Ben Campion

Still-images of videogames, discussed in this paper as ‘videogame photography’, have increasingly found a home in gallery exhibits. This contrasts with other forms of media derived from videogames, such as ‘livestreams’ and ‘let’s plays’, which have been characterised by communal spectatorship facilitated through online platforms. Through the work of Vilém Flusser, I argue that this is because what links videogame photography to real-world photography is its use of photographic conventions, and that adherence to these conventions allows galleries to integrate these images into a pre-existing canon of art photography. For the same reason, however, videogame photography has struggled to find a home in spectator gaming. By analysing videogame photography and its separation from spectator gaming in this manner, I demonstrate how videogame photography becomes socially ingrained in the conventions and the canon of real-world photography, something that approaches which focus solely on the aetiology or ontology of videogame photography miss.

Through her revision of Ansel Adams’s analogy between classical music and fine-art photography, Dawn M. Wilson arrives at a compelling idea: we can identify photographs by asking if an image contains a ‘photographic event’ in its causal history. This test provides a basis to accommodate a broader range of photographic practices than previous philosophical accounts of photography have allowed. In her discussion of Adams’s analogy, however, Wilson also makes it clear that accommodating first-order practice does not mean accepting every claim made by photographers as true. In this paper, I will argue that these competing tendencies are indicative of a tension in the ‘multi-stage’ account of photography that informs much of Wilson’s work, including the test she derives from her revision of Adams’s analogy. This tension, I will argue, is foregrounded by ‘videogame photography’: static images produced using videogames that have recently enjoyed increased popularity among photographers and photography institutions. Despite its increasing presence in the photographic art world, it is unclear whether videogame photography can be viewed as photography proper using Wilson’s test, without substantially diluting the theoretical commitments of the multi-stage account. I will conclude, therefore, that videogame photography presents a dilemma for the account: it either compromises its theoretical rigour to accommodate videogame photography, or it rejects this artform, thereby compromising its ability to accommodate first-order practice.