Philosophy of Photography Club
- Antonni Cuesta
- Nov 11
- 6 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
by Antonni Cuesta
Fig. 1. Christian Babista, Outgrowth, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
As with many things concerning Photography, there is much that can be said about the project. However, for the purpose of providing some conceptual location, the Philosophy of Photography Club is an indirect response to what scholars and practitioners have come to call “Post-photography.” In most cases, the term refers to the condition of photography within a cultural landscape shaped by surveillance, technological simulations, (a presumption of) photography-as-language, and the centrality of capital. While it is tempting to reduce this to the imagery of the panopticon, post-photography unfolds across multiple discursive registers: the Photographocene in visual anthropology (Peraica, 2020), ana-materialism in philosophy (Golding, 2013), contemporary art within museal and gallery systems, the generative and augmented image in popular discourse, remote sensing in the Earth sciences (Tumampos, 2024), and Photovoice in Health Sciences (Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, n.d.; Breny & McMorrow, 2020), to name a few.
One of the most explicit and accessible articulations of this movement is Joan Fontcuberta’s Post-Photographic Condition, showcased in the 2015 Mois de la Photo à Montréal biennale, describing the contemporary state of photography in which the medium has moved beyond its traditional role as a truthful record of reality. In this condition, as Fontcuberta and LensCulture note, images are increasingly generated, circulated, and manipulated by digital technologies and networks, transforming photography from a representational form into a pervasive algorithmic and cultural system that structures how we see and live in the world (Fontcuberta, 2015; Lugez, 2015). Fontcuberta claims that our relationship with images has fundamentally changed and that images now occupy an entirely new role in our lives:
“The post-photographic era is characterized by the massification of images and by their circulation and availability online. Digital technology not only provokes ontological fractures in photography but also engenders profound changes in its social and functional values.” (Fontcuberta, 2015)
Although Fontcuberta’s claim took the form of an exhibitionary work in a biennale, the sensibility it represents clearly seeps into other fields traditionally seen as impervious to—or having limited relation with—photographic thinking, such as religion, security and public safety, law, parliamentary democracy, and health. What once seemed separate and incommensurate now appears porous and overlapping. This cross-disciplinary slippage echoes Daniel Rubinstein’s provocation in “What is 21st Century Photography?”
“And yet, there is still an image, and the image can be of something or other, for example a cat, a politician or a beheading, and this image can still be fascinating as we know many images to be. But in a meta-critical sense—a sense beyond the manner in which we normally consider and criticise images—this fascination appears to be the defining quality of photography, precisely because the word ‘photography’ today names not another visual form of representation, but an immersive economy that offers an entirely new way to inhabit materiality and its relation to bodies, machines and brains. Johnny Golding christened this new materiality ‘Ana-materialism’. We can also simply call it ‘The Now’.” (Rubinstein, 2015)
While these ideas may seem edgy and novel to many, they are not entirely new. Rendering the world as image has been a subject of media theory for at least seventy years, if not throughout the entire history of Western philosophy. In a Heideggerian register, photography understood as Gestell (enframing) preformats the world (stellen), making it “standing-reserve” (Bestand) (Heidegger, 1954). From this perspective, it is not difficult to arrive at a language of ownership and manipulability. Indeed, as some writers suggest, “to capture” is to perform an extraction (Azoulay, 2021).
The Philosophy of Photography Club does not assume a teleology of capital. It keeps the format open, perhaps naively, given the conditions within which the initiative is formulated. Nevertheless, we shall keep, for now, the presumption that the project’s object and method is Photography qua Photography. As expressed, mildly humorously, by one of the founders, “I have no idea what it will look like or how it will unfold.”
I have written elsewhere a more comprehensive position regarding this ateleological idea, referring to it as “The Complex” (Photography Chismis PH, 2023). While much of that thesis requires further substantiation, it is nevertheless important to state a central point: there is no assumption that what we are doing has anything to do with “Art.” As a friend summarized in a separate conversation, “Art Studies deals with everything.” Perhaps naming the endeavor Philosophy of Photography Club places an unnecessary wedge between Art Studies and Philosophy, assuming that the two can be delineated. Indeed, the “Arts” have traditionally been the place where photography is discussed, and understanding photography as art has always been thought of as part of its natural mandate.
In 2009, John Roberts writes, “My contention here, then, is that in the wake of the demise of documentary image culture and the theoretical extension of art-as-photography, there has been an intellectual regression within photography’s division of labour. Not only is it the case that few professional photojournalists and documentarists write seriously and ambitiously about photography (this role being taken mostly by university-based photo-theorists and by a small group of writer-photographers), but also the social implications and possibilities of new imaging techniques in various sciences rarely move from the realm of specialist technical discourse into the broader field of critical theories of photography” (Roberts, 2009).
While Roberts’ position needs to be properly contextualized in his paper “Photography after the Photograph,” it is clear that it surfaces an issue in how the discourse of photography has been shaped since the 1980s. This is not to say that the project imagines itself as militant or adversarial towards existing fields of study. Rather, it sees itself as an exercise of “doing photography,” not bound by art discourse. It should not be construed as oppositional to art teachers or photography instructors. Bracketing is simply one of the methodological tools we employ in claiming that Photography is its own object of interest. Provisionally, we can think of Photography as a Derridean center where definition is always inseminated through relations (or in other words, something comes to be through “dissemination”).
What is clear is the performative act of calling it so: Philosophy of Photography. As discussed in a previous essay, “The title… conjures a cloud of associations and vibrates site-specific topics both grand and obscure (such as theories of affect, speech acts, morphology, epistemology, translation, philosophy of mind, technology, dialectics, gender, ontology) about Photography which arguably would not have been easily discernible if not for the very act of using these three words in combination and if they were, such matters are usually deemed subjects only relevant for higher studies” (Photography Chismis PH, 2023). Perhaps, what eventually comes out of the program is not much different from what one gets from Art Studies or Visual Communications, but for the moment, we have decided to do away with such assumptions.
The term “Club,” clunky as it may sound, is used consciously as a resistance to the idea of the impenetrability of Philosophy. “Doing philosophy” clearly has its academic enunciations, but we are creating the “Club” as a place where people are welcome to join having a clear interest in the subject as the only pre-requisite. The term is also a popular designation to photography groups, especially in the Salon tradition. As such, using the term “Club” gestures to a form of vernacularity and purports a mode of knowledge-making, space-making, and meaning-making that is communal in nature. In academic settings, the Collège de France can be an easy reference to this spirit of sociality, or an open university, but we would also like to overturn the idea that communal knowledge-making is somewhat European. We have local forms such as the Ambahan (singing-drinking) and the Sugidanon (epic chanting) that are present even prior to written articulations and recorded notions of “knowledge-doing” or “world-sharing”. The Club is just that.
Ultimately, what we want is to respond to the sense of powerlessness conjured in what is presented as the historical specificity of post-photography. All in all, the overarching idea for the project, is that doing photography is doing philosophy.
November 11, 2025
The Philosophy of Photography Club, founded by Remmon E. Barbaza, PhD, and Antonni D. Cuesta, MBA, will be inaugurated in February 2026 with a reading of Daniel Rubinstein’s essay “What is 21st-Century Photography?”
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