The Devouring Eye: Photography and the Mouth

In this provocative essay, academic Olivier Richon invites a reconsideration of how we relate to images, rethinking the act of looking through the language of appetite, taste, and consumption.

The Devouring Eye: Photography and the Mouth is a provocative essay by Swiss photographer and academic Olivier Richon which rethinks the act of looking through the language of appetite, taste, and consumption. Drawn from a series of influential lectures delivered during his twenty-five-year tenure as Head of the Photography programme at the Royal College of Art (1997–2022) – a period during which the course shaped an entire generation of photographers – the book presents a meditation on the camera as both eye and mouth: an apparatus that ingests the world in order to produce images.

 Framed through a psychoanalytic lens, Richon proposes that photography is less a neutral act of observation than a form of visual incorporation. If looking maintains distance, the mouth abolishes it. The camera becomes a devouring organ, where the object is dissolved, digested, and made into an image. The desire to see becomes entangled with the desire to consume. Through this reading, photography is revealed as an insatiable medium – one that satisfies and frustrates our appetite for representation in equal measure. The Devouring Eye invites us to reconsider how we relate to images, and how deeply they live in us.

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