Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This paper investigates the significance of photographs of alleged unidentified flying objects. I am concerned only with photographs that remain unresolved. The intent is not to renter into the debate between skeptics and believers, but rather to examine UFO photographs in terms of aesthetics. Currently, there is no such scholarship. I argue that the dominant frameworks through which UFO photographs have been seen should be discarded. In order to get closer to the significance of UFO photographs they must be analyzed outside the confines of Hollywood, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories. Looking to aesthetics and contemporary photography discourse, a more complex set of possibilities for understanding these images unfolds. UFO photographs reveal themselves to be images that expose a shared condition of all photography – that one need not know what something truly is in order to photograph it. Furthermore, UFO photographs show the epistemic limitations of photography through their inability to disclose information that can act as empirical evidence. If one cannot comprehend this strange phenomenon through the senses or photography, then what can be obtained through reason? This question requires a return to Plato’s Cave. To grapple with the saucer-like shadow on the wall, one must consider what Form it is an iteration of. UFO photographs are particular instances of what can simply be called the Unknown, a Form of which there is no conception of. Thus, allegory becomes the essential function of these photographs as way of picturing an aspect of reality that is not yet known.