Adelaide, street

Street photography: a note

July 29, 2024

This means that there is a need to introduce a boundary or limit to circumscribe the overreach of this account of street photography though questioning its assumptions. in order to make a space or clearing for other forms of photography. One assumption is that of aesthetic mimesis and its conventional habit of equating mimesis with realism usually understood in terms of a form of copying of reality (likeness-making) ie., imitation of nature.

Such an interpretation hides the other side of the coin, or the second aspect of the dual concept that Stephen Halliwell in his The Aesthetics of Mimesis: ancient texts and modern problems (2002) discerns in the classical Greek history of mimesis including its conceptions and discussions the creative, poietic, qualities of literature, or other art forms have been connected to mimesis. His is mimesis interpreted as including poiesis — as a world-creating activity of representation.

Sony A7 R111
Riverbank car park

Halliwell shows that the concept of mimesis encourages us hold works of art in a “dual focus,” both as “world-reflective” and “world-creating” modes of representation. Halliwell shows how this other aspect of mimesis already informs Aristotle’s conceptualisation, thus contesting the traditional foundations of the theory of mimesis as simply mirroring reality. Halliwell shows that mimesis, which lies at the core of the entire history of Western aesthetics of the representational arts, is a familial framework of ideas. He finds that there is no central or consistent commitment in the history of mimeticism to the truth-bearing, as opposed to sense-making, status of mimetic works.

From this perspective we can see that the street photography tradition has a number of presuppositions such as a conception of truth as an agreement or correspondence of knowledge as subjective representations or concepts with its object; is understood in terms of the duality of subject and object; and is grounded in subjective feeling or lived experience of the individual subject. These presuppositions place limits on, or boundaries around around street photography to the extent that other modes of photography — eg., responding to a scene with a camera in the form of a poetic evocation of a particular being (such as bark)— lies outside these limits or boundaries.

Sony A7 R111
Work, Pirie St, Adelaide

Mimeticism is more complex than a monolithic “imitation of nature.” The reductive imitation account emerges with Romanticism in the 19th century which replaced the classical ideals of truth-telling by romantic concerns with self-expression and originality. In doing so it lead to the widespread romantic renunciation of mimesis interpreted as a Platonic simple “mirror” theory about art, which is opposed to Aristotle’s concept of mimesis that encourages us hold works of art in a “dual focus,” both as “world-reflective” and “world-creating”. Hence the emergence of a poetic mimesis with its dual-aspect conception of artistic representation. This allows the artistic structure to be treated as an artefact with properties, internal relationships and coherence distinctive of and intrinsic to its design within particular media, and acknowledging the kinds of reality signified by and enacted within that design.

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