article sets out to substantiate an understanding of the photographic image as a constellation of scaled relations, with a focus on the significance of historically neglected questions of scale in and for the present. It explores two recurrent themes in Walter Benjamin’s writings: his celebrated methodological-epistemological concept of constellation and his less often remarked fascination for relationships of scale, processes of scaling and the scale effects these produce. These are investigated in light of the mutable and composite character of the contemporary photographic image and its unprecedented scale as a mass form. Key phenomena and prevalent conceptions of photography are approached as already structured by intercalated facts, operations and experiences of scale, scaling and scalability. On this basis, a constellation of three historical essays that examine questions of scale in photography is constructed. The guiding aim of this construction is that such a constellation might stand as a pre-history of scale and its significance in and for photography today.

Since the 1950s, art and philosophy have continued to return to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his assertion of the primacy of perception. Influenced by Husserl and Heidegger and an associate of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty developed a range of evocative concepts that have informed the production, criticism and theory of art. The only phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage with the sciences and psychology as well as art, literature, linguistics and politics, his exploration of the situated character of embodied perception and how it unfolds over time in social, historical and political contexts reveals a concept of the self that is "caught up in things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future".

This article introduces an evolving project of visual mapping initiated by Israeli photographers Miki Kratsman and Shabtai Pinchevsky under the title of Anti-Mapping. Placing this critical project in the context of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the article examines how Kratsman and Pinchevsky develop complex, strategic and critically sophisticated approaches to visualizing the conditions that produce victims of violence and that place Palestinian villages under threat of destruction. The article explores their strategic, technical and critical approaches to the difficulties of representing particular contested places in this geopolitical context.

This article sets out to develop a critical and theoretical interpretation of what scale means in and for photography, an investigation provoked by the expansive character of photography in the context of networked digital culture that also involves questions relating to historical practices and theorisations of photography. Scale has many different meanings in these contexts and these are normally addressed separately in specialised discursive frameworks. This article explores an alternative, namely, that it is its very diversity which gives the clue to what scale means for photography. The article projects a concept of ‘photographic scale’ to delineate the relational form of scale in photography and argues that photographic scale has ontological significance for photography. This concept denotes a ubiquitous, variegated and compound play between differing but necessarily associated scales that inform the spatiotemporality of photography, that allow for its sense as a form of visual representation, that structure its modes of materialisation and that figure significantly in determinations of its global geo-political processes.

COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus’ unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity’s growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities’ efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven philanthropic and state funding flows have bolstered foodbanking and the food system logics that support it. By contextualising the complex and variegated politics of foodbanking in broader movements, from community food security to food sovereignty, we reframe simplistic narratives of charity and highlight the need for justice-oriented structural changes in wealth redistribution and food system organisation if we are to prevent the kinds of emergency-within-emergency that we witnessed as COVID-19 revealed the proximity of many to hunger.

This interview with media anthropologist, Rebecca L. Stein, conducted by Noa Levin and Andrew Fisher in Spring 2023, takes her recent book Screenshots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021) as its starting point in order to explore issues of state violence and the militarization of social media in Israel/Palestine. This book marks the culmination of a decade-long research project into the camera dreams introduced by digital imaging technologies and the fraught histories of their disillusionment. Stein discusses the way her research has critically conceptualized the recent history of hopes invested in the digital image in this geopolitical context, by the occupier as much as the occupied, and charts the failures and mistakes, obstructions and appropriations that characterize the conflicted visual cultures of Israel/Palestine.

This roundtable discussion is based on an online symposium – The Promise of Photography: Scale, Measure and Proportion in a Conflicted Visual Milieu – which took place on 17 September 2021. Since its inception, photography has promised to set things to scale, to grant them measure and proportion, a series of promises that have also entailed moments of irrationality or conflict that persist in and continue to shape the era of global networked digital imaging technologies. The symposium started out from the diagnosis that, whilst photography continues to promise an ordered, proportionate and measured world in which things can be set to their proper scale, it also acts in many ways as an agent of dismeasure, disproportion and the unscalable. In light of this, the roundtable discussion presented here examines a range of different meanings that scale, measure and proportion have accrued in the photographic context and sets out to explore conceptual frameworks and research methodologies through which the current situation might be understood.

This interview with the art historian and curator Julian Stallabrass was conducted by Alex Fletcher and Andrew Fisher over the winter of 2022–23. It takes as its point of departure Stallabrass’s recent and large-scale study Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (2020), in order to consider the changing ways in which images have been used to both document and to wage war. The interview explores Stallabrass’s central historical contrast between photography in the Iraq and Vietnam Wars. It considers the relative critical values of photojournalism and art in their engagements with violence and what the problems and possibilities of photojournalism tell us about the wider fate of liberal notions of the public sphere. The interview ends by linking these themes in Killing for Show to the photographic mediation of current conflicts and the visual cultures of contemporary capitalism.

This article focuses on documents made by the Soviet military secret service detailing the arrest, interrogation, trial and execution of Sergei Tret’iakov in Moscow in 1937. The original documents were published in Russian in 1997 as part of Return my Freedom, a collection of archival records edited by Vladimir Kolyazin that details the fate of Russian and German cultural figures who fell victim to the Stalinist terror. This record of Tret’iakov’s violent death has received little attention, even in Russia or in Russian studies. The book presents facsimiles of 60 separately numbered and dated sheets containing records of Tret’iakov’s arrest and the search of his home. There are two written confessions; a first short admission of guilt and a second longer account of his supposed crimes that also claims parts of the first to be fictitious. These are followed by a transcript of his interrogation, a very brief account of his trial and the even briefer report of his execution. A historical gap separates these from documents of Tret’iakov’s official rehabilitation in 1954 which his wife, Olga Tret’iakov was instrumental in securing. Return my Freedom also contains the record of her arrest, interrogation and release in 1937. The article presents translated extracts from the official record of Tret’iakov’s interrogation and execution for the first time in English, and it explores these documents in relation to core strategies and critical commitments that shaped Tret’iakov’s influential conception of Factography.

Philosophy for Children has enabled schools to engage with what is typically thought of as an ‘academic’ discipline and has provided the opportunity to unlock a rich educational experience for children from a diverse range of backgrounds. A wide range of qualitative and quantitative studies have emerged looking at P4C in terms of the development of students at the social, academic and emotional level. However, while there have been many P4C papers that have ‘teacher’ in the title, these are often about teacher training – including ‘hints and tips’ and curriculum development. Relatively few studies have looked at the effect of teaching P4C on teachers themselves. This paper considers how P4C affects teachers, in particular whether teaching P4C has led teachers to develop new pedagogical approaches, different ways of thinking critically and whether it has changed how they engage with their students, colleagues and their school.