Co-relation that is not – photography and coming into the materiality
(2015)
author(s): Ari Kakkinen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Sure a photograph can be divided in its mental image and its image-object. These kind of duals follow our tradition, our metaphysics.
When we rather think our corporeality as becoming to or becoming of the corpus instead of the separation of the mind and the body, we can or we even have to think the same way with photography, which traditionally has been located in-between of the nature and the culture.
This essay aims at figuring out the question of the materiality of a photograph when we have to think otherwise than with the difference between mind and body, inside and outside etc. The text argues that the ”material core” is not the origin of the materiality of the photograph, but that the essential center appears only as a trace. Instead of referring to a distant object or a distant instant the trace is the distance itself, its differing and deferring.
The materiality of the photograph consists of its materialities. In a way it is like our bodies are – actual and real, partly serving us, yet also mute and unresponsive, giving the possibility of being. Being itself, becoming.
