From Seduction to Resonance

Hence, the contemporary image no longer stands still. Having become procedural, the image now enters a new economy – one driven not by representation, but by attention. Images are scored and surfaced based on their immediacy. They are tuned for frictionless circulation. Media culture follows a capitalist logic and is structured by scarcity. Today this is not a scarcity of information or images, but of attention. To survive, images must perform; they must attract, interrupt, and entertain Citton, 2017.

Photography once disrupted the visual order. As Walter Benjamin observed, mechanical reproduction stripped painting of its aura, destabilizing its authority and clearing the way for abstraction Benjamin, 2006. Today, that disruption is reversed. Photography is no longer the revolutionary force – it is the medium being destabilized by synthetic images that make even less claim to indexicality. Where once photography displaced painting, it is now displaced by a simulation of its core processes: neural renderings and algorithmic hallucinations trained on vast datasets of lens-based imagery Keller et al., 2021.

Yet the crisis of photography is on-going. This reversal opens space for photography to reposition itself – not as a representational tool, but as a practice of engagement, friction, and resonance Rosa, 2019. Freed from its documentary obligations, photography can begin to reimagine both its ontology and its methods – on its own terms.

Latour’s call to land offers a compelling framework for shaping the path ahead. In response to the ongoing tension between globalization and reactionary returns to the land, he proposes a third way: a terrestrial path. Between the global and the land lies what Latour terms the modernizing front, a shifting boundary that assigns value based on proximity. To be ahead of this front, nearer to the global, is framed as modern and progressive; to be behind it, closer to the land, is cast as regressive or nostalgic. Yet neither pole offers a sustainable path forward. The return to the land is often grounded in myth: the land in question, unspoiled, stable, knowable, is less a concrete place than a retroactively imagined fiction. Conversely, full alignment with the global implies disconnection from situated realities, frequently resulting in systems that enrich the few while externalizing costs to the many. Rather than advancing or retreating along this axis, Latour proposes a lateral move: to step sideways, to land on earth, and to recompose our relation to the terrestrial from within the dense entanglements of the present Latour, 2022.

If this logic is applied to contemporary photographic practices, synthetic images may be understood as manifestations of a detached, globalized visual regime, optimized to fuel the accelerating image economy and engineered to capture maximal attention. On the other end of the spectrum, purely lens-based, photography often signals a nostalgic return to outdated modes of visual production and perception. A terrestrial approach, however, offers a third path: a sideways step that reorients photography toward grounding: situated, process-aware, collective and materially entangled. From this terrestrial position, photography can retain the embeddedness and specificity of lens-based vision while critically confronting its infrastructural, technical, and historical entanglements.1

Paired with Andrew Dewdney’s notion of photography as residual, this perspective helps clarify photography’s remaining value in a visual culture increasingly defined by computation and networks. Though no longer dominant, photography remains fertile ground for rethinking vision, but only if photography as it has been historically understood is left behind. Dewdney characterizes traditional photography as a “zombie” form: technically displaced yet still culturally dominant, obstructing our understanding of the current image condition. In this context, “forgetting” photography is not an act of erasure, but a deliberate and paradoxical strategy of unlearning. It involves loosening the grip of indexicality, evidential realism, and representational logic that continue to shape photographic discourse. By suspending these inherited assumptions, we open space to critically engage with the socio-technical nature of the contemporary networked image, a relational, operational, and epistemological apparatus. Forgetting photography, then, is a generative method: it enables the emergence of new image epistemologies and cultural practices attuned to our current hybrid, computational, and post-representational condition Dewdney, 2021.

Flusser partially anticipated this condition, highlighting that photographers are not creative agents, but functionaries within the photographic program. The only freedom lies in playing against the apparatus – introducing unpredictability, resisting automation, and refusing the logic of optimization. Such gestures of friction mark the beginning of experimental photography Flusser, 2000.

Furthermore photography must be understood not only as image, but as a civic and relational practice – one that enables participation, accountability, and imagination Azulay, 2015. Yet in today’s visual culture, the viewer most often is no longer a witness but a scroller. Attention shifts from contemplation to throughput – from presence to velocity.

  1. Splicer’s logo, a line-drawn half-sphere, evokes a terrestrial position between containment and openness, structure and horizon. Referencing human and camera vision, it recalls the visual field and celestial dome, serving as a threshold between surface and sky, representation and orientation: a grounded, situated point from which to perceive and relate to the physical world. ↩