Photographing Ambiguity

This paper looks at photography as a metaphor for knowledge practices in a technological culture, arguing that a relational examination of the medium of photography can help us understand some of the dominant ideological tendencies of our times. In so doing, the paper argues for uses of photography that can highlight and catalyze more ambiguous ways of relating to the world, suggesting that ambiguity is a way to cultivate more conscientious, ecological, and creative relationships within the technological ecosystem of contemporary life. This paper critiques the idea that images are best deployed to verify or document a world outside of us, and proposes that such (quantifiable) ways of thinking—while rooted in the historical drive towards technology and data (what Arthur Kroker calls "the will to technology")—have become so pervasive as to have become a dominant form of ideological bias in the 21st century. Against the ubiquity of data consciousness, this paper proposes a series of exercises designed to cultivate an embodied encounter with digital living, not against the clouds of images, but within them—understanding photographs not as benchmarks of the real but as ambiguous constructions of the present and future imaginary. "Photographing Ambiguity" proposes that images—despite appearances to the contrary—were never really meant to make sense of the world but rather to help make it stranger.