Thinking Photography Alongside the Real: Austin Settle’s Embodied Photographic Posture

By Colin Gardner

University of California, Santa Barbara

“The existence of the photographer does not precede his essence; it is his body as force, indivisible into organs, that precedes the World” (François Laruelle 2011: 13).

 “But for non-photography the photo is no longer of an object, it is its own Reality, it photographs, or puts ‘in-photo’ the Real” (John Mullarkey 2012: 151).

With their jagged edges and smooth, glacial surfaces, the works look like nonrepresentational paintings, their surfaces sculpted with a pallet knife to evoke, by turns, prisms, wave forms, ice fields, rock formations and stratigraphic layers, both vertically and horizontally banded. What a surprise then to discover that Austin Settle’s 2014 “Antithesis” series are actually photographs, color transparencies in which the layers of emulsion have been sculpted and striated with surgeon-like skill using various cutting tools in order to reveal the material’s inherent properties as well as, in the case of “Purity,” a brief, self-reflexive glimpse of the color spectrum itself. Similarly in “Hommage à Georges Rouault” (2014) and “Liquid Forms” (2015), Settle uses retouching dyes – liquid epoxy and liquid acrylic – to break down the surface of the photo emulsion through a combination of liquefaction and hardening. The result is a series of highly viscous, painterly washes and transparencies of color that straddle the line between Expressionist and Fauvist landscapes and the ethereal, hylomorphic qualities of stained glass, where Form and Matter are united through the common properties of light.

    Of course, light is intrinsic to the very nature of analog photographic practice, but Settle’s unique form of “photography in an expanded field” (to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss) defies easy analysis through conventional critical means. After all, non-digital photography’s unique quality as a medium is its indexicality, a characteristic usually defined in relation to the pioneering semiotic work of Charles Sanders Peirce (itself popularized by Peter Wollen’s seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema), who divided signs into the iconic, indexical and symbolic. As Bill Nichols neatly explains, “Iconic signs resemble their source [drawing for example]; indexical signs bear a ‘point to point correspondence with the source’ [X-Rays, photographs, fingerprints, for example]; and symbols bear an arbitrary relation [words, Morse code, national flags]” (Nichols 1994: 18). Peirce thus argues that the iconic sign resembles the referent/object, while the indexical sign is directly determined and constrained by it: in short it is in an existential relationship to the world to which it refers. 

    This naturally raises an obvious question: how, with their overt manipulation of the material properties of the image, can Settle’s “photographs” be seen as remotely indexical and thus fulfill the basic requirement of being photographs in the first place? Clearly, a radical revision of terms is in order. Firstly, Peirce isn’t consistent in his definition of the indexical, arguing at times that it is a proclamation or likeness, the equivalent of pointing a finger at something, a relationship that is far less bound to a referent and more approximate to the representational properties of the icon: “I see a man with a rolling gait. This is probably an indication that he is a sailor […] A sundial or clock indicates the time of day” (Pierce 1992, 1998, Vol. 2: 8). (Winston 2014: 133). Secondly, as Peirce also points out, in the self-absorptive aesthetic moment of beholding an artwork, “Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them […] So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears […] At that moment we are contemplating an icon” (Vol. 1: 226). (Winston 2014: 134). One could argue that this is exactly what happens when we view Settle’s “Color Transparency” (2014) and “Nestled in a Colorscape” (2014), which are derived from found family photographs of a road trip and an Austrian farm respectively. The indexical properties of the object-in-the-world (two women posing for the camera, the Alpine context of the farmstead) are consistently present, but the painterly qualities of Settle’s post-studio manipulation move this world into the realm of a uniquely haptic representation, as much tactile as visual. As Göran Sonesson affirms, “First and foremost, the photograph is an iconic sign […] the photograph must originally be seen as an icon, before its indexical properties can be discovered […] In the case of the photograph […] we do not need to conceive of it indexically to be able to grasp its meaning […] Indexicality, in photo-graphs [sic], really is a question of second thoughts and peculiar circumstances” (Sonesson 1989: 81). Following this logic, the iconicity of Settle’s re-layering comes first, the original, so-called indexicality of the source material comes second.

    Perhaps more importantly, this first order iconicity also makes the photograph susceptible to “capture” by the caption and surrounding text, for as Roland Barthes famously argues in “The Photographic Message,” “[Text] comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image. […] Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (1977: 25-6). Thus commentaries on Settle’s work – like this one – constrain both icon and index into the straightjacket of discourse, conflating photography with philosophy as equal slaves to the limited thinking produced by that bane of all creative endeavour, the a priori. As François Laruelle bluntly argues, “Philosophy is that premature thinking that will have constituted itself, not through a mirror-stage but through a flash-stage, a darkroom-stage, giving it a fragile being, a fragile basis, in this photographic mode, unfinished and too immediately exploited” (2011: 3).

    Moreover, there is also the question of what Peirce called “Collateral Experience,” whereby the viewer checks the image-as-text to see how it corresponds to their view of reality through a combination of diagnosis and interpretation. This “collateral” – based on an embodied knowledge of the laws of nature -- is much like conjuring up a previous acquaintance with what the sign denotes in order to make sense of it. Thus it is not a stretch to argue that the innate iconicity of photography draws upon this collateral – for example, the nostalgia and “innocence” attached to the family road trip of the 1950s in “Color Transparency,” aided and abetted by cheap cameras and instant processing -- in much the same way that we view paintings, with their inevitable cross-referencing between movements, epochs and art historical baggage. 

    However, the key term here is “embodiment” for it allows Settle to move away from a traditional phenomenological photographic practice towards a more immanent trans-disciplinary “performance” based on what a photograph can do: in effect photography as a Spinozan immanence of interconnected bodies, an ethical enquiry into what a body (and therefore thought) can realize in terms of its ability to affect and be affected in turn. As Laruelle makes clear in his groundbreaking work on non-photography and non-philosophy, traditional, philosophical interpretations of photography are based on a given transcendental element inscribed in the world – the eye, the camera, its techniques, the flash, the object and its theme, the choice of object, the scene, the event. “That is,” notes Laruelle, they are made on the basis of a semiology or a phenomenology, doctrines that start out by ceding too much to the World, only to withdraw out of shot, withdraw from the essence of the shot, by interpreting it too quickly in relation to the transcendence of the World alone. They found themselves on the faith in perception supposedly at the basis of the photographic act” (2011: 8). 

Both Settle and Laruelle instead advocate a radical alternative to this being-photographic-in-the-World ontology where the World itself always dictates photography’s position through indexical (or even iconic) intentionality. The answer is to reconstitute photography as an essence unto itself – perhaps most fully realized in the “Antithesis” series -- not an event of the world or, indeed, of philosophy. In short, photography thinks itself by creating an immanent photographic thought, creating in effect, “…the existence, beyond the components of technology and image-production, of a certain specific relation to the real, one which knows itself as such” (2011: 6).

    In this sense, Settle’s “photographic” oeuvre – with its flat, irreflective, and horizontal thinking, where icon, index and symbol; painting, photo and text are de-hierarchized and folded into each other as a purely performative act -- is closer to a scientific paradigm, because it is an abstract, non-figurative essence unto itself (what Deleuze and Guattari would call its immanent, “univocal” becoming), a thinking alongside or according to the Real, not an event of the world or of philosophy. Laruelle calls this photography’s posture or stance, whereby “…truth-in-photo is detained in the photograph itself; and the latter, in the photographic ‘stance’ – force (of) vision or ‘photography’” (2011: 56). This stance, in turn, creates a ‘vision-force,’ a self-inherence of the body (as opposed to a motile being-in-the-World) which is itself stripped of all intentionality: “I is that which concentrates in itself an undivided and precisely non-intentional vision-force” (2011: 12). This, then, constitutes the “non-” in Settle’s non-photography.

    To conclude, by Laruelle’s definition, Settle is a non-photographer by virtue of his ability to draw upon (but also, literally draw on) the world by stressing photography’s iconicity rather than its indexicality. Non-photography thus stresses the artist’s body as a non-organized force (Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs as a disjunctive synthesis of artist/apparatus/thought/affect/World). In Laruelle’s terms, Settle’s stance doesn’t situate itself in relation to the World via a form of subjective surveying or capturing but in abstracting himself from it – the artist as processor, using the World as a mere support for the body’s role as an undivided vision-force. More importantly, it is here – in the combination of stance and vision-force – that photography generates thought, for as John Mullarkey argues, “…the thinking of photography, or in the photo, is not constructed by an extension of a philosophical model of thought (in its illustration in photo). Rather, it is native, or immanent to the photo, and is only discovered by a non-philosophical stance or ‘posture’ toward it” (2012: 150). In this sense, Settle cannot escape his stance/vision/camera/motif because he is the immanent cause of his own vision, located in his own way of looking, a painterly force of auto-poetic vision that is caught in the very act of its own thinking, which, in turn, becomes our thinking as we too enter a condition of being ‘in-photo.’

REFERENCES

Barthes, Roland (1977), “The Photographic Message,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen

    Heath, New York, Hill and Wang, pp. 15-31.

Laruelle, François (2011), Le Concept de non-photographie/The Concept of Non-Photography 

    (Bilingual Edition), trans. Robin MacKay, Falmouth UK: Urbanomic & New York: 

    Sequence Press.

Mullarkey, John (2012), “1 + 1 = 1: The Non-Consistency of Non-Philosophical Practice 

    (Photo: Quantum: Fractal),” in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, John Mullarkey and Anthony

    Paul Smith, eds, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 143-168.

Nichols, Bill (1994), Blurred Boundaries, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Peirce, Charles S. (1992, 1998), Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, edited by

    Peirce Edition Project. 2 volumes, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sonesson, Göran (1989), Semiotics of Photography: On Tracing the Index, Lund: Institute of

    Art History.

Winston, Brian (2014), “Peirce’s Better Triad,” in A Critique of Judgment in Film and

    Television, Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds., Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and

    New York, pp. 123-141.

Wollen, Peter (1969; 1972), Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Bloomington IN: Indiana

    University Press & London: British Film Institute.

Immanent Acts: Materiality and the Expanded Real

By Austin Settle

Deeper Analysis: Connecting Austin Settle's Work to Laruelle, Krauss, Baker, Birnbaum, Flusser, Benjamin, and McLuhan

1 Overview

This analysis explores Austin Settle's photographic practice through François Laruelle's non-photography, Rosalind Krauss's expanded field, George Baker's Photography's Expanded Field (2005) and Lateness and Longing (2023), Daniel Birnbaum's Chronology (2005), Vilém Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art (1936) and A Short History (1931), and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964).

Drawing on Colin Gardner's text, it examines Settle's material manipulations, iconic abstraction, and performative embodiment.

2 Key Connections

2.1 Material Manipulation and Immanence

  • Settle: Sculpts emulsion in "Antithesis" and applies dyes in "Liquid Forms," creating haptic surfaces evoking prisms or ice fields.

  • Laruelle: Aligns with non-photography's clone of the Real, embodying "vision-force" (2011: 12).

  • Krauss: Fits axiomatic structures, redefining photography's boundaries.

  • Baker: Reflects interdisciplinary malleability (2005: 122) and analog "lateness" (2023).

  • Birnbaum: Frames as temporal "chronotopes" (2005).

  • Flusser: Disrupts the photographic apparatus, reclaiming agency (1983: 80).

  • Benjamin: Restores aura through material singularity, revealing optical unconscious (1931).

  • McLuhan: Shifts photography to a cooler, participatory medium (1964: 22).

  • Comparison/Contrast: Laruelle's immanence aligns most; Krauss maps hybridity; Baker lacks narrative; Birnbaum adds temporality; Flusser complements with agency; Benjamin enriches materiality; McLuhan enhances sensory engagement.

2.2 Indexicality vs. Iconicity

  • Settle: Prioritizes iconicity in "Color Transparency" and "Nestled in a Colorscape."

  • Laruelle: Views photography as its own Reality (Mullarkey 2012: 151).

  • Krauss: Fits site-constructions, disrupting indexicality.

  • Baker: Aligns with not-stasis (2005: 127).

  • Birnbaum: Frames nostalgia as temporal fragmentation (2005).

  • Flusser: Resists apparatus's automation (1983: 35).

  • Benjamin: Engages dialectical image (1936).

  • McLuhan: Disrupts high-definition message (1964: 36).

  • Comparison/Contrast: Laruelle rejects narrative; Krauss accommodates structurally; Baker diverges narratively; Birnbaum enriches temporally; Flusser aligns with resistance; Benjamin adds critical depth; McLuhan emphasizes participation.

2.3 Embodiment and Performative Stance

  • Settle: Embodied acts create Spinozan immanence (Gardner).

  • Laruelle: Embodies "vision-force" (2011: 6).

  • Krauss: Fits marked sites structurally.

  • Baker: Aligns with counter-presence (2005: 136).

  • Birnbaum: Frames as world-making processes (2005).

  • Flusser: Resists automation (1983: 80).

  • Benjamin: Restores performative aura (1936).

  • McLuhan: Extends sensory engagement (1964: 22).

  • Comparison/Contrast: Laruelle aligns most; Krauss is less embodied; Baker includes narrative; Birnbaum adds temporality; Flusser complements agency; Benjamin aligns with singularity; McLuhan enhances performativity.

2.4 Challenging Philosophical Narratives

  • Settle: Resists textual rationalization through abstraction.

  • Laruelle: Rejects "flash-stage."

  • Krauss: Liberates via diagrams.

  • Baker: Critiques modernist theories (2005: 136).

  • Birnbaum: Frames fragmented temporalities (2005).

  • Flusser: Critiques apparatus's programming (1983: 35).

  • Benjamin: Engages dialectical image (1936).

  • McLuhan: Emphasizes medium's form (1967).

  • Comparison/Contrast: Laruelle's exit aligns most; Krauss remains philosophical; Baker diverges narratively; Birnbaum complements temporally; Flusser aligns with resistance; Benjamin adds critical depth; McLuhan emphasizes form.

3 Critical Reflections

Austin Settle's practice, as elucidated by Colin Gardner, occupies a unique position at the intersection of Laruelle's non-photography, Krauss's expanded field, Baker's interdisciplinary expansion, Birnbaum's temporal pluralism, Flusser's critique of the photographic apparatus, Benjamin's reflections on aura and the dialectical image, and McLuhan's notion of the medium as message. His work—through its material manipulations, iconic abstraction, and performative embodiment—redefines photography's boundaries, positioning him as a pivotal figure in contemporary art's post-medium, temporally complex landscape, as reflected in the exhibition Immanent Acts: Materiality and the Expanded Real. This expanded reflection explores the nuances of these intersections, highlighting his significance and the tensions between these theoretical frameworks.

Settle's sculpting of photographic emulsions and application of dyes in works like Antithesis and Liquid Forms align most closely with Laruelle's non-photography, which treats the photograph as a clone of the Real, free from philosophical mediation. His work as expanded photography proposes a visual paradigm shift in photography's reception and indexation. By prioritizing the material essence of emulsion and light, Settle's practice embodies Laruelle's vision-force, where the artist's body engages directly with the medium, creating haptic surfaces that resist representational narratives. This radical immanence, rooted in his Vienna-based practice and fascination with analog processes, distinguishes Settle from traditional photographic practices, positioning his work as a non-philosophical act that thinks in-photo. However, Laruelle's rejection of cultural or affective dimensions limits its engagement with the nostalgia coursing through Settle's found photographs, highlighting his role as a treasure hunter curating forgotten family histories. This tension between material purity and cultural affect underscores Settle's ability to navigate the art world's discursive frameworks while pushing toward a non-representational reality, challenging viewers to encounter his works as material events.

Krauss's expanded field provides a structural framework for Settle's hybrid practice, situating his works within axiomatic structures and site-constructions that blur photography, painting, and sculpture. Settle's photography operates in an expanded field that defies conventional analysis with its jagged edges and smooth, glacial surfaces resembling non-representational paintings. His transformation of found photographs into painterly objects challenges photography's indexicality, aligning with Krauss's view of photography as a theoretical object disrupting modernist hierarchies. Yet, Krauss's structuralist approach, rooted in philosophy, contrasts with Laruelle's non-philosophical exit, creating a productive tension: Settle's works are both structurally hybrid (per Krauss) and radically immanent (per Laruelle). His European sojourn and development of an idiosyncratic pictorial language suggest a deliberate engagement with this hybridity, positioning his practice within the art world's formal expectations while transcending them through material interventions. However, Krauss's focus on structural operations may underplay the temporal and performative dimensions, such as Settle's evolution from in-camera multi-exposures to direct emulsion manipulation.

Baker's Photography's Expanded Field frames Settle's iconic abstraction as a static moving image, hesitating between stasis and narrative, while his Lateness and Longing aligns with Settle's analog practice in a digital age. Settle's fascination with analog photography, developed in Vienna, resonates with Baker's notion of lateness as a critical return to material roots. However, Baker's feminist and narrative focus diverges from Settle's non-narrative abstraction, as his work evokes abstract forms (prisms, ice fields) rather than storytelling. This tension suggests that Settle's practice both participates in and resists the art world's narrative tendencies, aligning more closely with Laruelle's rejection of narrative but fitting Baker's interdisciplinary expansion through its performative counter-presence. Settle's international exhibitions and inclusion in renowned collections underscore his relevance within Baker's expanded field, positioning him alongside artists who push photography's boundaries.

Birnbaum's Chronology frames Settle's manipulations as temporal chronotopes, where the photograph becomes a site of duration and becoming. Settle's role as a curator of the past, amalgamating forgotten histories with the present, aligns with Birnbaum's temporal pluralism, where past and present collide to resist linear narratives. The geological forms in Liquid Forms evoke Birnbaum's Deleuzian view of art creating spatio-temporal realities, complementing Baker's temporal concerns. Yet, Birnbaum's phenomenological approach contrasts with Laruelle's non-philosophy, suggesting that Settle's practice navigates both experiential temporality and material immanence. The focus on nostalgia as a vivid connection with the past strengthens this alignment, positioning Settle's work as a dynamic intervention that invites viewers to engage with temporal complexity.

Flusser's critique of the photographic apparatus frames Settle's manipulations as resistance to automation, reclaiming agency through direct intervention on found slides, detailing his shift from in-camera techniques to material manipulation. This aligns with Laruelle's non-representational stance and Baker's interdisciplinary expansion, but Flusser's technological focus introduces a critique absent in Krauss's formalism. Settle's haptic surfaces challenge Flusser's view of photography as reductive, creating a tension between determinism and creativity reinforced through his idiosyncratic pictorial language.

Benjamin's concepts of aura and the optical unconscious are enriched by Settle's surgeon-like skill in revealing the color spectrum, suggesting a restoration of aura through material singularity and an optical unconscious through textured details. His nostalgic imagery, described as echoes from the past, engages Benjamin's dialectical image, complementing Birnbaum's temporality. McLuhan's "medium is the message" frames Settle's tactile surfaces as a shift to a participatory medium, as his hands-on process aligns with sensory extension, complementing Baker's performativity and Flusser's agency.

Settle's practice navigates tensions between immanence (Laruelle), structure (Krauss), interdisciplinarity (Baker), temporality (Birnbaum), technological critique (Flusser), critical awareness (Benjamin), and sensory extension (McLuhan). His role as a treasure hunter and curator of forgotten histories highlights his engagement with nostalgia, which Laruelle might dismiss but Birnbaum, Benjamin, and Baker interpret as significant. His self-described expanded photography explicitly ties his practice to Laruelle and Krauss, positioning him as a conscious contributor to these discourses.

In Immanent Acts: Materiality and the Expanded Real, Settle's work bridges photographic (e.g., Liz Nielsen) and non-photographic practices (e.g., Rachel Harrison, Sterling Ruby), synthesizing material and temporal innovations that challenge philosophical and technological constraints, underscoring his global impact and unique pictorial language.

4 Exhibition Context - Curatorial Thought Experiment

Settle's practice, enriched by Flusser, Benjamin, McLuhan, strengthens his role in Immanent Acts: Materiality and the Expanded Real, alongside Liz Nielsen, Rachel Harrison, Walead Beshty, Sam Falls, Tala Madani, and Sterling Ruby. Nielsen's photograms align with Flusser's technical image and Laruelle's immanence, Harrison's installations fit Krauss's site-constructions and Birnbaum's world-making, and Madani's paintings engage McLuhan's sensory extension and Baker's lateness. Falls's environmental works resonate with Benjamin's optical unconscious, while Ruby's sculptures align with McLuhan's medium transformations.

Exhibition Text - Immanent Acts: Materiality and the Expanded Real

Immanent Acts: Materiality and the Expanded Real explores the porous boundaries of contemporary art, where material interventions and temporal complexities redefine traditional mediums. This exhibition brings together artists—Liz Nielsen, Rachel Harrison, Walead Beshty, Sam Falls, Tala Madani, Sterling Ruby, and Austin Settle—whose practices dissolve distinctions between photography, sculpture, and painting, forging new realities through tactile and temporal engagements. Drawing on the material essence of their mediums, these artists challenge philosophical and technological constraints, inviting viewers to encounter art as an immanent, unfolding event.

At the heart of the exhibition, Austin Settle's expanded photography reimagines the photographic medium as a site of material and temporal alchemy. Sculpting emulsions and applying dyes in works like the Antithesis series (2014) and Liquid Forms (2015), Settle transforms found color slides—forgotten family histories and vacation snapshots—into haptic surfaces evoking prisms, ice fields, and stratigraphic layers. His practice, rooted in Vienna and shaped by a global artistic journey, aligns with François Laruelle's non-photography, embodying a vision-force that prioritizes material immanence over representation. Yet, Settle's nostalgic imagery, described as a vivid connection with the past, engages Daniel Birnbaum's temporal chronotopes, where past and present collide, and Walter Benjamin's dialectical image, sparking critical awareness through temporal friction.

Settle's work resonates with Rosalind Krauss's expanded field, blurring photography and painting in site-constructions that defy indexicality, while his analog manipulations echo George Baker's notion of lateness in a digital age. Vilém Flusser's critique of the photographic apparatus frames Settle's interventions as acts of agency, resisting automation, while Marshall McLuhan's "medium is the message" underscores his shift to a participatory, tactile medium. Benjamin's optical unconscious emerges in the textured details of Settle's surfaces, restoring a material aura to reproducible photographs. This interdisciplinary approach positions Settle as a treasure hunter of forgotten histories, curating a dialogue between personal memory and collective time.

Alongside Settle, Liz Nielsen's photograms share Laruelle's immanence, Walead Beshty's transparencies resist Flusser's automation, and Sam Falls's environmental works reveal Benjamin's optical unconscious. Rachel Harrison's and Sterling Ruby's installations align with Krauss's hybridity and Birnbaum's world-making, while Tala Madani's paintings engage McLuhan's sensory extension. Together, these artists redefine materiality and temporality, challenging viewers to experience art as a dynamic, immanent act. Immanent Acts: Materiality and the Expanded Real invites audiences to navigate this expanded terrain, where the photograph becomes a site of transformation, memory, and tactile presence.