Tracing the non-visible with Kant's transcendental philosophy
When philosophers want to know how experiencing anything was possible, how we could know something, prominent philosophers from Königsberg would answer with the categories of space and time. Within those so called Anschauungsformen, which might be translated as forms of intuition, we are able to know something. They were the precondition through which we can have any experiences. Kant's speciality might be that those spheres don't exist outside of us, they structure our consciousness as a frame in which, by which we are able to know things.
For Kant our perception coheres with space and time. For the philosophically motivated photographer this is a fruitful thought, because one might ask - if you can only recognize things within their own space and specific time, not the Dinge an sich, the 'things in themselves', will my photographs then be the images of the correspondent space-time-atmosphere? This was nothing new for photography, and sobering somehow. A dog in space and time, in front of a dog made of stone, shutter button released in the summer of 2009.
But what if you get yourself on the search for the 'thing in itself'? How to make something visible which is not in space and time? Not in particular a dog in itself. More a very special thing which is not a thing anymore, because it is not within space and time. Might the human soul be something beyond space and time? After all we travel continents in our dreams, visit distant planets even, and experience time that would turn our normal waking time perception upside down.
Because our soul might be something outside of space and time, one cannot directly see him, her, it in photos. But photos have soul, don't they? My detective soul experiment goes something like this: If there are things in themselves, which are not visible to us like ghosts, will we be able to make their traces visible? Might time be helpful to find those traces.
'Spacetime', Regensburg, 2009 © Dr. Christine Lehr
Seeing through old photographs I eventually recognize something, which does no longer exist today. A liking for certain colors, compositions, perspectives, which can tell something about my soul having been traveled through space and time. Or I notice new elements and perspectives in more recent photos that have not been there before.
Where Kant is surely disputatious and talking of a soul might also be highly debatable, this philosophical meditation serves as detective inspiration to investigate and locate the own collection of photographs within space and time, in order to find something in it, which only exists beyond those forms of intuition, and which only shows itself to us as traces.
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