The photograph’s ability to represent the subject of the captured image as an index of actuality - a legitimate measure of a real object - is one of the primary consequences of what Ron Burnett has called visualization. For Burnett, photographs are literally ‘visualizations’ – perceptual manifestations – of their subject:

“Visualization is about the relationship between images and human creativity. Conscious and unconscious relations play a significant role here. Creativity in this instance refers to the role of viewers in generating what they see in images. I am not talking about vision in general but the relationships that make it possible to engage with images … To visualize … means to bring into being.”

– R. Burnett, How Images Think (2004)

In many ways, this idea is similar to what I am trying to express with my formulation of ‘projection’. In both visualization of and projection to the photographic, the subject-depicted’s presence as other is performatively enacted by the viewer (and both are highly informed by Sartre’s work on the imaginary). That is to say, the individual photographic image, the apparatuses that inform that particular image, the photographer, and the viewer all converge to articulate the image as reality. I am using the term 'articulation' in the way put forward by Stuart Hall, in which the producers and consumers of any particular discursive message act as nodal points in the interpretation, reception, and circulation of that message. Meaning can only arise once these vectors converge and ‘articulate’ it according to their respective positions in a particular interpretive community (see Hall's Encoding/decoding*)

Taken as a whole, this process of articulation in relation to the photograph represents the sum of those projections that inform both the reception and the production of any photographic image. Paradoxically, this active ‘realization’ of the image-subject involves the work of imagination, and therefore fully implicates subjectivity in the apprehension of photographic images, despite its seeming function in these cases as objective depiction of the subject. (Note: there are many other discursive forms of the photograph, however the forms claiming the represent the ‘real’ or ‘true’ image of the self is our focus here)

However, by insisting on the visual aspect of this performative relationship in visualization’ Burnett’s term misses out on something that Jean Paul Sartre pointed out about our experience of representational imagery in The Imaginary; that often, it is not exclusively visual. As an object of thought, the image becomes imbued with forms of knowledge, and the ‘visuality’ of this mental or physical representation is usually quite limited in its accuracy. Indeed, in Sartre’s opinion, photographs and mental images are essentially two positions on a spectrum of “analogical representatives,” and rather than being turned into a mental image, the photograph is always already experienced to some extent as capable of operating as a mental image. He gives the example of picturing the Parthenon in your mind, and then attempting to count the number of columns on the outside. This is extremely difficult to do from a mental image if one hasn’t committed the number to memory. As a matter of fact, it is even difficult to do this with a photograph, as the image will be limited to a particular angle that may not show every column.

The diffuse, incomplete nature of the image is an indication of its relation to the imaginative, psychic life of the subject, which is itself always the tenuous production of discursive or symbolic systems and the appropriating unconscious or ipse. This means that not only is the photographic apparatus implicated in the production of the subject, but that the very experience of particular models of the photographic image as articulating the other or object-represented is performed at a level constitutive of subjective identity. This experience of the photographic image that seems to bridge psychic life, discursive representation, our imagined relation to the real, and its locality in the processes that maintain subjectification is why I believe the term projection is the best possible way to describe the contemporary subject’s relationship with photography and identity. It is a productive relationship that necessarily exceeds the frame of any image, and one that connects the subject to telepresent others, spaces, and forms of embodied knowledge. The term (and practice) is itself already enmeshed in photographic and cinematic production, and it captures the essence of what Manuel Castells has called ‘mass self-communication,’ (see his Communication Power for what is basically a description of modern social networking rituals). These practices are inherently dependent on the televisual, affective qualities of ritualized photographic representation, and its discursive position as validating, technologized other.

My application of the term is also influenced by Butler’s decision to use revised psychoanalytic principles in her description of performativity. It was Freud himself who first described the process of projection as a defense mechanism in a series of letters between himself and Wilhelm Fliess, which would later become the basis for Freud’s psychoanalytic practice. The subject was understood to ‘project’ unacceptable qualities of the self onto objects or others in order to ‘evacuate’ these undesirable traits and stabilize the self as an object of love. My use is somewhat closer to the adaptation of this concept into ‘projective identification’ by child psychologist Melanie Klein, where it is not simply ‘bad’ qualities that are projected onto the idealized object, but any aspect of self-identity can become associated with – and thereby dependent on – an external manifestation. For our purposes, it seems like this external manifestation of identity has become archetypal in the form of the photograph (though perhaps the more stylized online avatar will come to occupy this space if VR becomes a primary mode of communicative practice).

It should be telling that a number of photographic theorists have commented on photography’s ability to replace or supersede our experience of things with a photographic version of events. There is an existential anxiety concerning the image that many authors and cultural theorists have alluded to in their writings:

“The photograph then [is] a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time … a modest, shared hallucination.”

– Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

“ ... Walter Benjamin’s critique [of mechanical reproduction] can be extended beyond the arena of art. What has been dissipated by the reproductive onslaught of photography is not just the aura of art, but reality itself. Photography is no longer simply the litmus of reality; it has become reality’s replacement.”

– Andy Grundberg, The Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography

“This is what we really mean by ‘virtual reality’ … a term that we have mistakenly assigned only to the digital. Diffracting and diffusing the multiplicities of existence, keeping things captive within its ephemeral mind-set, the analog [photographic] media have been pivotal in the creation of a shadow planet.”

– Fred Ritchin, After Photography

“By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is … Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”

– S. Sontag, On Photography

However, for lack of a prevailing vocabulary these major works of the photographic canon remain disconnected. I believe this hypothetical model of imaginative projection within televisual discourse is capable of overcoming this theoretical rift between the ‘real world’ and the imagined, photographic one by rendering it moot. The photographic, or televisual, hasn't replaced the real so much as it has become the primary way of understanding and accessing it. The real is always, already mediated in expressible experience, and attempts to comprehend it otherwise fall into tautological traps or conservative romanticism. To say that reality has been 'replaced' in this context merely implies that the technological basis of accessing the other has shifted from a previously established forms.

If photographic images have become the new standard of beauty (as was suggested by Sontag: “So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful ... We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph.”), it is because we have projected our psychic lives into photographs, and the paradigms of photography have been projected into us. We exist in what Flusser called ‘the photographic universe’:

“To be in the photographic universe means to experience, to know and evaluate the world as a function of photographs. Every single experience, every bit of knowledge, every single value can be reduced to individually known and evaluated photographs. And every single action can be analyzed through the individual photos taken as models.”

- V. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

How did this photographic universe come into being?