Sensory digital photography: re-thinking 'moving' and the image

Abstract

This article critically interrogates how we might understand and theorise the image in relation to theories of place. The recent 'sensory turn' in visual scholarship suggests a re-thinking of the meanings, materialities and values of the image through attention to relations between visual and other sensory categories and to human perception. However, here I argue for an approach that goes beyond simply re-thinking images as having sensory qualities and/or the potential to communicate across sensory categories. Rather, I reconsider visual production and consumption through interrelated concepts of movement and place, thus proposing that any rethinking of the image in relation to digital media should also account for these elements. Such an approach offers ways of understanding the image that go beyond analysing either its role as a conveyor of dominant discourse in economies of power or its place as a visual text in a hierarchically ordered economy of the senses.