"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."
