Rethinking the Aesthetics of Photography Through the Lens of the Philosophy of Technology

The aim of this paper is to rethink the relationship between automatism and artistic agency in photography through the lens of the philosophy of technology. In critical response to the realist theories of photography that have been focused on the material condition of the medium, recent theoretical approaches have increasingly insisted on artistic agency. Against this turn towards fictional inventiveness and human-centred creativity, I argue that we should focus more, not less, on the technical dimension of photography in order to defend its aesthetic status. While my position aligns with the basic realist claim that photography operates independently of human intervention, I remain critical of their substantialist assumptions about medium and reality. Drawing on, what could be called, a relational and process-oriented philosophy of technology, I advocate for a different understanding of both reality and technical objects, namely as dynamic and open-ended rather than fixed entities. Consequently, this perspective allows us to locate agency at the very heart of photographic automatism and to interpret the aesthetic dimension of photography as a result of its techno-material nature.