POP 1 (1) pp.

14–17 Intellect Limited 2010

Philosophy of Photography
Volume 1 Number 1
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Symposium. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.14/7

PAVEL BÜCHLER
Manchester Metropolitan University

Live view

A recent technological innovation, ‘real-time live view’, which enables us to preview the image on
the display screen of a digital camera with ‘zero image latency,’ throws into further confusion our
already fragile beliefs in photography’s fundamental correspondence to perceptual reality. It may
function, give or take, like an old-fashioned optical viewfinder but it poses a new challenge to how
we understand the tension that photography creates between the world and ‘the world as image’. It
also exemplifies the psychological shift, if not reversal, from ‘vision’ to a pure illusion that digital
technology seems to propagate, promote and facilitate.
The view through the viewfinder is always a promise of the picture to come. It is less a confronta-
tion with the present than a moment of anticipation in which the conventional criteria of looking and
observation are suspended for the benefit of a hypothesis, and what is seen is no longer the world
‘out there,’ as it would appear to the ‘naked eye,’ but a tacit image. It presents a potential ‘state of
things,’ in the limited sense in which Vilém Flusser coined the term to denote photographic images:
not the existing ‘state of affairs,’ the actual existence of ‘a configuration of objects’ as ‘facts’, whose
total sum makes up the world according to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
For Wittgenstein, ‘a picture is a model of reality’. It ‘contains the possibility of the situation that it
represents’(Wittgenstein 2002: 12). Picturing (the making of a picture) is a way of ‘looking outside’,
thinking about reality, imagining and grasping its structure. This is as true of an immaterial mental

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 Live view

image (which is what Wittgenstein had in mind) or a language construction as it is of a photograph,

or indeed any picture; however, in the technological domain of photography the relational bond
between the model and the situation is complicated by the technical functions and capacities of the
camera which seem to unite the two, briefly, in the moment of exposure.
It does take time, albeit a generally short amount, for the light passing through the lens of the
camera to register on the sensitive surface of the film or the image sensor. But psychologically, we
associate photography with instantaneity rather than duration and we experience the moment of
exposure as an almost dimensionless temporal contraction in the endless flow of observable events:
a sharp demarcation between ‘before’ and ‘after,’ the seen and the as-yet unseen. This is not only
because modern photographic equipment can record images at speeds which cannot be accounted
for by our sense of transience and lived time but also because of the completeness and irrevocability
of the recorded image. Witness, for instance, the distinct echo of both instantaneity and finality in the
vocabulary we use (‘capturing’, ‘shooting’, ‘snapping’) or in the click of the shutter, to whose speed
and precision photography owes much of its authority (and which, for that very reason, has survived
electronically reproduced in our compact digital cameras). In this respect, Henri Cartier-Bresson,
who ‘craved to seize the whole essence [...] of some situation that was in the process of unrolling
itself before (his) eyes’, rightly spoke of ‘the decisive moment’ (Clarke, 1997: p. 208).
In the moment of exposure ‘the possibility of the situation’ is decided, realized, and in some manner
exhausted, as a latent image. There is, strictly speaking, no gap between reality and representation or a
clear distinction between existence and non-existence. There is nothing, or ‘no-thing’, an interim ‘state’
(stasis) of an object not yet ‘displaced’ by the action of the camera (in photography things lose their
place) but no longer simply ‘out there’ either. The possibility of the situation as it had appeared to the
observing eye has been realized but is, as yet, without a consequence. The ‘no-thing’ is really a paradox:
a theoretical construct, in the literal meaning of θεωρ′ια (observation, a looking at), which is at once
unproven and fully resolved. Or, to put it differently, this is where Wittgenstein’s ‘state of affairs’ pre-
cisely overlaps with Flusser’s ‘state of things’. But this is also where, at another level, they split apart.
For Flusser, the possibilities of (photographic) situations cannot be found in the world but are ‘pro-
grammed’ within the functions of the camera. This ‘programme’ is designed in such a way as to help us
make sense of something ‘out there,’ by enabling us to make images that reach out to reality, but only
within the programme’s own predetermined parameters and norms and their possible permutations. A
photograph is not, then, a slice of the real or its frozen fragment but merely ‘a realization of one of the
possibilities contained within the programme of the camera’(Flusser 2005: 26). It restructures reality
according to an image-scenario derived from techno-scientific theoretical concepts. It produces a new
‘state of things, a situation never seen before,’ by trans-coding ‘a theory of optics into an image’ (Flusser
2005: 76). Its material sources and all its references are always external but their effects are theoretically
predicted and emerge from within the functions built into the recording technology.

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 Pavel Büchler

The exploration of what the camera can do, Flusser argues, is the sole preoccupation of photogra-
phers. They ‘look through the camera out into the world’ but ‘their interest is concentrated on the
camera; for them, the world is purely a pretext for the realization of camera possibilities’ (Flusser
2005: 26). These possibilities are practically endless and determine not only how the picture is taken,
by providing a range of spatial and temporal categories (focal length, shutter speed etc.), but also,
indirectly, what can be photographed: the possible situations or ‘states of things’. To realize any one
of the possibilities of the camera, photographers proceed through a series of provisional choices
before arriving at ‘the final decision taken in the act of photography: pressing the shutter release’
(Flusser 2005: 39). In Flusser’s interpretation, there is no ultimate decisive moment and the apparent
singularity of the image is but the cumulative result of a decision-making process.
In any case, a photograph is a record of observation. It is a summary of looking concluded and
condensed in a picture at the exact moment the picture is taken. It is inscribed at a single stroke, as it
were, like a full stop at the end of a sentence. And it is also all that there is. To some extent, this is so
even with some fully automated forms of recording (traffic speed-cameras, for example), but it is
certainly so where it confirms the observation as a self-conscious search for the picture. The decision
to press the shutter is, if not ‘decisive’, then perhaps ‘critical’: it plays a ‘critical’ role in deciding that
this is how things should be seen. It involves an analysis and evaluation of the given situation, dis-
cernment (as to what is included and what is left out) and a value judgement. It is also ‘critical’ in the
sense that its urgency or arbitrariness is the critical message of photographs, as well as in the sense in
which the term implies a quantitative threshold and the need to act. In short, and rather obviously,
without the ‘critical’ decision to press the shutter release being acted upon, there is no photograph.
In the ‘critical’ moment of exposure, we sense that we already hold onto something. Not yet a
photograph but more than merely raw data: we possess information. But as much seems to be taken
away as is gained and we also sense a loss: the information that we now possess is something that is
no more, the recorded event has passed, the ‘state of things’ has lost its contingency (its random sug-
gestiveness as a tacit image), which is exactly what we had been looking for from the start. Precisely
because we have decided to take the picture, we have lost the picture promised to us.
The notion of immediate verification of the result runs counter to this psychology. In our practical
experience of picture-taking, we may not be conscious that the latent image captured on film is dif-
ferent from one recorded and stored digitally, but the difference seems to nevertheless have a bearing
on our expectations. It may not be in the foreground of our photographic thinking that digital cam-
eras do not retain traces of the chemical action of light but transform light continuously into electro-
magnetic impulses and transcribe those as instantly retrievable binary data, but the difference
nevertheless affects our imagination. The information that is waiting to ‘come out’ on the film in the
darkness of the camera is, figuratively speaking, like dark matter whose presence can only be inferred
from visible reality. Our instinctive anticipation of this prompts the eye pressed to the viewfinder to

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 Live view

keep the ‘outside’ in view. Even as we concentrate on what the camera can do, we imagine that it will
preserve the ‘critical’ parameters of a special moment ‘out there’.
The instantly processed digital image is more like a found object, something that we come across
without knowing what we are looking for. It encourages us to ‘take’ the world as it is displayed to us:
a ready-made image. The instant availability and therefore disposability of the image creates the
impression that we can manipulate time in the still image as we do with video, and that our decision
to isolate one moment from the continuum preserves the ready-made picture without any slippage,
loss or promise. But as the uninterrupted flow of information on the ‘live’ preview screen blocks the
view of the moment ‘out there’, it highlights the imperative of thinking critically whenever we press
the shutter release.

References
Clarke, Graham (1997), The Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Flusser Vilém (2005), Towards a philosophy of photography, London: Reaktion.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2002), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.

Suggested citation
Büchler, P. (2010), ‘Live view’, Philosophy of Photography 1: 1, pp. 14–17, doi: 10.1386/pop.1.1.14/7

Contributor details
An artist, teacher and occasional writer, Pavel Büchler is Research Professor in Fine Art at Manchester
Metropolitan University. He was a co-founder of the Cambridge Darkroom Gallery, and Head of
School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. He writes on contemporary art, photography, film and
art education, has co-edited several anthologies of critical writing, and is the author of Ghost Stories:
Stray Thoughts on Photography and Film (Proboscis, 1999).
Contact: Pavel Büchler, Research Professor, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan
University, Righton Building, Cavendish St, Manchester M15 6BG, UK.

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