Introduction
At each blow, at each shot, with its power of stupefaction the photographic act casts over the world a transparent, paralysing veil. Like a fixing bath, it never fails to fix the world in all its stiffness and contractions, endowing each figure with the immovility of stone, even when that stone is made of paper: frozen paper – needless to say – paper frozen with dread, freezing cold, literally filmed-over for all eternity. Covering everything with a fine transparent film.
Philippe Dubois,The Photographic Act, 1983
I am interested in how photography as a field of knowledge is a carrier of exclusive cognitive properties. The general name of my project is Uses of Photography.
Photos of others belongs to a group of three series that study the nature of the photographic act.
Photos of others is a series of photographs taken with the shutter in B position while an unknown person is taking a photograph using flash. I hold the shutter open and right after the other photographer’s flash fires I release it. The resulting image reveals the photographic act. All its instances are present here—the photographer, her/his camera, the source of light, and the operation of photography over time and space. The photograph presents a sharp area, illuminated by the other person’s flash, the actual photograph that the unknown photographer is taking, and a blurry area flowing outside the boundaries of this other person’s photograph, shows how the photograph cuts itself from the continuity space-time. The out-of-time and the out-of-frame generated by this action completes the depiction of the photographic act. This synchronic cut from this continuity constitutes the photographic gesture.