“Onto(photo)graphy: for a new topology of perception”
This university research project, carried out in 2019 at the University La Sapienza in Rome as part of the Master’s degree in Philosophy, Political Philosophy, follows the theoretical perspectives of Deleuze, Latour, and Laurelle to explore photography as a generative and syncretic activity, distant from the traditional concept of representation or imitation of reality. Photography does not represent or imitate, but codifies, taking shape as a bodily gesture that emerges from the depths of the body itself and is realized through assemblages of bodies that influence each other, producing unique and unrepeatable effects.
The work rejects the notion of a “photography of the whole,” instead emphasizing the importance of partial connections within an infinite network of relationships. Photography is conceived as a pure, immanent event that cannot be explained or interpreted, but only experienced. It is a process of realization that occurs within the body through assemblages, which render the body real and substantial.
The reflection is situated on the plane of immanence, where photography manifests as a fractal phenomenon, irreducible to a unity. Through this perspective, photography is configured as an act of connection, a mediator between bodies that, while transforming, do not lose their essence, participating in a process of becoming-sensible that materializes the real.

Photography is therefore understood as an activity, non-metaphoric and non-perceptual, that generates its own manner of operating. The photographic description, then, becomes only a syncretic one and all that it can communicate is therefore a point of synthesis between different generating forces, all very distant from the concept of reality. 
At this point, Deleuze’s claim would be worthwhile: “Nothing stands for something else” (Deleuze, 2006). No metaphors then, only meta-forces. Imitation can no longer be possible, only a codification, a way of capturing a code. But, how? We have to change the way of understanding the photographic activity, to see it insert in a manner of codifying.

What I choose to name, with Laurelle’s words, photographism (Laurelle, 2011) is the photographic gesture, precisely a practice of composition of bodies. Is about finding channels to connect and locate one self: positioning capacities coming from an agent, no more a transcendental subject, as a knowledge of making the right encounters. The photographic act is not a position before the word and towards an object: it is from the most obscure and unreflexive depth of the body that the photographic act is generated. The world works only as a support, a vehicle for the body, as the body is also a material vector.

To be able to participate to the extension of the matter, we have to be aware that it is possible only through one owns stance and prospective. We cannot see all the connections of all the parts, but we can only see them as parts of this infinite network, which are all already in game and pre-existing at partial meetings. Since the subject is a part, he has a position and through it he can only move as a part of these aggregates knowing certain contingent and emerging forms and not the all. Here comes again, clearly the illusion of the “photography of the all”.

For better understand photography’s activity we need to include in the discussion what is about being-a-body. The point I want to make is that photography gesture is the action of the body, or better, an assemblage or many bodies on other bodies, which affect one another creating unrepeatable effects. We’ll need to explore their being together in an assemblage and search for the effects produced, not explain them.

“The whole is always smaller than its parts” (Latour, 2012), Latour would say. A photography of immanence is a pure event, something that can only happen and cannot be interpreted. Laurelle suggests that only a fractal theory can define such order, not hybridized with art: a new theoretical sphere based upon the plane of immanence, rather than working on aesthetics concepts (Laurelle, 2011). The plane of immanence envelops the endless recurring movements that run through it. It’s a concatenation of concrete events, formless and absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractal. We need to conceive photography as this phenomenon irreducible to a whole.

Through this composition of becoming-sensible any entity can become something else without ceasing to be itself, in a way. Photography becomes a body, made of many bodies, formed by meetings on the plane of immanence. A connective mediation where is not the body that realizes (something) by itself, but it is in the body that something is realized due to the assemblage and thanks to which the body also becomes real and substantial. Photography of immanence is a realization process where the event is actualized.