Abstract

Photography had a pivotal role in Vilem Flusser’s thought. Not only was it instrumental in transforming his professional identity from language philosopher to spokesman for—and against—new media, it also came to constitute the most important single event in his history of human communication. For him, photography was the first “technical image,” that is, the first technology to fuse human beings and devices into a cognitive mesh he called the “apparatus.” Flusser considered Towards a Philosophy of Photography a study of the apparatus, an examination of the impact a human–device fusion would have on human creativity, which is to say, on human freedom.