Nothing to see here: Fractal Photography and the politics of invisibility

In what follows I wish to argue that in the twenty-first century the importance of photography is not in freezing moments in time, nor in portraying situations and individual points of view, but in exposing the inherent contradictions of structures that take representation as their ground. As representation is one of the building blocks of our culture, from the political order (representational democracy), to economics (money represents assets and labor) to science (theories and laws represent real-world systems), photography provides an insight into its abyssal paradoxes, precisely because it configures the very space of the visual. Photography is fundamental to the transition from the industrial to the information age because it allows to think about power not as the reactive logic of ideology, but as the fractal and self-referential process by which information and knowledge are produced, distributed and utilized. For this reason, the question for this chapter is not how individuals use images but how individuality is produced by the photographic image. The challenge therefore is not to describe photography as a representation of politics, but to suggest that representation is a force that molds and configures political action. Fractal photography then becomes a means to radicalize politics by making available to the gaze the dynamic techno-political forces that shape the world.