Vilém Flusser

Zitat: The Image

“This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences. For example: In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise. The significance of images is magical. “

Villém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, The Image, 1983

Posted by zsp, 19. Jan 2019
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Zitat: ‘ex-ist’

Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings ‘ex-ist’, i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible. However, as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings. They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create.

Vilem Flusser, towards a philosophy of photography, 1983

Posted by HH, 19. Jan 2019
Bild Brazil Medientheorie Technical Images Tschechien Vilém Flusser

Zitat: Black Box

It is true that with technical images another factor places itself between them and their significance, i.e. a camera and a human being operating it (for example, a photographer), but it does not look as if this ‘machine/operator’ complex would break the chain between image and significance. On the contrary: The significance appears to flow into the complex on the one side
(input) in order to flow out on the other side (output), during which the process – what is going on within the complex – remains concealed: a ‘black box’ in fact.

Vilem Flusser, towards a philosophy of photography, 1983

Posted by HH, 19. Jan 2019
Bild Brazil Philosophie Technical Images Tschechien Vilém Flusser

Zitat: Reception

“As the function of the text is subordinate to the image, the text directs our understanding of the image towards the program of the newspaper. It thereby does not explain the image, it confirms it. Besides, we are by now sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences of the war in Lebanon: In the image we see with our own eyes what the war looks like. The text simply consists of instructions as to how we are to see. “

Villém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reception of Photographs, 1983

Posted by zsp, 19. Jan 2019
Narrativ(e) Bild Bildwissenschaft Digitalisation Germany Male Tschechien Vilém Flusser Visual Culture