The Photographic Image as an Aesthetic Phenomenon.

Kuznetsova Tatyana Viktorovna Doctor of Philosophy Professor, Department of Aesthetics, M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University 119991, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Lomonosovskii Prospekt, d. 27, korp. 4 89163805403@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Velch Luiza Vladimirovna Postgraduate student, Department of Social Sciences, Maxim Gorky Literature Institute 123104, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Tverskoi Bul'var, 25 luizawjournal@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Photography, as an object of elite, then mass culture, has existed for the second century. Society did not immediately realize what kind of new phenomenon it was, which instantly and firmly invaded its daily life. First, photographs are an integral part of the family's personal life, then they remain in oblivion for a while, then they reflect the picture of the world of a bygone era, become part of the historical memory of mankind. Photography invades the museum space in the 1930s, and receives recognition in the second half of the XX century. Philosophers did not immediately join the process of analyzing this phenomenon, so unexpected was the phenomenon that was introduced into the world by the invention of daguerreotype in 1839 by Daguerre, who was able not only to fix the image obtained in the camera obscura at with the help of light, but also to publish, patent his invention, thereby leaving his name in history. Daguerre managed to preserve the images obtained in the camera obscura, which was the basis for the invention of three types of art: perspective painting, photography and dioramas. In fact, the authorship of the invention of photography has relations to three famous inventors: the Frenchmen Joseph Nicephore Niepce, Louis Jacques Mandet Daguerre and the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, the most famous of whom was Daguerre. The starting point of the creation of photography was the invention of the diorama by Daguerre and his work with light effects, the possession of which is still a condition for confirming the photographer's skill. The daguerreotype preserved for history the images and faces of people who were once known only by members of their family. Now we are looking at the preserved faces of people who were once present in this world, and in our imagination we recreate the lives of numerous generations of inhabitants of our planet from their preserved images, often getting real pleasure from the process of penetrating into another era. Each family could preserve its past for numerous descendants, and even when their names were lost in history, the family knew that these were their ancestors, this was their life. Looking through the photos of previous generations, different feelings arise: for someone, these are wonderful happy emotions, and for someone, echoes of pain and the experience of tragic fate. Knowledge about one's kind enriches the inner world of a person. Today, documentary photography is gaining popularity in society: many families want to capture "live footage": how they play with children, laugh, launch balloons into the sky, hug each other, eat ice cream.

The invention of the daguerreotype led to a change in the thinking and consciousness of those who had to face their personal image for the first time. The clarity of the image was so unexpected and unusual that people experienced the powerful impact of photography and were ready to believe that the faces from the pictures were able to look at their counterparts themselves. The invention of photography has become a means of obtaining images for completely different social and scientific purposes, including preserving the image of the family for posterity. As A. Kask notes ^[1], "photographic transmission of time" (as one of the publications of the late XIX century was called), like a systematic visit to the theater or horse races, was one of the markers of socio-cultural identity and a way of relating oneself to a certain group. Since the advent of portable cameras, photography has accompanied mass tourism, but photography has also initiated "class tourism".^[2]

V. Flusser suggests considering the appearance of photography as the second turning point in human culture, which falls in the middle of the XIX century. The philosopher comes to the opinion that the existence of culture radically changes its structure. The first turning point – the "invention of linear writing" occurred in the middle of the second millennium BC. Literary creativity, especially novels, brought up a sensuality of perception of life in a person. He gives the name "invention of the technical image" to the second turning point in human culture. ^[3] According to his classification, almost three thousand years are counted between two significant leaps in human culture.

If we consider the evolutionary processes that took place in culture, then the problem of the influence of painting on the photographic image lies on the surface. The basis of photography is an image that V. Flusser calls imagination, the ability to "encode phenomena into two-dimensional symbols and read these symbols." ^[3] Photography seems to pick up the baton from writing and literary creativity in the education of feelings. A person learns to comprehend the beautiful, and photography allows him to capture another moment of life, just one moment - there is neither before nor after, there is only now. St. Augustine also said that the present does not exist, there is only the past and the future, and in photography there is the present, this moment between the past and the future, and it is, it is captured, it reflects this moment. And it reflects all the diversity of the sensory world, which is characteristic of a family, a person, an event captured in a photographic image. There may be cherry blossoms here, and we get visual enjoyment. There may be the breath of the sea, the freshness of the mountain air, that is, looking at the photo, we experience a numerous polyphony of feelings. And if after many years we return again to the place where we were once, and captured this moment, then we will be able to experience all the harmony of feelings that we experienced here, in this place.

If the influence of literary and artistic creativity on the perception of a photographic image is an indisputable moment, then since the end of the XIX century philosophers have been interested in the question of the formation of photographic thinking, which develops into one of the significant aesthetic problems of the time. Researchers are trying to isolate the photographic image from the artistic image, and come to the conclusion about the role of photography in changing the language of fine art. Two sides of this problem are distinguished: technical and aesthetic: phototechnologies lead to the emergence of photographic thinking as an aesthetic phenomenon. ^[4] Changes in public life of the first quarter of the XX century, associated with the First World War, state not only the development of new thinking, there is a revolution in public consciousness. D. Berger notes that the emergence of new trends in the cultural life of the era states the emergence of the concept of visual culture, which embraces such a developing phenomenon as photography. The main characteristic of time is "novelty", which becomes the defining term of modernity. Especially popular are shopping Passages, which in the first half of the XIX century. become a fashionable space in which new forms of culture and art are manifested, including the first photographs - daguerreotypes and calotypes. As can be seen from the examples of modernist and postmodern art, photographic thinking is an integral attribute of the consciousness of a modern artist, which leads to a change in the language of fine art, hence, photographic thinking leads to the creation of a new modern language of art, which we encounter at modern art exhibitions, which confuses society, since awareness of the new one always comes much later. All this cannot but testify to the significant role of the development of photography and its impact on many genres of contemporary art.

If a photograph is considered not as a technical means, but as a theoretical object of perception - an image, then this will allow us to pose the problem of a new subject of perception – the communicativeness of the image itself, moments of community in the viewer's imagination are revealed. In addition to the already generally accepted understanding of communication and informativeness, N. Sosna suggests such a term as "ghostly" in photography, which seems to absorb all the basic concepts: optical, iconic and medial. ^[6] M. Stepanov draws attention to the fact that the background on which the images are projected is important for the perception of the image, which is a variable value, therefore, the images are also variable. ^[14] Returning to the question of the magical property of photography, we can add here that "seeing" a photograph means adding something that is invisible, this is the magic of photography, creating an image, an image – technically equal to reality, but aesthetically not equal to "reality", stitched together from symbols and imagination, dynamic, ghostly, nabout not an independent, requiring decryption, additional text. Ghostliness, magic in the very act of creating images and ghostliness in the perception of the image by the viewer. M.-J. Mondzen comes to the conclusion that the non—artificiality of the image of photography is not important, that "photography is an instrument of objectification of the spirit seen by a body without a hand, which does not apply smears and does not leave a signature: the trace of the spirit has gained an advantage over the handwriting". ^[7]

The image is a reflection of what is inherent in the photographer's thought and the viewer's perception.  The French philosopher P. Bourdieu drew attention to the unequal attitude to amateur photography of various strata of society and to the social conditionality of the choice of an object for shooting. ^[8]

The image in the viewer's perception is ambiguous. A person's gaze as a center of perception can grasp one element of space, but then, switching to another segment of the frame, he can get carried away by another aspect, which will become the central point of perception. This indicates that the gaze can establish multiple connections with the object. Barth notes that everything in photography reflects randomness, why the author chooses this object and not another, randomness and how this particular goal is selected as the center – that is, there is no classification in photography. ^[9] V. Fluesser quite rightly designates this world of perception – the world of magic, which differs from the "historical linearity" of the space in which cause-and-effect relationships work - "images act as intermediaries between the world and man." ^[3] It is not uncommon to find enlarged images of the same work in the art and exhibition space of the exposition, in each case the author-photographer identifies one aspect of his creative experience, creating certain scenes of the universe or a historical period. The author, as it were, returns to the period of imaginative thinking of man, in the period of three or two thousand years before the new era, and brings the codes that once existed into the modern world of conceptual thinking, further complicating it with the invention of digital technical or technogenic images. Traditional images are abstractions, technical images are created by technical apparatus, but this is a different world and a different perception of the world. Technical images are abstracted both from traditional images, from the text, and from the concrete world. V. Flusser notes that traditional images are prehistoric (they are magical, older than historical consciousness, this is mythological consciousness), and technical ones are "posthistoric" – this is a new magic that inherits historical consciousness, this is "software" thinking. Traditional images mean phenomena, technical - concepts. Technical images are difficult to decipher. Texts were invented to deprive images of magic, photography returns the magical look and charges them with these invented texts. But this is conceptual thinking, technogenic thinking, which has led to the impoverishment of historical consciousness, its primitivization. Culture was divided into three branches: the branch of fine art – elite culture, the branch of science and technology – technogenic culture, the branch of the broad strata of society – mass culture. To overcome this crisis in culture, attempts were made to invent a technical code valid for the whole society, which did not happen, as a result of which there was a fragmentation of culture and the emergence of a lower level of culture – mass culture, the process of penetration of which into elite culture is happening today. ^[2] The development of digitalization and informatization has led to the development of technical or man-made images that include all information about the path of human development and cultural memory. If an event does not get on the screens of television, the Internet, or a photo lens, then it may be lost forever for further historical memory. In this case, the technique, the device come to the fore and include all the information of the past and present, looking into the future – this is a futurological view of development. The device becomes a part of culture, it produces symbols, it is programmed to create photographs, and photography is the realization of the possibilities inherent in the device, of which there are a great many, but they are still finite, they are embedded in the device itself. If you shoot the same scene, then the images created by the camera no longer carry new information. V. Flusser calls them superfluous. ^[10] If the text - image of the past is not translated into a modern technical medium, it is forever lost to society, thus there is a distortion of the history of mankind. The photographer appears to us, especially in the modern digital era, as a carrier of information. He is a functionary who plays with symbols just as a writer plays with such an apparatus as "language". Flusser believes that the camera creates images automatically, and the master only indulges in free play with the camera. Here it can be noted that the author is illogical, since the game is already part of the artistic creation of an image that cannot be created automatically, at this moment the photographer loses his functions as a functionary, he becomes an artist. The fusion of the action of the machine-apparatus and the master produces an image that the viewer can imagine. The photographer has power over the viewer, programs their behavior, and "the device has power over the photographer, it programs the gestures of the photographer. This turn of power from the material to the symbolic is, strictly speaking, a characteristic of the so–called "information society" ^[10]

When we talk about the philosophy of photography, we first of all mean the philosophy of the photographer himself, who chooses an object, studies and analyzes it, creates his own image of what he saw in consciousness and thinking, then tries to reflect this image in his product, which may turn out to be completely different from the conceived option.

R. Barth conducted an interesting experiment, taking himself as an object of research. He drew attention to the fact that the image changes as soon as it gets into the lens: a person begins to focus attention on the fact that he is the object of photography, begins to pose, creating himself the way he would like to see himself, transforming himself, turning himself into an image. ^[9] In this case, the image object tries to take over the functions of the director. The photographer is also trying to direct his object, creating the panorama that is interesting to him, to capture the moment that will go down in history, it will be interesting to the viewer. Here he is likened to a hunter who may or may not be lucky. But the object-image that the photographer manages to create may not fit into the socio-historical scheme of time, and his work may not be in demand by the authorities. For example, by grabbing the face of a popular personality on the camera at a moment that can compromise it. Turning to vernacular photography, which develops in the late XIX – early XX centuries and does not seek an artistic model and professional use, the researchers note the element of carnivality in creating an image. Posing, creating an atmosphere, determining the center of the frame, image, shooting in the studio and other elements of the staged frame, take the process of photographing beyond the accepted norms of everyday life, where the laws, rules and norms of this life cease to apply. ^[5] The object at the moment of creating the image goes out into another world - another life, a holiday, a different attitude. In this space, he has the opportunity to create himself as he imagines himself, as he wants to be seen and perceived by friends, relatives, loved ones: he is different, he is transformed, he meets the criteria that he sets for himself. Hence, vernacular photography, casual, amateur, is a photograph of posing, creating oneself or the image of the "other", therefore, a person in height, or at least a head, should be depicted in the photo, since it is about this person who must necessarily look into the camera lens. If only expressive hands, feet, or body parts are imprinted on the image, the photo is considered unsuccessful. If a photographer depicts beautiful old hands, he may be remarked that he could show a face. The staging of photography is necessary, according to an amateur photographer, so that the scene of a person with an open mouth, for example, does not accidentally get into the frame. This is considered ugly and unacceptable, incorrect. O. Boytsova, a researcher of amateur photography, drew attention to this. ^[12] In the work of a professional photographer, for example, in the creation of political reports, such pictures can be considered the highest achievement of the master. A professional portrait photographer, on the contrary, can grasp only one part of a person's appearance, increasing it, giving an emotional emphasis on the image, for example, it can only be old, rough, overworked human hands. Here the photographer assumes the function of an artist, but again creates the character of the image in a staged way, focusing on the inner world of a person. As S. Sontag notes, photographing, the master "seeks to appropriate someone else's reality." ^[13]

Thus, both the photographer and the subject of photography can become directors of creating an image. But there is another "actor" between the subject and the photographer — this is the camera, which also takes part in creating the image. The device captures a piece of the world: there are sun rays, sea waves, and sand – it seems that this is the reality of the world at a certain moment of life, but this is only an illusion of this reality, because a master photographer stands between the image and its meaning. What is his role in this process? Is he such a silent witness of the event, or is it also an illusion. The choice of the moment, the plot, the focus, the time, the center of the object, the duration of the photographing process, during which the entire system of the universe has already changed – all this creates an image at a certain moment that goes into the past. The circle seems to be closing: photographer – image – camera – photographer. The photographer begins and closes the process of creating an image of a work – a photograph. The photographer's freedom is always limited by the functions of the apparatus, the possibilities of imagination of which are unlimited, it is the apparatus that has countless points of view on the image. The photographer's goal is to immortalize himself and the images created by him and the device. The cooperation and struggle between the photographer and the camera makes it increasingly necessary to improve the technical apparatus for creating those images that will satisfy the photographer and the viewer. The image in photography is the transformation of the real world into the world of illusion, it is the imagination of the master, the appearance of a ghost, it is the use of the real world as a metaphor – this is the area of subjective vision. But this is also the image of a stopped moment of life.