The paradoxical relationship between gesture and photography: : an exposition of the technical image's mediation in developing a gesture philosophy.

Abstract

This paper proposes that the understanding and analysis of gestures depend on non-gestural frameworks that, to a certain extent, "contaminate" what we think of gestuality. To speak of paradoxical mediation to understand gesture means that the nature of gesture obliges us to use "a means of contrast" to conceptualize it, that is, to thematize it from a determinate negation. This article will present the paradoxical mediation of photography in understanding gestures. This task is carried out using the phenomenological conceptual framework of Martin Heidegger and Vilém Flusser, and it will be exemplified with cases drawn from the anthropological work of Clifford Geertz and Alfred Gell.