Abstract

What exactly is stored when an image is saved in RAW? This talk takes the RAW file as a starting point for thinking about photography between capture, storage, and deferred visibility. Usually imagined as an unprocessed original, RAW is neither simply a visible image nor a transparent trace of reality. It names a state of reserve: something kept available for future processing, future interpretation, or perhaps no future use at all.
Moving between everyday photographic practice, archival formats, and the metaphorics of rawness, the talk asks what happens when the promise of the image is increasingly shifted from visibility to storage. Is RAW a source, a remainder, a future image — or a way of postponing the question of what the image is?

About the conference

This conference investigates theories, histories and methodologies relating to photographic images that are, for different reasons, unseen or unseeable. In the past twenty years, theorists and scholars across disciplines have raised the idea of the invisible image in various ways: discussing “operational” images intended for machine-reading rather than human viewing, and “invisual’ images that appear in aggregation and in which the visual qualities of the image are less significant than the metadata they carry; the legal and political processes that have restricted the viewing and distribution of certain types of images; the images that provide the ‘training’ for AI image production; latent photographic images that have been exposed and may never be developed, and the traces of erased, damaged and faded images. Writers concerned with archival photographs of racialized subjects appeal to senses other than the visual: to the rhythms and tactility of pictures. And for a long time now, photographers and artists have found creative ways to visualise absence, and especially, to make present subjects “disappeared” by dictatorships and through war.