I wrote the following after reading some of Vilem Flusser's thoughts on Photography and I attribute some of the concepts to his original writings on photography:
Photography is like a book of chess puzzles, games and combinations. The image is like one of the many possible combinations. Although no one player can exhaust every game or every combination, these combinations are non the less finite. The book has been written. My inquiry into photography is theoretical. Instead of producing images in an already exhausted series of combinations, ie; art, the nude, the documentary etc., I combine and evaluate the images I find or create, so as to reduce the program to its simplest series of combinations in order to decode the information.
One can argue that to get to the information, one simply has to read the context in which the image is created. For example if it is a photojournalistic image then you consider the audience and publication and so forth, or if it is scientific then one can read it from that perspective. Yet philosophers like Flusser have shown that it isn't that simple, that all these " channels " of various programs that create images still follow the general program of the apparatuses that produce them.
Christopher Blay
