Photography Remoulded

An extended review of Joanna Zylinska's book Nonhuman Photography. Nonhuman Photography is an invigorating and passionate call to reclaim photography’s essence and to rethink its ontology and is a much needed addition to critical thinking about photography. At a time when the practices of what we still continue to designate under the term photography are folding into new and emergent forms of computational hypermedia, Zylinska offers a way of refocusing on what is specifically photographic. In the context of the convergence of art, media and technology, the book is a riposte to the arguments of postphotography, a contentious rejection of the value of continuing to think of the digital as the currently defining condition of images, as well as a critique of the limits of the humanist tradition of photographic history, theory and teaching.