Issue 11: Photography as Philosophical Framing

From Hobbes to LaBarge: On Reason, Vision, and the Edges of Perception

Author

Jorge Silva
July 23, 2025

GALERIA LOCAL

Welcome — and thank you for reading.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been tracing a line from Thomas Hobbes to photography—not as a historical exercise, but as a way of thinking about image-making. Issue 8 began the series with an essay on abstraction and symbolic reasoning. Issue 9 followed with a reflection on photography as a trace of presence. Now, in this issue, I bring it to a close with a third and final essay: Photography as Philosophical Framing. It looks at the frame not just as boundary, but as reasoning—an image’s way of thinking.

This issue also debuts a new experiment in the Narrative Layers section: a series of snapshots responding to Emily LaBarge’s Seeing Things.

These fragments are not readings of the text, but reflections that walk beside it. This time, the focus is on the body and the senses—on vision as something that touches, leaks, bleeds across categories.

And finally, a preview.
In Issue 12, I’ll publish my full interview with Italian photographer Davide Degano. We discussed Romanzo Meticcio, the legacy of fascist Italianization, the role of fiction in shaping identity, and what it means to create images from the margins.
You’ll find a glimpse of that conversation in the Coming Next section.

All photographs in this issue are part of the Arcadia project—except the final image, which is by Davide Degano, from his series Sclavanie.

— Jorge

Essay

Photography as Philosophical Framing

Building on Part I’s symbolic reasoning and Part II’s traces of presence, Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy, as explored in Nicola Abbagnano’s History of Philosophy, frames philosophy as abstraction—stripping perception to reveal principles like space and time. Photography’s frame mirrors this act, not merely representing reality but structuring what lingers after perception is distilled. The frame is photography’s calculative gesture, akin to Hobbes’ reason organizing experience through signs.

The photographic frame imposes a logic of selection: this, not that. It carves reality into a unit of spatial and temporal meaning, tracing boundaries as Part II’s imprints reveal presence. Like Hobbes’ abstraction of space and time, the frame is structural—closer to geometry than narrative. What lies outside is not absence but condition, shaping meaning through exclusion. In Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (1932), a man leaps over a puddle, the ripple’s glint catching light. The content—a man, a street, water—is simple, but the tight frame balances stillness and motion, the unseen landing defining its resonance.

“A photograph captures an actual moment yet unveils the possible: unframed gestures, untaken shots. Each image carries a horizon of alternatives, mirroring our capacity to abstract beyond the immediate.”

Through Hobbes’ lens, photography is a system of relations, extending Part I’s symbolic reasoning. It declares not “this was” but “this remains,” a trace shaped by light, form, and exclusion. Extending Part II’s whisper of the divine, if Hobbes’ divine lies beyond discourse, photography’s frame is its silent revelation, reasoning relationally to craft meaning not as truth but as a structured trace of experience.

Photography challenges Hobbes’ claim that nothing is possible unless actual. A photograph captures an actual moment yet unveils the possible: unframed gestures, untaken shots. Each image carries a horizon of alternatives, mirroring our capacity to abstract beyond the immediate, revealing beyond our sensory limits. This aesthetic potential makes photographs artifacts of thought, read as much as seen, activating memory, desire, or projection. A portrait suggests a person’s essence, hovering between presence and imagination.

Narrative Layers

A New Experiment

Over the next three issues of Narrative Layers, I’m trying something new. I’ll be reflecting on my experience of reading “Seeing Things” by Emily LaBarge, published in Granta. This isn’t a tidy article—it’s an open-ended, richly layered essay, dense with historical, literary, and philosophical references: Kierkegaard, Defoe, Plath, Rembrandt, the Great Fire of London… all woven into a narrative of walking the “City of the city” during the COVID lockdown.

The essay doesn’t offer a neat conclusion. Instead, LaBarge continually asks, “When should one stop seeing?”—choosing instead to keep walking, tracing lines of history frozen in place while culture shuts down around her. For me, this refusal to close the gaze was both striking and instructive.

So here’s the experiment: a dozen of short reflections, across three issues. Each piece will respond to one of the core ideas that stood out—snapshots of thought, set in visual and bodily dialogue with LaBarge’s walk. I won't interpret Seeing Things; I’ll respond to it—walking alongside it. These fragments are not conclusions. They are questions, provocations, openings. An invitation to keep seeing.

LAYERS OF SEEING

Eyes Open After the Blow

A few years ago, I noticed something. Many people stop truly seeing as they grow older. They close off—not their eyes, but the deeper process of questioning, of absorbing the world as it unfolds. They trade it for certainty, confidence, coherence, as if they’ve decided who they are and can’t let new perceptions shake that frame.

I’ve long aligned with the refusal to stop seeing, even when it hurts, even when I think I’ve understood. It’s not easy. It makes you less decisive, more unstable, slower to speak. But it lets change become visible—in the world and in oneself. As a photographer, I know seeing isn’t just something we do; it’s a practice.

The Mind as a Camera

In a 1958 journal entry, Sylvia Plath copied a line from Defoe about the “monstrous and frightful shapes” seen in the breath of the ill. Then she added a note of her own: “the chaemeras of the sick mind also.” At the time, she was working at a psychiatric clinic in Boston, transcribing patient records. She found it oddly nourishing — a way of reading deeply into others, of opening souls. “Fear: the main god,” she wrote. Elevators. Snakes. Loneliness. A poem on the faces of fear.

Unfamiliar with Plath’s idiosyncratic spelling of “chaemera,” I misread her note as “the cameras of the sick mind.” The slip felt right. The mind, like a camera, frames and distorts, blinds with overexposure or underexposure, capturing what we’re primed to see. Misreadings aren’t just errors—they reveal the mind’s lens, exposing the chimeras we carry within.

“Fear: the main god: fear of elevators, snakes, loneliness — a poem on the faces of fear.”
— Sylvia Plath

Just as we draw borders around green space, we also frame what feels unruly within us. The tension between design and wildness is not only urban — it’s emotional. Arcadia invites a doubled gaze: outward, to the city’s quiet negotiations with nature; and inward, to the ways we soften, shape, or silence what cannot be fully contained. What grows in these margins — of land or of self — reveals something essential.

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.”
— Muhammad Ali

Vision in the Flesh

Emily LaBarge’s reflections on “seeing things” in the “City of the city” echo something deeper: the idea that vision is not just mental or optical, but somatic—that visual experience can touch us.

Wittgenstein wrote, “The human gaze has a power to make things precious; but so does the human hand” (Culture and Value, 1946). For Elaine Scarry, this evokes beauty as a tactile force, a shiver across the skin that decenters the self. I see no such divide: beauty stirs the body—symmetry draws the eye, as primal as a predator’s gaze—while calling the mind to trace elegance in harmony, topology, or syntax, weaving instinct and thought into a delicate thread. Wittgenstein’s “frames”—words and images conjuring tangible realities—find echo in LaBarge’s walks through London’s layered streets, where history becomes a tactile medium, vision gaining depth.

My own experience drives me more towards synesthesia than the tactile vision of walking, when I hear Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, with its shimmering, bronze-heavy chords. I see radiant golden edges or piercing red intensity in vigorous passages, sometimes shadowed blue in darker, obscure moments. These sensations remind me that perception is never cleanly separated by sense. Beauty leaks. It bleeds across categories. It insists on being felt.

Arcadia’s Opening – September 2025

Opening at Galeria Local in September 2025, the Arcadia exhibition offers a renewed gaze on urban nature—inviting viewers to see gardens not as escapes from the city, but as sites of quiet negotiation, where human design meets nature’s stubborn will

Coming Next:

Davide Degano in Conversation

In our next issue, I’ll share my conversation with Italian photographer Davide Degano, where we discuss Romanzo Meticcio, identity as fiction, the legacy of fascist Italianization, and what it means to create images from the margins. The dialogue moves between anthropology, photography, memory, and doubt.

Here’s a glimpse:

“I believe we need to start asking questions that make people uncomfortable. Not in a confrontational way, but because comfort often comes from ignoring the complexity of things. Photography, for me, is a way of insisting on that complexity—of holding open a space where easy narratives don’t fit.”

The full interview will be available next week for Premium Subscribers.
Click HERE for early access to this interview and much more.

By Davide Degano

“The ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.”

Martin Parr

Until next time,