Analysis of the Transition from Representation to Aesthetics in Photography Based on Rancière's Views

A technical image, such as a photograph, is produced by a device, which is an entity designed for specific functions, having supplanted and emulated human manual labor. Engaging with a device limited to generating technical images can quickly become repetitive and dull, prompting professional photographers to experiment with their equipment in a manner termed "photographic play." This playful approach has a significant affinity with Jacques Rancière's theory of artistic regimes. Play can be interpreted as a strategy through which subjects marginalized from the dominant social and political landscape can reclaim their position. The aesthetic regime intended by Rancière can also be seen as the collapse of the common symbolic system of art, through which the dignity and position of the subjects of representation were determined, and it is obvious that photography also emerged from the same common representational system and belonged to that system. The aesthetic regime of the arts removed the correlation between the theme and the way of representation and gave value and importance to the mundane, and in this structure, photography was no longer imitating the arts but was rather in the process of self-constructing the matter. The shift from the representational regime to the aesthetic regime in photography is facilitated by challenging the distribution of the sensible—a concept that defines the extent to which the everyday can impact society. Photographic plays focus on the everyday elements that lie outside the norms and conventions of representational art and reintegrate them into the distribution of the sensible, thereby disrupting the conventional representational order. Photography can only assert its presence among the arts by moderating the everyday and challenging the distribution of the sensible. This descriptive-analytical study seeks to explore how individuals and objects can assert their presence in society through the concept of play, which disrupts the existing aesthetic order and the rules of the distribution of the sensible. It aims to answer the question: How do photographic plays achieve presence in the aesthetic regime envisioned by Jacques Rancière? How can the concept of the distribution of the sensible be equated with the concept of play? The approach to answering these questions is informed by Rancière's theories on the distribution of the sensible and Vilém Flusser's concept of play. These concepts are applied to examine two case studies in Iranian photography from the late 1990s. The findings of this research can be summarized as follows: In photography, the transformation of the every day, achieved by disrupting the conventional representational order, has a significant potential to be present in Jacques Rancière's aesthetic regime. The concepts of play and challenging the distribution of the sensible converge towards a single goal in two distinct domains; in photography, one pathway to achieving Jacques Rancière's aesthetic regime is through the use of photographic play.