The underwater world not only operates a “conceptual displacement” that leads to rethink long-established paradigms; it generates failures and disruptions of both such paradigms and of the technologies developed to support them. By doing so, water challenges the heuristics of visuality not only due to its biophysical characteristics, but also to how seawater reacts to imagery systems: it easily subverts and destroys imagery technologies (e.g., when water enters a defective camera housing), as a resistance of marine life to human gaze and commodification. Based on one of the author’s photography projects, this presentation takes the example of underwater thermal imagery to explore the heuristics of failures and destruction of imagery technologies in seawater, to better analyze more-than-human resilience to the domestication and dispossession of colonial water politics. Because the temperature of organisms is central in the analysis of their biochemical mechanisms, the temperature of subaquatic species remains closely related to their domestication. While thermal imagery techniques are widely used for recreational fishing in low-visibility conditions, seawater greatly limits the caption of infrared, which makes thermal cameras useless to capture images once fully immersed. Precisely because it fails to properly operate, underwater thermal photography, or “thermography”, appears as a powerful storytelling method that builds an alternate narrative articulated around how water rejects human-induced imagery technique.
“Thermography” is an imagery and storytelling method developed for the book The Thread of the Water (2024) and introduced at the College Art Association conference in Chicago, in February 2024.
Julie Patarin-Jossec 