Unthinking Photography is a strand of The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme, an online platform for mapping and responding to photography’s role in contemporary culture.

The title of the platform indicates a departure from Victor Burgin’s 1982 book ‘Thinking Photography’ and acts as an invitation to reconsider the ways we perceive photography today. In order to understand the contemporary principles of representation, we suggest an unthinking of photography from its traditional conceptions.

The system of representations based on ideology, historical and social factors, is today expanded by the politics of algorithms, the impact of social media platforms as well as the practices of intelligent machines. Our understanding of the photographic image and the world as a whole is now based on a complex set of techniques, significations and coded relations between the digital-computational, the institutional and the individual.

Visit unthinking.photography to explore the Digital Programme's commissions, articles and incidental interests.