Visual Representations:: the Technical and Social Production of Photographic Images

Visual Representations: The Technical and Social Production of Photographic Images, takes the still camera as its ethnographic object of inquiry to show how the technical may not necessarily be seen as the specific and the objective resting on a particularity. Privileging the domain of the visual through its construction and representation, this work attempts to thwart the assumption that the technical occupies the domain of objectivity while the social lies in the realm of generality. Moving beyond this assumption this work in fact reveals that the technical in meeting the demands of the social constantly shifts its own deterministic principles and changes its own conditions of specificity. The central argument then being that the technical in its essence is based on universality and the social having demanded these changes of the technical actually rests on a specific particularity. The realm of the visual, constantly traverses the terrain of the technical and the social and ought to be seen as both at the same time ? a technical process as well as a social signature which collapses the boundary between the instrumental and the expressive, the material and the symbolic.