Photographic Non-Self

Abstract

Non-self has unsurprisingly been featured very little in explanatory material of-object-based contemporary art history. Buddhist nonself has contributed to subjectivity research, but non-self in photography is, perhaps appropriately, absent. This chapter will explore how the experience of non-self might differ from but overlap with emptiness in the ‘history of art' specifically ‘photography theory and practice.' The author's research in experiential non-self wrestles with the complexities of non-representation when articulating embodied affect, of childhood racial discrimination, for instance. Yet, embodied autobiographical non-self is an impossible category. This is a subjugated knowledge that disrupts self-hood, undermines historical artefacts -leaving us with no birth of photography- and ruptures socio-cultural identity. Can a contemporary secular Buddhist non-self function as liberatory? Photographic non-self might render ‘writing on/and photography' disastrous, when indelibly marked by the failures of representation.