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3 Cut! The Imperative of Photographic Mediation “What Is Photography?” Yet Again As the event of mediation is, like time (or, indeed, life itself), both invisible and indivisible , any attempt at its representation must ultimately fail. In this chapter, we offer a challenge to representationalism by looking, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, at a form of media practice that is most readily associated with representationalist ambitions: photography. Our aim is not so much to raise familiar questions regarding photography’s truth claims and its supposed “indexicality,” that is, the relation the photographic image allegedly maintains to an object it is said to represent. Rather, we are interested in foregrounding the productive and performative aspect of photographic acts and practices that are intrinsic to the taking or making of a picture. With a view to this, we propose to understand photography as an active practice of cutting through the flow of mediation, where the cut operates on a number of levels: perceptive , material, technical, and conceptual. The recurrent moment of the cut—one we encounter not just in photography but also in film making, sculpture, writing, or, indeed, any other technical practice that involves transforming matter—will be posited by us as both a technique (an ontological entity encapsulating something that is, or something that is taking place) and an ethical imperative (as expressed by the command: “Cut!”). The key question that organizes our argument is therefore as follows: if we must inevitably cut, and if the cut functions as an intrinsic component of any creative, artistic, and especially1 photographic practice—although this is still only a hypothesis— then what does it mean to cut well? This study of the cut as an inextricable accompaniment of mediation will be enacted as an encounter between the two philosophical traditions that are shaping the argument of this book: the vitalism of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze on the one hand, and the différance of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on the other. Yet, 72 Chapter 3 as explained earlier, this philosophical encounter will be of interest to us only in so far as it will allow us to move the debate on media and mediation on, not as an exercise in philosophical point scoring. Contrary to Bergson and Deleuze, we will see photography as more than a series of frozen “snapshots.” In introducing a distinction between photography as a practice of the cut and photographs as products of this process of cutting, we will also aim to capture and convey the vitality of photographic movements and acts. If, indeed, “To live is to be photographed,”2 then, contrary to its more typical association with the passage of time and death, photography can be understood more productively in terms of vitality, as a process of differentiation and life-making. It is, paradoxically, precisely in its efforts to arrest duration, to capture or still the flow of life—beyond singular photographs’ success or failure at representing this or that referent—that photography’s vital forces are activated, we will claim. To see this process of cutting in action, in the final part of this chapter we will look at practices that use “the cut” as both a subject and a method. Focusing on the photographic series Oblique by the Australian artist Nina Sellars, we will raise some broader questions about visualizations of the open and wounded body in the current media culture. Specifically, we will be interested in interconnections and symbolic transactions between widely distributed media images of open bodies in franchised TV makeover shows such as ABC’s Extreme Makeover and MTV’s I Want a Famous Face, and gallery-destined photographs of what we can call “mediated pain.” Through this, we will aim to identify points of convergence between art, philosophy, and science, as well as trace some of the ways in which creative practice can alter reality by intervening in it on a material level. The way “the cut” is variously exercised by the artist, the surgeon, and the philosopher will become a focal point for a discussion about photographic mediations. Life Will Find a Way New York fine art photographer Joel Sternfeld’s images from his Walking the High Line series (2000–2001)3 depict what looks like an abandoned railway track amid an urban landscape, with thick vegetation of all sorts—grasses, shrubs, trees, wildflowers— enveloping the metal and wood of the line. The color palette of the photographs changes depending on the season when they were taken: from verdant green...

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