ABSTRACT
The history of photography to illustrate this private/public distinction: Paul Strand's turn from using trick lenses and other means of photographing people unawares on the street to his later relational technique of capturing them such that they not only see him and his camera but also stand in judgment. Strand's mature photographs, by contrast, offer little defense against that judgment. Photography, when it turns from its indulgence in ontology's disavowal to the higher satisfaction of mediation's recognition, offers one way out of our self-induced and self-protective blindness and entry into the bright, self-made vision of freedom, reason, and enlightenment. What makes such copositing ontological in the Heideggerian sense is not the relation between form and matter which is variable such that one can speak of the reconciliation of subjective and objective understanding but instead the autonomous "unmolested" variability of that relation itself, its definitional state of contradiction.
