Reflex-Reflection: Photography’s Genius

The unique mechanism by which photography distinguishes itself from every other visual art is something I call reflex-reflection. Photography, although shunned by the establishment in its infancy, became the quintessential, defining art of the twentieth century. This was not simply because photography’s roots were in the five decades immediately preceding the year 1900, nor that it blossomed, came to maturity and ultimately transformed with the ageing of the century itself. Photography did what any great art must do: it unified the Apollonian and Dionysian understandings of the universe in one statement. These conceptions, and ways of conceiving, are symbiotic while opposed, like the shapes in the yin-yang symbol. The Apollonian is abstract, transcendent, mathematical, logical. The Dionysian is real, immanent, cannot be understood by maths or physics and utterly passionate