A new philosophy of photography that goes beyond humanist concepts to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent, as both subject and agent.
In the current epoch of drone, CCTV, social media and constant satellite images, photography is Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is progressively detached from the agency of humans and human vision. In Zylinska's book, Nonhuman Photography, she proposes a new philosophy of photography, that goes beyond the human centric perspective and acknowledge image making practice from which humans are absent.
In the book, Zylinska expands on the potential of photography and its ability to develop new methods of seeing and creating imagery. By presenting photographs from her own project, Active Perceptual Systems, she considers the questions posed about how the rapid increase of digital method affects the established notions of art, culture, and the media. Zylinska explores where photography stands in the 21st century, a time where predictions of the medium becoming somewhat obsolete, are frequent, yet we are in the age of image overload and the persistent production of photography is at higher level than ever before. Zylinska argues for the on going importance and even the human need for photography, a stance she takes throughout this book, centred around the phrase 'photography is a technology of life'.
Zylinska ventures to convalesce the value of photography and build a post-humanist philosophical view on photography that demonstrates the photographic medium as fundamental to the spectators perception and experience of life. She does so by exploring photography as a set of connections and relationships between human and nonhuman, instead of a technique for artistic expression or social practice.
