Concrete Visibility—Confrontation and Relocation in Modern Images

Abstract

The articles main hypothesis is, following Vilém Flusser, that modern imagery in general is ‘technical’, which means its images are images of concepts. As such they are difficult to distinguish phenomenologically and semiotically from their environment and therefore difficult to identify as images. From this outset the main argument is that certain modern images are capable of revealing this technicality by confronting the viewer with a concrete visibility forcing discursive relocations of the knowledge integral to perceiving them. The article develops this argument via the understanding of images of Gottfried Boehm and Michel Foucault in connection with analyses of photographs of the Russian artist Alexander Rodchenko and paintings by the Danish painters J. F. Willumsen and Erik Hoppe.

Keywords

• archaeology of the visible
• image theory
• modernity
• phenomenology
• semiotics