Meet Animal Meat - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Thoughts series actualize by thinking of themselves
as bodies.
Francesca Woodman’s work, generally
speaking, as well as Arno-Rafael Minkkinen’s “Body
Land” series both represent other significant
photographic testimonials of the common
encroachment of the body onto the material
substance of the world. Minkkinen chose to
explore natural settings to foreground his
corporeal inherency to wilderness’ open being. His
idea that “we are in the same world but in
different landscapes” (Minkkinen, A. Body Land)
resituates the body’s dialectical relationship to Self
and world within the quest of its ontological
envisioning. Minkinnen thinks of the body as being
co-constitutive of landscape vision, as its
necessary material provenance.
The works of Samaras, Woodman and
Minkkinen are all exemplary definitions of selfportraiture
as a reflective investigation of the
subject upon his presence or appearance in the
world. As such, they entail crucial conceptual and
critical resonances with the Mammal Thoughts
series. The imperative questioning carried out in
any self-figuration definitely underlines the human
need to mirror one’s factuality when facing
existential doubt. What is then asked of the
photograph in a self-portrait is to provide a coobjective
perception of oneself in the world, so
that one is able to see himself as objectively as
another; namely, to be both seer and seen,
object and subject of that perception.
Consequently, the photographic self-portrait is
always cogitatively designed on a first literal level
of significance. But unlike subjectivity’s diegetic
temporality in actual life, its perception has been
discontinued from the perceived object and
therefore constitutes a reported experience. It is
thus a product, as reflection or imago, of an
elusive self-reflection owned by the world. As a
principial remedy, the Mammal Thoughts’ series
allowed for a resynchronization of the cogitative
experience and of its witnessing, while
photographing individuals engaged in the active
doubting of themselves as anything else than
bodies. The displacement from self-portraiture to
portraiture redistributed the subjective and
objective investments of the real in accordance
with a diachronic world composed of
intersubjective relationships. If indeed the
portraying of a self-reflecting individual by another
individual guarantees an integral perceptive
experience of self-perception, since what is thus
depicted isn’t a differed and reflective selfreflection
of the photograph’s subject but the
objective and lived experience of another, the
Mammal Thoughts series can therefore be
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understood as the true envisioning of a
community of cogitos made visible by virtue of
the photographer’s existence. However, the
revealed interdependence between photography
and the photographer’s existence cannot provide
any conclusion as to know exactly what the
resulting photographs stand for. They could
represent the photographer’s shared historicity of
yet authentic individual self-reflections, in which
case the photographer’s consciousness would
then become the true sensible photographic
material. If on the other hand they were not about
the photographer’s constitutive co-presence, the
photographs could then plausibly uncover
portraiture as a successful monstration of selfreflectiveness.
But in that case, the visual criteria
evaluating the degree to which self-reflection
occurs or not are not identifiable. Moreover,
seeing oneself as his own body from the viewpoint
of another subject would presuppose a sort of
projection, if not disincarnating. If so, the visibility
of such a phenomenon would problematically
not belong to any physical subject, echoing
Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic saying that “Man is not
the end of the body” (Merleau-Ponty. The Visible
and the Invisible).
Bibliography
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Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis, Hackett Pub.
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Ewing, A., William. Body : photographs of the human form. San Francisco,
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London, Routledge
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Evanston, Northwestern University Press,
1964.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston,
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Professor Bastien Desfriches Doria was born in Paris, where he used to live
and work before moving to America in 1999 to study Photography. In France,
Bastien earned both a degree in Philosophy and in Information &
Communication Sciences. Bastien earned an MFA in Photography at the
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in May 2006 and has been working
as an assistant professor of Digital Imaging and Photography at Governors
State University since September 2006.