Phenomenology of photography and photography as phenomenology

We encounter photographs every day, in papers and magazines, on TV, online, through social media, as well as all sorts of information material. It therefore shapes how we understand the world as possibly photographed (Sontag, 1977). The ubiquity of photography is so prevalent that we don't notice it anymore.

According to Barthes' contemplation on photography (1980), photography is a magical medium, since it is always of the particular and therefore disrupts the temporal flow and spacial logic of ordinary perception. Looking at, for example, the famous photograph The Terror of War, (Ut, 1972), depicting children running from a South Vietnamese attack, we see a particular girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc when she was burned by a napalm bomb. We see that moment in 1972, her pain in that moment. Photography can transport us to that moment, show us that particular girl.
Phenomenology reveals this fundamental aspect of photography.

Moreover, I argue that photography itself can be seen as phenomenological investigation. Some photographic projects (e.g. Spence's A Picture of Health, 1985) reveal the nature of phenomena through the visualisation of what it means to experience the phenomena (e.g. suffering from cancer). Phenomenology investigating how the world appears to us through the eidetic reduction and epoché is a complex philosophical analysis. Photography, arguably can be used to perform similarly, but do so in a much more intuitive manner. Husserl's call to do phenomenology (HUA III) could be achieved through doing photography.