Sound Images, Beyond the Photographic

Zwaap explores how photography can be understood differently when the image is no longer seen as the result of a single human maker, a transparent representation of the world, or a carrier of meaning assigned exclusively by humans. Through a self-developed method of photographic transduction, the research shows how light, sound, apparatus, code, duration, and environment co-produce the image. Drawing on Simondon’s process ontology, material ecocriticism, and Barad’s account of material-discursive mediation, the photographic image is approached as a relational trace: a materially mediated, more-than-human, and meaning-bearing trace of an encounter.