PlayStation Photography - Vladimir Rizov
What is video game/virtual/screenshot/in-game, [etc] photography? How does it relate to “traditional” photography, photographic technologies, digital spaces, and related discursive fields? While far from the first essay to examine the field (Poremba, 2007 is the earliest academic paper I know), Rizov’s PlayStation Photography: Towards an Understanding of Video Game Photography is the kind of excellent academic foundational text, grounded in theory, but filled with astute observations useful to artists, critics and curators alike. Fundamental to Rizov’s approach is to build forward from understanding photography as Rancière-esque “aesthetic logic of a mode of visibility”, not a singular lineage of artworks inextricably tied to a specific technology. Or to simplify a bit, photography is a plurality of practice and ideas, and virtual photography can only be fully understood in the context of how it has to explicitly wrangle with its (often exaggerated) relationship to those historical concerns of photography. Engaging with colonial vision, narrativizing impulses, games’ direct usage of photography, and the way Alan Sekula argues that photographic meaning is always determined by its context, Rizov is an excellent text to frame the past and suggest new avenues of work, both scholarly and artistic, in the future.
(Note: I’m not saying this is the final word on virtual photography. From both my critic and artist hat, I could argue with this text for many thousands of words in the places I disagree. But it is robust and broad enough, and has a very forward-thinking model, that even the arguements with it will be productive!)
Creator: Vladimir Rizov
Connections:
Cindy Poremba - “Point and Shoot: Remediating Photography in Gamespace”
Alan Sekula - Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983
Jacque Rancière - The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible