Optical Survey: Anthropocenean Consciousness of the Photographic Image

Abstract

Early forms of photography play a unique role in establishing an Anthropocenean consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century that witnesses human relationships with nature as exclusively transactional, by centring its focus on the violent displacement of people from their contexts simultaneous to the violent displacement of objects from their contexts. Such practices of perception were co-constituted with other forms of excessive violence that eventually became unique to the geography of the American West. By photographing Native Americans as objects, white American male photographers were able to transform them into relics, and in so doing, cast the Indigenous cultures from which they were drawn as fundamentally dead, turning the enemy figuratively into the past, and practically into oblivion to the degree that it is possible for institutions to confine them to ‘natural’ history through the twinned force of taking both object and image from them. It was, therefore, not so much a case of designating colonised populations, as designing them aesthetically so that they fit in a material sense of belonging to an order greater than themselves. Violence in this sense becomes a relational project to how we understand mankind itself and its origins in a racial science that allowed for this living body of photography to enter in and make itself known as both a witness and a trace of the past generating whole environments through which such systems of knowledge could and did endure to our present moment.