Photography and Ontology Unsettling Images

This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form. What makes photographic images unsettling and how do the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of the visual field? Taking up these themes, this book examines the role of photography as a revelatory medium underscored by its complex association with history, memory, experience and identity.

Introduction(Natalya Lusty and Donna West Brett)1. Ontology or Metaphor?(Andrés Mario Zervigón)2. Unsettling the Archive: The Stasi, Photography and Escape from the GDR(Donna West Brett)3. Dark Archive: The Afterlife of Forensic Photographs(Katherine Biber)4. Hard Looks: Faces, Bodies, Lives in Early Sydney Police Portrait Photography(Peter Doyle)5. Anticipatory Photographs: Sarah Pickering and An-My Lê(Shawn Michelle Smith)6. Eli Lotar’s Para-urban Visions(Natalya Lusty)7. The Presence of Video: Making the Displaced and Disappeared Self Visible(John Di Stefano)8. Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi’s Autobiography of Seeing(Jane Simon)9. Suspending Productive Time: some photographs by Gabriel Orozco and Jacques Rancière’s thinking of modern aesthetics.(Toni Ross)10. Photography as Indexical Data: Hans Eijkelboom and Pattern Recognition Algorithms(Daniel Palmer)11. Afterword: Photography Against Ontology(Blake Stimson)

Donna West Brett is a lecturer in art history at the University of Sydney.Natalya Lusty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.