Nonhuman Photography

A new philosophy of photography that considers imaging practices from which the human is absent, and argues that photography is nonhuman even when people make the pictures.

Zylinska starts from CCTV, drones, medical body scans and satellite images, where photography is decoupled from human agency and human vision. She argues that images made by artists and amateurs also contain a mechanical element. They run on technical and cultural algorithms that shape our cameras and our viewing habits. The book looks at what digitization does to established notions of art, culture and the media. It proposes that photography is a light-induced process of fossilization across media and time scales. It includes images from her own project, Active Perceptual Systems. MIT Press published it in 2017.

Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice at King's College London, and before 2021 taught at Goldsmiths. She combines writing with an image-making practice. Her later books include AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (2020) and The Perception Machine (2023).