Article:

False color/real life: Chromo-politics and François Laruelle’s photo-fiction

This article looks to false color practices within photography, cinema, and media imaging technology, from surveillance to photographic art, and the manner in which they do not remain positioned on separate planes of Truth versus Fiction. In film and media theory, color is not only the problem of the metaphysics of color versus ‘reality’. Film theory realism has also always been concerned with the realness of color practices and social and racial violence, color and death, color and the corpse. In this way, film and media theory draw the line for approaching color imagery on the grounds of chromo-politics, historical, and new. With the conceptual lens of François Laruelle’s ‘photo-fiction’ this article aims to re-think the relation of realism, fiction, and the politics of color imagery through an analysis of ‘false color’ practices. Ultimately, I look to contemporary thermal images and the chromo-politics of contemporary images via employment of Laruelle’s non-philosophy and photo-fiction.