Immanent images: photography after mobility

The onset of digital photography involves an image not fixed on celluloid or paper, and whose very existence is often only luminescent and evanescent – created with the smallest of thoughts, multiplying without limit and deleted without conscience. This paper uses Gilles Deleuze’s cinema theory as a lens through which to see this change in personal photography as it transcends its medium in the digital age.
For Deleuze, the sensory-motor schema imposed by the strip of photographs (as frames) running through the projector’s gate is elemental to cinema’s depiction of movement and time. Yet, in practice, digital photography is unlike the photograph as frame or print. Personal images – taken, saved and sent – are now mobile sections of time in a manner different to the cinematic shot, as they create a narrative in their movement through time and space to the screens of others. Such images are also immanent as shared actualisations, a cinema created by every viewer. As such, photography is now closer to the ‘virtual insistence of pure recollections in time’ than the recollection-images, memory-images, and dream-images that are plucked from this to constitute the ‘Kodak moments’ of everyday life. The paper will propose that photography can no longer be seen as an immobile section of time and life, and instead that the super-abundance of the photographic image is a potential cinema of the mind.