Resumen
Magic, as an emanation of past presence in a picture, emerges as a theme in postmodern theories of photography. It is linked to various forms of actual and symbolic absence; an absence which creates a space that keeps us looking, ostensibly for something that is lost. Photography may not always have been digital, but it has always been magical. Photography Without Pictures explores the critical dialogue and disciplinary uncertainty around the terminology of an expanded photographic that derived from debates surrounding the proliferation of digital media and the previous, ontological question of the nature of photography as a technology and a pictorial medium. It is prompted by Andrew Dewdney?s conviction that in order to deal with the contemporary condition of the networked screen image, we need to ?Forget Photography? (2021). Dewdney considers the paradox that while photography is now ubiquitous, it is also peculiarly and magically undead, a simulation at the behest of mutable electronic data. The article examines three instances of critical response to contemporary photography, including the interpretation and response to several photographic artworks and one simulated photograph, to distinguish characteristics of pictoriality, authorship and temporality in photographic pictures. In asking what it means to be a real photographer, we discover that the singular observer/artist has become a crowd in respect of the image sharing culture of post-internet art. Throughout his polemical argument to Forget Photography, Dewdney prefers to use the term image and imagery to refer to both the photographic and the networked image. The terms picture and image tend to be interchangeable in language and inhabit each other in practice, yet there are historical differences and continuities that make the distinction remarkable in considering questions of ontology and media continuity. Pictorial, temporal and illusory ?magic? are the themes through which these photographic uncertainties unfold.