Assemblage & Photography

Someone said that the best camera is the one that inspires you to keep using it.

This is my #FujifilmXT4 with an old #NikkorLens originally designed for film cameras, with a focus wheel that’s a little loose but is light enough to feel like nothing on this camera body. It’s fun. It’s imprecise. Adapted to this body, it’s completely manual. How does one assemblage inspire what another does not?

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This is the same route I take every time I walk to work. Sometimes, things change and I notice them in a #superordinary way, but most of the time, things are exactly the same, and so things recede from the threshold of my perception.

But with a camera in hand, I tend to see things differently, and with different cameras and configurations, I’ve noticed that I notice different things, as well.

That’s how an assemblage works.

Listen to the theorists sing: “Assemblage (from French: agencement, “a collection of things which have been gathered together or assembled”) is a posthumanist philosophical approach that studies the ontological diversity of agency, which means redistributing the capacity to act from an individual to a socio-material network of people, things, and narratives. Also known as assemblage theory or assemblage thinking, this philosophical approach frames social complexity through fluidity, exchangeability, and their connectivity. Its central thesis is that people do not act exclusively by themselves, and instead human action requires complex socio-material interdependencies.”

This lens, that eye, this camera and corporeal body: all conspire to perceive and prehend this light, that shadow, this reflection, that hue. And hopefully, it looks good too.

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“What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns — different natures. This, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.” (Deleuze & Parnet, Dialogues II)

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