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Photography held a key position in the work the writer and philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), a sort of "hinge" between two very different kinds of culture. Rising out of a culture dominated by alphabetic writing, linear thought, historical consciousness, photography was, in his account, the first apparatus to support a very different kind of human consciousness -- a structurally visual, superficial, calculating form of consciousness. Flusser's account of photography is dispersed through many texts over many years, reaching both back into his early writing on language and forward to his late work on media culture. The relevant texts were written in, or sometimes translated into all of the four languages he used for his work (German, Portuguese, English, French, in order of frequency). This site is intended to make Flusser's understanding of photography more accessible to speakers and readers of English, providing details of the textual sources and facilitating an ongoing discussion of terms and ideas.
The quotation in the header above is from an essay entitled "Photography and History," 126-131 IN: Vilém Flusser, (2002) Writings, Andreas Ströhl, editor, Erik Eisel, translator, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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