Representational Machines

Photography, much like any other form of representation, poses pressing questions about sense, habitus, modalities of representation and perhaps most insistently these days, about the productive capacity of its representations. Photography does not merely represent the phenomenal world in some neutral and objective manner—we know that—but neither does it suffice to show that it represents the world in a manner saturated with conventions and choices, manipulating techniques and interests. What seems important today is to face the question of how these conventions, interests and technologies have enabled photography to be productive and how that productivity involves space.