Arnaud Claass's 'Le réel de la photographie' Published by Fligranes

Fligranes éditions has released 'Le réel de la photographie', a collection of over fifty short texts by Arnaud Claass, who is both a photographer and a writer on photography. The book avoids conventional historical, critical, or theoretical approaches, instead offering brief, erudite narratives that explore photography's properties, inventions, evolutions, and forms. Each text addresses a specific problem, drawing on philosophy, visual theory, technique, and art history, grounded in concrete examples from the entire history of photography. Claass challenges the dominance of the pictorial model in photographic analysis, rejects the opposition between essentialist and utilitarian conceptions of the medium, and rethinks the relationships between the sensible and the intelligible, objective and subjective, visible and invisible. He also reexamines continuities and differences between analog and digital supports. Rather than a grand historiographical narrative of binary oppositions, Claass proposes a cartography of 'visibilities' at the intersection of heterogeneous points and forces within different spatiotemporal series. The book offers a multiplicity of hypotheses that reflect the complexity of images in a 'living complicity' with photography. Christophe Kihm contributed to the volume.