N-fold Exposures - Non-Photography, Aleatory Materialism, Images without Objects

In classical photography, analog double or multiple exposures are considered as an accident, a mistake, or unaesthetic. But the accidental blending of different places and times in a photo holds the possibility to detect the unknown, the unconscious, to speculate about co-incidence or to experience immanence. This article goes on the traces of an ontology resp. a non-onto-photo-logical description of n-exposures with Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophical visual aid as well as the philosophy of Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari. At the center of this consideration is the assumption not to regard a photo as a clone of reality, as a fetishistic realism, but as an inversion of this order: not the photo simulates reality, but the image establishes reality. Therefore a photo can develop a life of its own, a reality of its own. Through the interlocking of objects in multiple exposures, the object forms in the photography are deprived of causality, thus creating an epistemological, a sensual in-between, i.e., possibility spheres of imagination and experience. The reflection that in the non-standard aesthetic of n-fold exposure no doubles of the world are produced, but indeterminants, has the consequence that these variables and scenarios has to be recognized as such. That is why in this article theoretical legends are developed, which allow to capture the immanence of the images by means of a non-standardized aesthetics.

This exposition is available in German only.