Photographic Non-Self

Non-self has unsurprisingly featured very little in explanatory material-object-based contemporary art history. Buddhist nonself has contributed to subjectivity research (Albahari, 2006, Siderits, 2011, 2015) but non-self in photography is, perhaps appropriately, absent. This chapter will explore how the experience of non-self might differ from but overlap with emptiness in the ‘history of art’ specifically ‘photography theory and practice’. My research in experiential non-self (Stephens, 2018, 2019, 2021a, 2021b) wrestles with the complexities of non-representation when articulating embodied affect, of childhood racial discrimination, for instance. Yet, embodied autobiographical non-self is an impossible category. This is a subjugated knowledge that disrupts self-hood, undermines historical artefacts -leaving us with no birth of photography- and ruptures socio-cultural identity. Can a contemporary secular Buddhist non-self function as liberatory? Photographic non-self might render ‘writing on/and photography’ disastrous, when indelibly marked by the failures of representation.