In 1983, Flusser's first book in German, Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie [Towards a philosophy of photography], was published by European Photography. In 1984, the first English translation was published under the title Towards a philosophy of photography, 1985 the Brazilian Portuguese version Filosofia da Caixa Preta: Ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia. Flusser “wrote and published four original versions, two in German, one in English and one in Portuguese”¹⁾ . Meanwhile, it has gone into its 12th edition and has been translated into 25 languages.²⁾

In February 1981, Flusser took part in a photography symposium at Schloss Mikkeln near Düsseldorf, where he met his future publisher, the photographer and editor of the journal European Photography Andreas Müller-Pohle, who encourages him to write a book based on his lecture (Wie sind Fotografien zu entziffern?). The essay Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Towards a Philosophy of Photography) was written and marked the beginning of an intensive collaboration that lasted for years.³⁾

In his first German-language book publication, Flusser proposes a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics serves him new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser shows how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) goes hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.⁴⁾

Introductory Note – I The Image – II The Technical Image – III The Apparatus – IV The Gesture of Photographing – V Photography – VI The Distribution of Photography – VII The Reception of Photography – VIII The Photographic Universe – IX The Need for a Philosophy of Photography – A Lexicon of Basic Concepts⁵⁾

Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, 96 pages. Internet Archive Scan

apparatus, automaton, code, concept, culture, decode, entropy, functionary, game, gesture, history, idea, idolatry, image, traditional imagination, new imagination, industrial society, information, machine, magic, memory, object, photography, photographer, post-history, program, reality, redundancy, sign, significance, symbol, technical image, text, tool, translation, work

Marc Lenot, Für eine Philosophy of Caixa Preta. Critical textual analysis of the different versions of Vilém Flusser's book Towards a Philosophy of Photography and a short history of its editions. In: Flusser Studies 30, Vilém Flusser and His “Languages”, November 2020, www.flusserstudies.net/lenot-critical-textual-analysis.pdf