Ten Years Between Vanishing Points: Natasha Chuk on perception, post-photography, and the evolving conditions of seeing and knowing
- Jan 29
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Ten years separate my first book from my second, but they feel less like discrete markers than like points along a looping, iterative path. They represent distinct vanishing points, plural. Their relationship to one another is only revealed in retrospect. When Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects was published in 2015, I was preoccupied with how art approaches what can’t be known directly: death, absence, the physiological and psychic fallout of loss turned into presence. When Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography came together a decade later, the focus had shifted toward media, images, and emerging technologies, yet the underlying structure of my inquiry remained surprisingly intact. Both books are attempts to think through the multiplicity of perception, of experience, and of materiality, and to understand how art mediates what eludes a stable form.
The vanishing point, as it emerged in Renaissance linear perspective, promised order. Formalized by Brunelleschi and Alberti in the fifteenth century, it organized space around a single endpoint, a fixed locus toward which everything on a two-dimensional plane cohered. The convenience of this logic shaped centuries of image-making, even as later movements fractured or rejected it. Modernism splintered the picture plane, and postmodernism exposed the fiction of singular truths. In writing Vanishing Points, I took this perspectival device and insisted on its pluralization to understand not only art but everyday existence. I argued that a single endpoint was insufficient for describing how we move through experiences that have unclear starts and endpoints, with death foremost among them. I imagined a constellation of vanishing points: trajectories that appear to diverge, double back, and stall, yet remain oriented toward many ends and many beginnings. Rather than pictured and easily articulated, they are uneasily felt. Some more than others. In fact, many points remain hidden, some are ignored. Still others are punctuating vanishing points that are impossible to ignore. They sting and mark a new path from which you are unable to return.
Because the subtleties I was trying to identify are difficult to isolate within the density of everyday life, I turned to artworks as case studies, selecting some that make tangible the relationship between presence and absence. The most instructive examples are those that produce perceptual uncertainty, where meaning, content, process, or even form resists immediate comprehension. John Cage’s 4’33”, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, and Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film all operate in this register, withholding resolution and inviting sustained attention to absence, duration, and contingency.
In one chapter, I also dwell on the wraparound mechanic in the video game Pac-Man, describing it as a kind of sanctuary, a crypt-like liminal space where both Pac-Man and the pursuing ghosts can achieve a moment of respite from the chase. The passage hides in plain sight, even when our avatar momentarily disappears into it, making it a threshold between worlds that we only perceive in the abstract forms of anticipation and in retrospect.
At that time, I was interested in the liminal space located somewhere just before knowing. The space of protective ambiguity that precedes certainty that we only recognize in retrospect. The book suggests that we cling to unknowing because some forms of knowing feel more life-altering than others. But that is also the point I wanted to illustrate. In that book, I shared Einstein’s belief in the existence of hidden variables. Even when we want to know in the moment, we’re often unable to fully know except in hindsight. The artworks that moved me most don’t represent death directly, rather suggest or stage encounters with absence, disorientation, and fragmentation. They seem to simulate an approach toward a void or at least cultivate the confusion that characterizes it. Knowing rumbles somewhere beneath this surface but remains unattainable until there’s a point reached of no return, suggesting not necessarily an impasse that marks an end but a beginning of something else. This is a way of suggesting death itself is not only unknowable, it is unfixed as an endpoint.
Nam June Paik, Zen for Film, 1964, 16-mm film, looped. Installation view, Fluxus Festival at Fluxhall, New York, 1964. Photo: Peter Moore. / Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953. Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame.
Today, I suspect I would write that book differently. Perhaps, more fittingly, it would be a book without pages, or without language. Something with an incalculable form. Something closer to Jean Cocteau’s experiments in The Blood of a Poet than to a traditional text. The world no longer affords the same luxury of speculative removal. We are living inside what once could be held at arm’s length. The sensation now is not of approaching a vanishing point, but of being caught within a dense field of them, where every signal feels like it could mark an ending. Still, there is a particular burden and responsibility in sensing these points as they accumulate. The “event” is never singular and never fully perceptible. It’s a chain of acts, decisions, and conditions that move toward an impasse whose boundaries are fuzzy, but which mark the point where things don’t return to their prior configuration. Things like anticipatory grief, I’ve now come to understand, is the body’s way of registering this process before the mind catches up. That chemical reaction is an embodied form of perception. The body’s way of recognizing that something is already changing, even if its form remains unclear.
Photo Obscura emerges from this place of both uncertainty and recognition, though on the surface, its subject appears quite different. Where Vanishing Points grappled with the articulation of death through a dialectic between presence and absence in various created objects, Photo Obscura examines photography’s concealed presence within emerging media practices. In this book, like the first, multiplicity is central, unfolding thematically and oriented around contemporary art examples. I try to locate the photograph in traces, processes, and assumptions rather than in fixed images in an argument that contends that today photography is merely obscured, not erased entirely.
In one example, Diana Velasco’s Face Lift deploys distortion to render her photographic self-portrait illegible to profiling and identification. As the 3D image slowly rotates like a digital death mask, the work reverses interior and exterior perspectives, briefly repositioning the viewer from observer to an intimate, vulnerable proximity with the artist’s deconstructed likeness.
In another example, Richard Carter’s Waveform indexes landscape through fabricated relationships between photography, scientific data, spatial coordinates, and poetry. Beginning with drone images of coastal shorelines, he applies machine-vision algorithms to detect land–water boundaries, then translates these markers into short text fragments that he curates into poems. Such examples illustrate how the book is anchored in the recognition that photography doesn’t exist as a discrete medium. The photographic is both present and absent, and it always has represented the entanglement of the two. Today it’s dispersed across software, simulations, virtual environments, and computational systems, making it a more concealed set of operations that aren’t always visible on the surface.
Richard A. Carter, Waveform (2017-); images courtesy of the artist.
This turn toward the specific medium of photography coincides with my growing interest in quantum thinking and in frameworks like the idea of The Polycene, which resist singular narratives in favor of entangled, coexisting realities and potentialities. Quantum theory’s insistence on superposition—the capacity for multiple states to exist simultaneously—offers a powerful metaphor for creative practice and critical thought. Art, like quantum systems or dream states, is a site where incompossibilities routinely occur, where contradictory realities are not resolved but are held together with tension as their binder, and where many alternative possibilities exist. The Polycene similarly locates the multiplicity of everyday existence in overlapping temporalities, scales, and agencies that resist collapsing into a single story of progress or decline. This new era appears as a crisis, as the effects of everything collide, but entanglements such as these have always existed, most likely at different scales. What’s changed is our ability to see the constellation of vanishing points that were always present.
Seen this way, my two books are less sequential than entangled. I see how they coexist, informing and destabilizing one another. The first lingers in the fuzziness of speculation and the shape of absence; the second confronts absence as a form of obscurity informed by systems of mediation, infrastructure, and of course the play between visibility and invisibility of the photographic. Both books engage the power of the perceptual capacities of things: our own and those of any creative medium. If there is a noticeable throughline between them, it’s a commitment to thinking about the uneasy entanglement of everything in ways that resist the comfort of singular perspectives. Even the book form, typically understood as a singular vanishing point toward resolution, is hopefully destabilized into a more generative space of multiple starts and stops, provoking conversations and debates, creating friction and agreement, and inspiring additional inquiry. My hope is that these books have no singular vanishing point.
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Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography. Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2025. 198 pages. Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects. Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2015. 196 pages.
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Natasha Chuk, PhD is a New York-based media theorist, arts writer, educator, and independent curator whose work examines the relationships between art, philosophy, and creative technologies.