Nature, Technique and Perception: Twentieth-century Afterimages and Modes of Scientific Representation

This article is based upon the author's personal experience in Berlin at the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (1999-2000) that drew their attention to changes in the modern visual episteme. These changes encouraged an examination of the main beliefs one has about nature as the material and philosophical basis of knowledge. This examination paralleled the inclusion of theories of perception in the writing of photo-history. Theories of perception recognized now as the theory of photography reveal the way in which the epistemology of photography prefigured the new visual episteme, based upon the radical equivalence between sign and sensation at the level of life processes. The article discusses the photo-practices of Eva-Maria Schon, Rineke Dijkstra, Wolfgang Tillmans and Olafur Eliasson's installations in the context of modem and contemporary photo-practices and photo-theories of perception. The dialogue between old and new photo-theories and practices registers a new relationship between observation and experience. It reveals the way in which conternporary German photo-practices unravel the naturalistic mode of representation that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. These contemporary photo-practices and installations in Germany teach one to move beyond the dichotomies of true and false, document and artifact, and acknowledge the radical equivalence between these categories and the network of apparatuses and producers, and images and factual objects, that mediate the multiple dimensions of our surroundings.