The Virtual Life of Photography

The premise of this article is that although photography is proliferating and diversifying, we still do not know what it is. In order to find out what it is, we must look at it from both the outside and the inside: we must consider both the condition of photography, and its ontology. New media studies, science and technology studies, and other related fields help to illuminate the condition of photography, or its exteriority. But it is philosophy which enables us to address, directly, and from the inside, the question of ontology. The article proposes that this ontology is one of becoming, not of Being, and that it can be understood through Bergson's terms of memory and intuition. Memory, as an ontology of becoming, constitutes the virtual life of photography, and intuition, as a method of understanding, enables us to apprehend it.