From the representation of space to the space of representation: modern visual research

The subject matter of this study is the evolution of means of social space visualisation. Photography is seen as a kind of visual data and a way of research in the visual research system. The visual material created by photography requires correlation with various symbolic theories and perceptual concepts that go beyond the scope of artistic material to the sphere of various social practices. The aim of the article is to trace the evolution of the relationship between the image and the reality of photography and to demonstrate the transformation of the aesthetic value into the social one. The article analyses the interdisciplinary nature of visual studies and the problem of the "purity of fields" of visual sciences. The concepts of Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault are considered, where photography is presented as a product of discourse, a visual representation of ideological values. The authors propose their own principle to work with visualisation: the visual image is presented as a phenomenon of consciousness inscribed in the horizon of a complex system of interactions. In this system, corporeality, sociality, psychology and other anthropological projections are conditions, not means of expressing meanings. Such a visualisation model suggests working with the "idea" of measuring a certain reality in accordance with an invented scale, rather than with its metaphor or allegory. The implementation of the authors' approach is exemplified by the image of Che Guevara in the photography and painting of Andy Warhol. Visualisation is analysed as a methodology of perception and expression, i.e. creating an image as the bearer of an idea and reading the idea by creating an image. Together with this, the manifestation of the complex process of converting the aesthetic into a social, psychological or economic phenomenon is revealed. The authors come to a conclusion that photography is an efficient, compactly organised and hermeneutically open way of conveying a message. The main difficulty in the study of social reality is the transformation of communication processes. Methodological photography is an attempt to fix unstable and dynamic phenomena of social reality, present in the visual image forms of social relations, identity, semantic and functional spaces. Photography created a system of visual rhetoric and viewing techniques. A photographic image can be considered as an instrument for morphogenesis of anthropological and social phenomena, a "device" for revealing the stable order of the relations it creates.

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