Grounded Apparatus, Situated Image

The question is not only what photographs are, but how they come into being – through what relations, in which contexts, and under whose conditions. While earlier chapters examined photography's systemic, aesthetic, and subject transformations, this chapter shifts from analyzing photography as infrastructure to rethinking it as situated practice Haraway, 1988. In this view, making becomes encounter, and the apparatus is no longer sealed, but open and present. While the following sections lay out the theoretical and aesthetic foundations for such grounded image-making, the next chapter turns to Splicer – a concrete visual practice. This practice materializes these concerns through a slow, procedural, and materially entangled photographic process, including multi-axis sampling and time-based imaging techniques. This practice may be considered grounded in the Latourian sense—attached to the material and political conditions of the terrestrial, rather than abstracted into either global or universal logics Latour, 2022.

The focus is set on the device – not to critique it again, but to consider how it might be opened, repurposed, and lived with differently Haraway, 2016. In line with Object-Oriented Ontology, this approach resists reductive critique and instead approaches the device as a thing-in-itself – irreducible to its function or historical critique, yet still available for new modes of engagement and relation Harman, 2018 Morton, 2013. The camera is not only an apparatus for producing images; it is also a site of material inscription. As a black box, it functions as an engineered system that translates concepts into surfaces while concealing the industrial and technical processes behind that translation.

To rethink photography, has to start with the device itself: its casing, circuitry, programmed constraints, and its embeddedness within the global ecology of image production Flusser, 2000. A grounded apparatus, in contrast to the black box, renders these operations visible. It reveals its internal mechanics and exposes the political economies – of labor, logistics, and extraction – that shape its existence. Cameras are not neutral instruments of seeing – they are artifacts of history, power, and infrastructure. At the same time, they function as interfaces – points of contact between body and machine, perception and inscription. When treated not as sealed commodities but as modifiable tools, cameras become open to intervention, adaptation, and repair. Practices such as do-it-yourself (DIY) building, hardware hacking, and open-source design are crucial here: they reclaim photographic devices from corporate abstraction and re-situate them within cultures of technical literacy, critical making, and collective repair.

While hacking the camera may disrupt its mechanics, it addresses only part of what it means to resist the photographic program. To rethink photography as practice also means reconfiguring the photographic process itself – its mechanics of production, its conditions of capture, assumptions of singular authorship, and ritualized gestures of image-making. Grounded photography questions not only the device, but the underlying logic that determines when, why, and how an image comes into being.

While the photographic black box may never be fully opened – its very complexity often forms another kind of black box – learning to navigate its systems is a political act. Even partial awareness restores agency to the photographer and opens space for reprogramming the apparatus on new terms.

In contrast to the high-speed logic of platform aesthetics, grounded image-making slows down. Friction and delay are not limitations – they are epistemic tools. An iterative photographic process, where each step moves forward without the ability to undo, invites care, decision, and presence. There is no total image, only partial compositions. These constraints produce value – not through efficiency, but through situated attention and accountable and grounded production circumstances. In doing so, they reintroduce consequence into a visual production culture built on endless repetition, reversibility and erasure. This form of photography is not about control, but about maintenance – about staying with the process, caring for its unfolding, and accepting its imperfections. As with any act of repair, it values what emerges from constraint, accident, or partiality. Grounded image-making is therefore not only a technical gesture, but an ethical one: an act of visual care.

Traditionally, photography has reserved the performative dimension of image-making for the photographer, while rendering viewers passive – reduced to spectators rather than participants. But photography can be reimagined as performance: a choreography of perception, movement, and negotiation. The now in photography is no longer a captured instant, but an embodied encounter. This shift moves us from geometrical optics to physiological optics – from fixed perspective to lived perception. The photograph becomes not just a record, but a trace of how vision unfolds in time – shaped by subjectivity, spatial relation, and discursive context.

In an image culture dominated by clarity and smoothness, visual imperfection becomes a site of resistance. Referencing Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity, grounded images embrace partial blur, texture, and abstraction Glissant, 2009. These aesthetic strategies not only resist the platform’s demand for instant legibility; they also challenge the colonial lineage of photography itself, a lineage built on classification, and the visual capture of the other. By cultivating ambiguity, multiplicity, and interpretive depth, such images enact a refusal: not of form, but of dominance. They invite resonance over recognition, encounter over extraction, and embodied reflection over visual certainty.

This shift also reconfigures the role of the viewer. No longer cast as a passive spectator, the viewer becomes a co-interpreter – invited not to decode an explicit message, but to dwell within ambiguity, to project, reflect, and relate to the process, its implications and decisions. Rather than delivering meaning, grounded images allow space for it to emerge. This quality recalls Barthes’ punctum – that unexpected detail in an image which escapes rationality, piercing the viewer and provoking a deeply personal response. Like punctum, these grounded images do not insist on clarity or closure; they open up a space of encounter, affect, and transformation Barthes, 2024.

The age of visual extraction through photography is over. Every possible image has already been made Flusser, 2000. What remains relevant is not novelty, but relation. Photography becomes a practice of being-with – of coexisting with apparatus, bodies, materials, light, and time Haraway, 2016. The image no longer stands apart from its making – it is shaped by the frictions and contingencies of encounter. To photograph is no longer to take, but to compose in resonance.

These concepts – opacity, care, resonance, and civic encounter – are not abstract ideals. They are made visible, tangible, and testable through the photographic process of Splicer Glissant, 2009 Haraway, 2016 Rosa, 2019 Azulay, 2015.