ABSTRACT
To say that photography has an imagination of its own is to imply that, in its ways of image-making, photography involves inherent dimensions of freedom and play and that, as such, it does not function as a passive imprint of a given visibility. But, in what ways does photography’s imagination point beyond the visible? And, how should we understand its connection to the invisible? The chapter discusses photography’s ongoing preoccupation with invisibilities, prefaced with a reading of Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic notion of the “optical unconscious.” Examining the “grammar” of the different kinds of invisibility that are operative in photography, I locate a crucial distinction between lacunae in the visible that photography’s method of visualization overcomes and lacunae in photography’s own visuality. Accordingly, the chapter’s central question is: In what ways is the invisible part of and present in what we see in photographs? I argue that what is hidden in photographs is not any positive content that eludes the eye but the opposite—a positive content that cannot be framed as a positive, presented to the eye in such a way that the eye forgets the conditions of the photograph’s emergence.
