Marco Caldéron
Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico
Marco Calderón Zacaula, has an MA in Arts and Aesthetics from the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, where he is also working as a professor for visual culture and aesthetics. His research interests include aesthetics, media theory, and cultural studies. He is working in two academic projects together with Alberto Carrillo: Philosophy of Technology: the case of new media and Cinema, television, videogames and the experience. He published several articles in different academic journals.
Articles of Marco Caldéron
Bazin, Flusser y la Estética de la fotografia / Bazin, Flusser and the Aesthetics of Photography
Both the film theoretician Bazin and the philosopher of photography Flusser follow a well-known tradition according to which aesthetic experience belongs in the realm of the extraordinary. In this way, that which makes a photograph an aesthetic object is its link to the extraordinary. Nevertheless, Flusser deals with photography within the frame of a general theory concerning technical images. Such images have, according to him, a quantitative structure. Consequently, the extraordinary character of photography would vary in a quantitative way. Furthermore, again according to Flusser, there is a reversal of meaning taking place within the realm of technical images: the technical image is existentially meaningful in itself, not because of what it represents. So, in the case of photography the meaning vector does not point to the world but to the image itself: the image is real, not its object. Of course, this idea implies a complete break with Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image. According to Bazin the image and its object share the same nature, the way a fingerprint does. Photographs, furthermore, awaken our admiration for the object, and are mostly used only for that.