This text explores the intersection of colour perception, unconscious influence, and self-deciphering through the lens of photography. By selecting blue as a personal favourite, it reflects the unseen forces shaping conscious preferences. Using the camera as a tool for navigating these internal landscapes, the process acknowledges the limitations of both apparatus and Operator. Ultimately, it questions whether the self can be fully known or if it is merely a simulated construct filtered by subjective experience. Through this ongoing inquiry, the blue process becomes a meditation on the tension between what is known and what remains hidden. 27012023
APPOINTING BLUE
INTRODUCTION
Recently, there has been a profound shift in my perception of photography—one that has rendered my previous grasp of the medium so distant that I can hardly recall it. This essay lays the foundation for an evolving interpretation of photography as a tool for self-deciphering. It does not aim to make universal claims; rather, it reflects on the visual and conceptual elements that have influenced my current thinking on this abstract yet specific use of the medium.
The theory I present here is a personal exploration, engaging with a small segment of the photographic universe. Referred to as the blue process, it is not a definitive framework but rather an ongoing investigation into self-deciphering through photography.
To set the stage, I want to establish a blue backdrop against which I will consider the kind of “self-deciphering” I am addressing. In doing so, I turn to my recent fascination with the colour blue, which has become central to my thought. I distinguish between hue and connotation—two aspects that inform our perception of colour. While hue pertains to the conscious experience of colour, connotation points to the unconscious influences that often guide our preferences without our awareness. This distinction served as the starting point for my exploration of how both consciousness and unconsciousness might be examined through photography.
The blue process draws from various theories. Vilém Flusser’s concept of the apparatus and Roland Barthes’ attention to photographic meaning contribute to my perspective, as does Han Byung-chul’s idea of the Other. However, it is Thomas Metzinger’s assertion that the self is not a fixed entity, but a simulation, that challenges everything.
As I continue to develop this process, I recognise that my understanding remains in progress. The thoughts presented here are tentative and unproven, reflecting the limits of my admittedly amateurish capacities. Any definitive claims are made in the spirit of ongoing investigation.
The blue process does not present a prescriptive methodology, but rather a conceptual framework. Rather than offering instructions or outcomes, it invites a sensitivity to the making and reading of images as two intertwined gestures. By resisting concrete examples or fixed interpretations, the process remains intentionally open-ended, enabling each practitioner to navigate its stages in relation to their own context. In this sense, it offers not a formula, but a mode of inquiry—both adaptable and contingent.
BLUE
There is a newfound fascination with the colour blue. Much more than before, it stands out. I might even be looking for it. It’s bewildering to be so taken by something that had once seemed unremarkable. Perhaps I first noticed blue’s overbearing presence in my mind when, despite meeting a friend with blond hair—later briefly dyed blue, then black—all I see when I think of her is cobalt blue. The way meaning seems to seep into colour, making it all the more endearing and vibrant, brings to mind William H. Gass: “So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.”¹
When it comes to colour, it might be that involuntary connotations influence the experience of looking at hue. This could be an instance of the unconscious altering the conscious. It’s important to point out that the unconscious is not accessible to us, and its effects, so it seems, go largely unnoticed. Still, there is an incessant need to understand the self, and even if I cannot, I must still try. Such was the case with blue, which ignited my desire to reach toward the unattainable: the unconscious.
To understand the self, I draw on a Jungian interpretation of the psyche as something that “remains an insoluble puzzle and an incomprehensible wonder, an object of abiding perplexity.”² Jung holds that self-knowledge is measured by what the individual knows about themselves, but this knowledge does not include the “real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them.”³ In this light, the self-knowledge one can possess suddenly seems inconsequential when compared with what remains unknown—or so it felt to me. The influence of the unconscious on perception, beginning with colour and extending to something deeper, became increasingly compelling. Trying to understand why blue was becoming my favourite colour opened up the prospect of using photography as a tool for self-deciphering.
Though I’ve used Jung’s concept of self-knowledge as a starting point to explain what I mean by “self-deciphering,” there are some distinctions to be made. Given that “the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents,”⁴ I use the word decipher to signify the attempt to convert the self into a kind of personal language—one tailored to the individual's own way of making sense. The present continuous tense suggests an ongoing, possibly futile, endeavour. The blue process does not generate certainty, but speculation. Knowledge, in itself, feels burdensome: “we know the world only by using representations, because (correctly) representing something is what knowing is.”⁵ Instead, I’m collecting theoretical puzzle pieces about something that may never be represented correctly.
As for the title of this essay, Appointing Blue, it implies a choice. I am appointing blue as my favourite colour, at least for now, because picking a favourite colour is no longer a casual matter. It’s not about what looks pleasant to the eye, but what pulls at my mind. I even enjoy the way it sounds. Blue. Blue.
A SURMISE
There are four facets to the theorisation of the blue process.
First, the camera as an apparatus with autonomy, rather than a subservient machine with little influence over the image. According to Vilém Flusser, the photographer’s primary responsibility is “not to become a function of his or her camera, or the apparatus’s clerk.”⁶ I must tread carefully, then, because my inquiry is this: the externalisation of the unconscious and its contents through a collaboration between Operator and apparatus. The intentional mishandling of the photographic process creates mistakes that materialise as inflictions of the unconscious on the image. Perhaps before expanding on this idea, it is time to reiterate that the nature of my speculations is entirely without empirical measure. It is not representations that I intend to make, but fictions to be interpreted. For example, Daisuke Yokota uses “intentionally crude processing techniques”⁷ to signify his intervention with the image as photographer. He explains that “a photograph without the intervention of human perception is just material.”⁸ These interventions are not fully within the Operator’s control; they fall partly under the prerogative of the camera. The images produced are abstractions—because “images signify […] they provide space for interpretation.”⁹
One critique of photography is that humans have come to rely on images to make sense of the world and, through this reliance, no longer experience reality itself but rather a simulation of reality, shaped by the program of the apparatus. But instead of Flusser’s anxiety over redundant images, I adopt a more sentimental gaze—that of Roland Barthes, who “wants to decipher the meaning or ‘rhetoric’ of the image.”¹⁰
The next facet turns to interpretation, through the interplay of studium and, notably, punctum. The studium is “that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste”;¹¹ it is “a kind of education”¹² that enables the Spectator to access the Operator’s intention. In other words, it is the context. The punctum, on the other hand, disturbs the studium. Created by accident or with intention, it is “that accident which pricks me”;¹³ it is subjective. It is not present in the same photograph for everyone, and even if it is, the detail appointed as punctum varies. It becomes a private sensation, one that allows the interaction with the image to become a personal task of “a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.”¹⁴ The supposed punctum reveals the emotional charge a Barthesian reading can bring to the images that make me linger. Whatever it may or may not be, it emerges as a trace of the unconscious. Through the camera, I attempt to reach this point: collaborating with the apparatus as Operator, becoming the Spectator, and interpreting the images in search of the detail that captivates—or that pierces me open just enough to touch the unknowable. At times, however, nothing surfaces. From here, my inquiry shifts, proposing the camera as a superficial other, and turning toward reflections on eros.
The third facet begins with Han Byung-chul’s conception of the Other, especially in the context of eros. Eros, for Han, is not simply sexual or romantic desire: it is the capacity to be wounded, to be thrown off balance, to long for something that breaks you open. It is fundamentally tied to lack and difference. Yet in an overly positive and consumerist society, everything is made to mirror us, to reflect our preferences and desires, “thereby flattening them into the Same.”¹⁵ We exist in a world of optimised feedback loops, in which the possibility of encountering the Other is diminished; there is no escape “out of a narcissistic inferno.”¹⁶ The gift of the Other is not comfort, but disruption—a wound that opens. The Other has become scarce, simulated but rarely felt. Into this paradox steps the camera. It functions as a superficial other, a presence that appears to hold mystery. Yet that mystery is shallow, reflexive, and staged. The gaze of the camera doesn’t rupture the self so much as filter it. Through the blue process, you receive yourself marked by the program of the apparatus.
The superficial other cannot offer the full Other that Han longs for, but it simulates it just enough to evoke desire. And in that simulation, there are glimpses of the unknown, of the unconscious, of the placeless thing in myself that is not fully mine. Rather than receiving a gift, I obtain a moment to contemplate: “Indeed, closing your eyes visibly signifies as much […] perception can arrive at a conclusion only by way of peaceful contemplation.”¹⁷ In a world moving at excessive speed, where the sheer volume of distributed information “heightens the entropy of the world,”¹⁸ this process offers a pause… a quiet contemplation of fragmentary incompleteness.
The final facet considers Thomas Metzinger’s proposition of the self as simulation. If this proposition is accepted, the blue process is dramatically reframed. The possibility that “the content of consciousness is the content of a simulated world in our brains, and the sense of being there is itself a simulation”¹⁹ unsettles any stable notion of self-deciphering. But rather than disillusion me, it compels me—offering another way to rewire what self-deciphering might mean, as another lens through which to reframe the search for the self.
Metzinger writes: “Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through the world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our ‘reality tunnel.’”²⁰ The tunnel, then, is the extent of what we get to experience of reality, according to the limits of human consciousness. What the simulation offers is not the negation of experience, but a sobering shift in its framing. The self, under this view, becomes less a discoverable essence and more a navigational interface—a model generated for survival rather than truth. Self-deciphering through photography, then, cannot bypass the tunnel but must acknowledge its architecture. The blue process does not grant direct access to the self, but instead traces the contours of its illusion.
Can the apparatus surmount this? Can it decipher not the self, but a simulated self? These questions attempt to trace the outline of something that cannot be fully known, but is felt. And that shape might be coloured blue: “blue is the colour of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the colour that consciousness becomes when caressed.”²¹ Perhaps this is the reason for my fascination with blue—a fascination destined, like all borrowed colours of the mind, to eventually fade.
AFTERMATH
The blue process is composed of personal speculations, the most intrinsic of which is this: the experience of colour is shaped by both hue and connotation. Hue signals conscious recognition—what is seen, chosen, known—while connotation marks the influence of the unconscious, the felt but unarticulated. This distinction led me to ask what the self is, and how one might begin to decipher it. I became fascinated by the idea that the ego is aware only of consciousness, blind to the unconscious structures conditioning it. So, by appointing blue, rather than green (which I may prefer visually), as my favourite colour, I chose to honour a preference I cannot fully explain. Blue, for me, remains compelling precisely because its appeal feels external to my will.
This gesture initiated the blue process: an ongoing attempt to use photography as a tool for self-deciphering. Of course, this inquiry does not claim that the phenomenon of mind—let alone of being human—can be understood or represented through photography. Rather, it suggests that photography might operate, on a smaller scale, as a kind of consolation. If the self cannot be fully known, perhaps projecting its mysteries onto the photograph offers a way to mitigate the weight of that unknowability.
Central to this process is the notion of the camera as an autonomous apparatus. Instead of seeing it as a passive tool directed by the conscious Operator, the roles are partially inverted. The camera assumes the conscious function, framing and filtering, while the Operator, in surrendering intentional control, opens space for the unconscious to emerge. This is a speculative logic: if we momentarily suspend the Operator’s intentionality, might the unconscious step forward in its place? Or does this simply result in endlessly redundant images?
Still, the apparatus is not neutral. Its autonomy is structured by design, settings, and programmed functions—these, too, carry unconscious traces. Recognising this prevents the image from being mistaken for a representation of the self; instead, it becomes a symbol, something that resists closure and demands interpretation. This interpretive act is crucial. The blue process does not end with the making of an image. Even if the images risk becoming redundant, it is through conscious and intentional reading that they are animated and rescued from that redundancy. In the blue process, beginning and end hold equal weight: the first marks the meeting between apparatus and Operator; the second, a renewed encounter between image and Spectator—who may, once again, be the Operator, now returned in a different role. The apparatus, then, becomes a superficial other: an external structure that allows for a fragmented form of self-encounter. Crucially, it is superficial. Its limitations are continually acknowledged, its visualisations relentlessly questioned.
The ongoing reframing of the blue process eventually led me to a concept that reoriented everything: that the self may not be a core to uncover, but a simulation running within a tunnel of perception. Can such a simulation be deciphered through photography? Perhaps not directly, but maybe it can be navigated. The tunnel, as Metzinger describes, marks the limit of human experience. To trace its contours requires something non-human. And so photography, precisely because it straddles automation and subjectivity, offers a way in.
Across its iterations, the blue process is not a method for locating the self, but a means of circling it—probing the structures, displacements, and projections that give the self its felt coherence. The camera does not reveal what is hidden; it stages an encounter between operator and apparatus, between what is known and what remains withheld. In this interplay, the process becomes a quiet resistance to certainty.
What emerges is not a final image, but a shifting outline. A blur that reflects back the conditions of looking itself. If there is a self to be deciphered, it is one already filtered, shaped, and simulated. And yet, the desire to continue, despite opacity, marks the work as meaningful. Blue, then, is not a solution but a signal. A hue that touches the surface of something deeper, without claiming to reach it, leaving us in a state of perpetual inquiry.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
Recently, there has been a profound shift in my perception of photography—one that has rendered my previous grasp of the medium so distant that I can hardly recall it. This essay lays the foundation for an evolving interpretation of photography as a tool for self-deciphering. It does not aim to make universal claims; rather, it reflects on the visual and conceptual elements that have influenced my current thinking on this abstract yet specific use of the medium.
The theory I present here is a personal exploration, engaging with a small segment of the photographic universe. Referred to as the blue process, it is not a definitive framework but rather an ongoing investigation into self-deciphering through photography.
To set the stage, I want to establish a blue backdrop against which I will consider the kind of “self-deciphering” I am addressing. In doing so, I turn to my recent fascination with the colour blue, which has become central to my thought. I distinguish between hue and connotation—two aspects that inform our perception of colour. While hue pertains to the conscious experience of colour, connotation points to the unconscious influences that often guide our preferences without our awareness. This distinction served as the starting point for my exploration of how both consciousness and unconsciousness might be examined through photography.
The blue process draws from various theories. Vilém Flusser’s concept of the apparatus and Roland Barthes’ attention to photographic meaning contribute to my perspective, as does Han Byung-chul’s idea of the Other. However, it is Thomas Metzinger’s assertion that the self is not a fixed entity, but a simulation, that challenges everything.
As I continue to develop this process, I recognise that my understanding remains in progress. The thoughts presented here are tentative and unproven, reflecting the limits of my admittedly amateurish capacities. Any definitive claims are made in the spirit of ongoing investigation.
The blue process does not present a prescriptive methodology, but rather a conceptual framework. Rather than offering instructions or outcomes, it invites a sensitivity to the making and reading of images as two intertwined gestures. By resisting concrete examples or fixed interpretations, the process remains intentionally open-ended, enabling each practitioner to navigate its stages in relation to their own context. In this sense, it offers not a formula, but a mode of inquiry—both adaptable and contingent.
BLUE
There is a newfound fascination with the colour blue. Much more than before, it stands out. I might even be looking for it. It’s bewildering to be so taken by something that had once seemed unremarkable. Perhaps I first noticed blue’s overbearing presence in my mind when, despite meeting a friend with blond hair—later briefly dyed blue, then black—all I see when I think of her is cobalt blue. The way meaning seems to seep into colour, making it all the more endearing and vibrant, brings to mind William H. Gass: “So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.”¹
When it comes to colour, it might be that involuntary connotations influence the experience of looking at hue. This could be an instance of the unconscious altering the conscious. It’s important to point out that the unconscious is not accessible to us, and its effects, so it seems, go largely unnoticed. Still, there is an incessant need to understand the self, and even if I cannot, I must still try. Such was the case with blue, which ignited my desire to reach toward the unattainable: the unconscious.
To understand the self, I draw on a Jungian interpretation of the psyche as something that “remains an insoluble puzzle and an incomprehensible wonder, an object of abiding perplexity.”² Jung holds that self-knowledge is measured by what the individual knows about themselves, but this knowledge does not include the “real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them.”³ In this light, the self-knowledge one can possess suddenly seems inconsequential when compared with what remains unknown—or so it felt to me. The influence of the unconscious on perception, beginning with colour and extending to something deeper, became increasingly compelling. Trying to understand why blue was becoming my favourite colour opened up the prospect of using photography as a tool for self-deciphering.
Though I’ve used Jung’s concept of self-knowledge as a starting point to explain what I mean by “self-deciphering,” there are some distinctions to be made. Given that “the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents,”⁴ I use the word decipher to signify the attempt to convert the self into a kind of personal language—one tailored to the individual's own way of making sense. The present continuous tense suggests an ongoing, possibly futile, endeavour. The blue process does not generate certainty, but speculation. Knowledge, in itself, feels burdensome: “we know the world only by using representations, because (correctly) representing something is what knowing is.”⁵ Instead, I’m collecting theoretical puzzle pieces about something that may never be represented correctly.
As for the title of this essay, Appointing Blue, it implies a choice. I am appointing blue as my favourite colour, at least for now, because picking a favourite colour is no longer a casual matter. It’s not about what looks pleasant to the eye, but what pulls at my mind. I even enjoy the way it sounds. Blue. Blue.
A SURMISE
There are four facets to the theorisation of the blue process.
First, the camera as an apparatus with autonomy, rather than a subservient machine with little influence over the image. According to Vilém Flusser, the photographer’s primary responsibility is “not to become a function of his or her camera, or the apparatus’s clerk.”⁶ I must tread carefully, then, because my inquiry is this: the externalisation of the unconscious and its contents through a collaboration between Operator and apparatus. The intentional mishandling of the photographic process creates mistakes that materialise as inflictions of the unconscious on the image. Perhaps before expanding on this idea, it is time to reiterate that the nature of my speculations is entirely without empirical measure. It is not representations that I intend to make, but fictions to be interpreted. For example, Daisuke Yokota uses “intentionally crude processing techniques”⁷ to signify his intervention with the image as photographer. He explains that “a photograph without the intervention of human perception is just material.”⁸ These interventions are not fully within the Operator’s control; they fall partly under the prerogative of the camera. The images produced are abstractions—because “images signify […] they provide space for interpretation.”⁹
One critique of photography is that humans have come to rely on images to make sense of the world and, through this reliance, no longer experience reality itself but rather a simulation of reality, shaped by the program of the apparatus. But instead of Flusser’s anxiety over redundant images, I adopt a more sentimental gaze—that of Roland Barthes, who “wants to decipher the meaning or ‘rhetoric’ of the image.”¹⁰
The next facet turns to interpretation, through the interplay of studium and, notably, punctum. The studium is “that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste”;¹¹ it is “a kind of education”¹² that enables the Spectator to access the Operator’s intention. In other words, it is the context. The punctum, on the other hand, disturbs the studium. Created by accident or with intention, it is “that accident which pricks me”;¹³ it is subjective. It is not present in the same photograph for everyone, and even if it is, the detail appointed as punctum varies. It becomes a private sensation, one that allows the interaction with the image to become a personal task of “a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.”¹⁴ The supposed punctum reveals the emotional charge a Barthesian reading can bring to the images that make me linger. Whatever it may or may not be, it emerges as a trace of the unconscious. Through the camera, I attempt to reach this point: collaborating with the apparatus as Operator, becoming the Spectator, and interpreting the images in search of the detail that captivates—or that pierces me open just enough to touch the unknowable. At times, however, nothing surfaces. From here, my inquiry shifts, proposing the camera as a superficial other, and turning toward reflections on eros.
The third facet begins with Han Byung-chul’s conception of the Other, especially in the context of eros. Eros, for Han, is not simply sexual or romantic desire: it is the capacity to be wounded, to be thrown off balance, to long for something that breaks you open. It is fundamentally tied to lack and difference. Yet in an overly positive and consumerist society, everything is made to mirror us, to reflect our preferences and desires, “thereby flattening them into the Same.”¹⁵ We exist in a world of optimised feedback loops, in which the possibility of encountering the Other is diminished; there is no escape “out of a narcissistic inferno.”¹⁶ The gift of the Other is not comfort, but disruption—a wound that opens. The Other has become scarce, simulated but rarely felt. Into this paradox steps the camera. It functions as a superficial other, a presence that appears to hold mystery. Yet that mystery is shallow, reflexive, and staged. The gaze of the camera doesn’t rupture the self so much as filter it. Through the blue process, you receive yourself marked by the program of the apparatus.
The superficial other cannot offer the full Other that Han longs for, but it simulates it just enough to evoke desire. And in that simulation, there are glimpses of the unknown, of the unconscious, of the placeless thing in myself that is not fully mine. Rather than receiving a gift, I obtain a moment to contemplate: “Indeed, closing your eyes visibly signifies as much […] perception can arrive at a conclusion only by way of peaceful contemplation.”¹⁷ In a world moving at excessive speed, where the sheer volume of distributed information “heightens the entropy of the world,”¹⁸ this process offers a pause… a quiet contemplation of fragmentary incompleteness.
The final facet considers Thomas Metzinger’s proposition of the self as simulation. If this proposition is accepted, the blue process is dramatically reframed. The possibility that “the content of consciousness is the content of a simulated world in our brains, and the sense of being there is itself a simulation”¹⁹ unsettles any stable notion of self-deciphering. But rather than disillusion me, it compels me—offering another way to rewire what self-deciphering might mean, as another lens through which to reframe the search for the self.
Metzinger writes: “Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through the world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our ‘reality tunnel.’”²⁰ The tunnel, then, is the extent of what we get to experience of reality, according to the limits of human consciousness. What the simulation offers is not the negation of experience, but a sobering shift in its framing. The self, under this view, becomes less a discoverable essence and more a navigational interface—a model generated for survival rather than truth. Self-deciphering through photography, then, cannot bypass the tunnel but must acknowledge its architecture. The blue process does not grant direct access to the self, but instead traces the contours of its illusion.
Can the apparatus surmount this? Can it decipher not the self, but a simulated self? These questions attempt to trace the outline of something that cannot be fully known, but is felt. And that shape might be coloured blue: “blue is the colour of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the colour that consciousness becomes when caressed.”²¹ Perhaps this is the reason for my fascination with blue—a fascination destined, like all borrowed colours of the mind, to eventually fade.
AFTERMATH
The blue process is composed of personal speculations, the most intrinsic of which is this: the experience of colour is shaped by both hue and connotation. Hue signals conscious recognition—what is seen, chosen, known—while connotation marks the influence of the unconscious, the felt but unarticulated. This distinction led me to ask what the self is, and how one might begin to decipher it. I became fascinated by the idea that the ego is aware only of consciousness, blind to the unconscious structures conditioning it. So, by appointing blue, rather than green (which I may prefer visually), as my favourite colour, I chose to honour a preference I cannot fully explain. Blue, for me, remains compelling precisely because its appeal feels external to my will.
This gesture initiated the blue process: an ongoing attempt to use photography as a tool for self-deciphering. Of course, this inquiry does not claim that the phenomenon of mind—let alone of being human—can be understood or represented through photography. Rather, it suggests that photography might operate, on a smaller scale, as a kind of consolation. If the self cannot be fully known, perhaps projecting its mysteries onto the photograph offers a way to mitigate the weight of that unknowability.
Central to this process is the notion of the camera as an autonomous apparatus. Instead of seeing it as a passive tool directed by the conscious Operator, the roles are partially inverted. The camera assumes the conscious function, framing and filtering, while the Operator, in surrendering intentional control, opens space for the unconscious to emerge. This is a speculative logic: if we momentarily suspend the Operator’s intentionality, might the unconscious step forward in its place? Or does this simply result in endlessly redundant images?
Still, the apparatus is not neutral. Its autonomy is structured by design, settings, and programmed functions—these, too, carry unconscious traces. Recognising this prevents the image from being mistaken for a representation of the self; instead, it becomes a symbol, something that resists closure and demands interpretation. This interpretive act is crucial. The blue process does not end with the making of an image. Even if the images risk becoming redundant, it is through conscious and intentional reading that they are animated and rescued from that redundancy. In the blue process, beginning and end hold equal weight: the first marks the meeting between apparatus and Operator; the second, a renewed encounter between image and Spectator—who may, once again, be the Operator, now returned in a different role. The apparatus, then, becomes a superficial other: an external structure that allows for a fragmented form of self-encounter. Crucially, it is superficial. Its limitations are continually acknowledged, its visualisations relentlessly questioned.
The ongoing reframing of the blue process eventually led me to a concept that reoriented everything: that the self may not be a core to uncover, but a simulation running within a tunnel of perception. Can such a simulation be deciphered through photography? Perhaps not directly, but maybe it can be navigated. The tunnel, as Metzinger describes, marks the limit of human experience. To trace its contours requires something non-human. And so photography, precisely because it straddles automation and subjectivity, offers a way in.
Across its iterations, the blue process is not a method for locating the self, but a means of circling it—probing the structures, displacements, and projections that give the self its felt coherence. The camera does not reveal what is hidden; it stages an encounter between operator and apparatus, between what is known and what remains withheld. In this interplay, the process becomes a quiet resistance to certainty.
What emerges is not a final image, but a shifting outline. A blur that reflects back the conditions of looking itself. If there is a self to be deciphered, it is one already filtered, shaped, and simulated. And yet, the desire to continue, despite opacity, marks the work as meaningful. Blue, then, is not a solution but a signal. A hue that touches the surface of something deeper, without claiming to reach it, leaving us in a state of perpetual inquiry.
NOTES
- William H. Gass, On being blue: a philosophical inquiry (London: Vintage Classics, 1976), 7.
- Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (London: Routledge, 2002), 32.
- Ibid., 4.
- Ibid., 3-4.
- Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 9.
- Sjoukje van der Meulen, Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser’s Media Theory (New German Critique, 2010), 197.
- Dan Abbe, Daisuke Yokota (Aperture, 2015), 78.
- Jean-Kenta Gauthier, How photographer Daisuke Yokota turns pictures into hallucinations (Numéro, 2021).
- Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 1984), 8.
- Sjoukje van der Meulen, Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser’s Media Theory (New German Critique, 2010), 193.
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Classics, 1993), 27.
- Ibid., 28.
- Ibid., 27.
- Ibid., 12.
- Han Byung-chul, Agony of Eros (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017), 2.
- Ibid., 3.
- Ibid., 40.
- Ibid., 50.
- Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 23.
- Ibid., 9.
- William H. Gass, On being blue: a philosophical inquiry (London: Vintage Classics, 1976), 57.