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A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography
Between Disciplines and Media
by David Tomas
Les éditions Daziboa, Montreal, CA, 2004
367 pp., illus. Paper, $27.00
ISBN: 2-922135-21-7.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts, Leuven, Belgium
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be
A survey of more than three decades of theoretical and artistic
research in the field of photography, David Tomas’ book is a major
contribution to a broad range of subjects that are at the very centre of
our current multimedia and multidisciplinary approach of art,
technology, and culture. Both an artist and a scholar (although the word
"both" may be slightly deceiving since it supposes certain
boundaries that the author convincingly challenges), David Tomas
proposes a refreshing theory of photography, which he manages to combine
with a fascinating reading of the way knowledge is institutionally
constructed (and, of course, also blocked or hindered) by academic,
disciplinary, and political boundaries in modern and postmodern society.
Photography is here no longer considered from the viewpoint of the product,
i.e. of the image, but from that of the process, i.e. of the
image-making (in this respect, there are some similarities with the
basic stance hold by Patrick Maynard in Thinking Through Photography (1997)
even though Tomas’s approach is much broader). This major shift
provides the basis for an anthropological interpretation of photography,
which David Tomas elaborates with the help of several frameworks:
anthropology (the main reference here is the work by the early 20-th
century French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep), semiotics (which Tomas
uses as a kind of interdisciplinary meta-language and which help him to
link the dialectical relationships of light and darkness with the
successive aspects of Van Gennep’s theory of ritual processes, such as
separation, margin, and aggregation). Corollarily, the move from product
to process engenders also a completely different artistic use of the
medium (given his refusal of the image’s priority, Tomas has made many
experiments with overexposed pictures of the sun, whose total
"whiteness" makes room for experiencing and theorizing the
stakes of all the other, process-linked aspects of photography). Here,
the main reference is the heritage of conceptual art, with its double
emphasis on the institutional aspects not just of "art" (as in
the Duchampian revolution), but also of knowledge-construction itself (a
crucial role is here devoted to the intervention of language, text,
books, and the university as the new "biotope" for the
postmodern artist-scholar).
The book is divided in six chapters, each of them containing first an
introduction situating with great clarity the problem or the point to be
made, second one or more reprinted articles that are revised and
reedited for the book, and third a postscript that provides a new
contextualization. The global structure is chronological. Despite some
repetitions that might have been reduced in one the sections (that on
the semiotic reading of photography as socio-symbolic process), this
structure gives a fascinating insight in the way the author has been
thinking on photography since the early 70s: the reader sees how new
ways of theorizing produce new ways of photographing, and vice versa
(and he may also realize that it was possible from the very 70s to
critically engage with Benjamin’s ideas on the aura). The main thread
that runs throughout the whole book is the question, "What is
photography?" but this possibly essentialist approach is connected
with great strength to a global theory of the way technology is used in
order to produce knowledge, understanding, and interaction. For Tomas,
photography is a key medium in technological culture for many reasons,
not simply for historical reasons, as the first of "new
media", but as a short-cut to the decisive features of
intermediality and interdisciplinarity. Bridging the gap between art and
technology, or between nature and culture, photography is for Tomas the
perfect device to foreground some sound ideas on knowledge-producing,
such as the idea that good interdisciplinarity should be able to produce
new objects (and not just different viewpoints on already known
subjects) and that innovation in subject matter is therefore a necessity
of media innovation. The examples of Tomas’s own creative research,
such as for instance the work on the encounter of the book and the
Internet ("The Encoded Eye", first published in Leonardo
Electronic Almanac) and which link, following the basic observation
made by Henry Adams, the "medium" of transportation (the
railway system) and the "medium" of photography (as a process
of moving through time and space), are a clear and stimulating example
of what the book stands for.
Updated 1st April 2005
Contact LDR: ldr@leonardo.org
Contact Leonardo: isast@sfsu.edu
Copyright © 2004 ISAST
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