Volume 1, Issue Part 1, 2007
Selected Essays from Asia Part 1
Cheung Chan-Fai
Pages 31-53
Phenomenology and Photography
On Seeing Photographs and Photographic Seeing
Although photography is believed to be a copy of reality and an icon for memory, it has attracted scrutiny from philosophers concerned with its semiotic structure and its phenomenological impact. Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre have made reference to the photographic image without any detailed phenomenological analysis. With the help of Roland Barthes’s refl ection on photography, this essay attempts to give a phenomenological description of photographs as seen and on seeing in photographing.