Photography after the Human

Photography as a practice of life

But let us start with some futurology. William Bornefeld’s 1996 science fiction novel Time and Light offers an interesting conceptual gateway for our discussion because it considers photography in a postapocalyptic context while also interrogating photography’s powers beyond its supposed ability to represent. The novel is set in an unspecified time, inside a five-mile-long domed city called Fullerton, in which the last survivors of an undetermined nuclear disaster have reconstructed a miniature semblance of the bourgeois society of yesteryear, with all its hierarchies and exclusions. Deemed “The Family of Man,” Fullerton’s residents resemble a bad copy of the people depicted in Edward Steichen’s celebrated 1955 photographic exhibition at MoMA of that same title. The aim of Steichen’s exhibition was to showcase the commonalities among cross-cultural human experience while also promoting the values of pax Americana. In the essay titled “The Great Family of Man” included in Mythologies, Roland Barthes described the exhibition, which subsequently toured to Paris, as presenting a ”moralized and sentimentalized” idea of a community and thus perpetuating a myth of a “human essence,” while also obscuring the historical, geospecific, and ethnic fault lines that divided humanity.¹ Designating such attempts at what we might term “cultural geology” as politically disabling in their misguided search for eternal truths about humankind, Barthes rallied against “the solid rock of a universal human nature.”² He ended the essay with a warning: “I rather fear that the final justification of all this Adamism is to give to the immobility of the world the alibi of a ‘wisdom’ and a ‘lyricism’ which only makes the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.”³

The illuminated domed city of Fullerton in Bornefeld’s novel seems to have been processed through a Barthesian critical filter. Its “Great Family of Man” is revealed as being powered by its invisible underbelly: an underground world full of depraved and dirty workers—very unlike those noble working men and women from Steichen’s images—whose sole purpose in life is to provide fuel and energy for the smooth running of the city above. The postindustrialism of Fullerton is therefore being fed by the steam-and-manpower industrialism of this hidden underground world, which serves as its bloodline. Fullerton’s geospatial arrangements reveal a nexus of sociopolitical issues that structure it. Jussi Parikka points out that the underground lies “at the crux of technical imaginary of modernity” as both “the place of hell”—through the hard labor of mining, excavation, and deadly vapors—and “a place of technological futures.”⁴

Fullerton’s society operates according to a number of prohibitions, the most prominent of which is an absolute ban on photography and other forms of imaging. The justification for this rule is as follows:

It was told that at one time in its early history the dome society had been excessively visual with a great emphasis on looking at things including pictures in printed books; but it was decided a long time ago that a visual society was in a constant state of imbalance and agitation due to stress on the optic nerve, and produced discord, especially harmful in the small controlled dome atmosphere; therefore, visual paraphernalia was phased out and then totally eliminated.⁵

The novel itself is constructed around twelve photographs which we never see, but which hint at famous images from the history of photography in the Western world. Those photographs serve as prompts for various developments in the narrative. Bundled into a package, they arrive one day in the hands of its main protagonist, Doctor Noreen, who violates societal expectations by not reporting his discovery. After having literally seen traces of light, Noreen is pushed to commit further acts of insubordination, which include his descent to Fullerton’s underbelly to shake the dome from the bottom up. At times bizarre in its imagery and less than convincing in its plot, Bornefeld’s book succeeds on a different level: it articulates a defense of the ontology of photography as a zoetic, life-transforming medium, one that can agitate and animate a different life—rather than just critique the present one, the way documentary photography does.

It is perhaps not too much of an overstatement to suggest that, to understand a given society, we should look not just at the images it produces of itself but also at its very relationship to photography and image making. As Joan Fontcuberta illuminates in his aptly titled Pandora’s Camera: Photogr@phy after Photography, “the products of the camera are materials that transcend the merely documentary as a discourse of verification, and take on instead a symbolic value that we do well to analyse in attempting to judge the regimens of truth that every society assigns itself.”⁶ Bornefeld seems to suggest that the survival of photography is vital to the survival of a human society, because images are what can give life back to an enclosed and paralyzed community—although, in themselves, they do not carry any guarantee of a better world. Importantly, this is a very different story of photography from the more common narrative we have inherited from Barthes’s Camera Lucida (more about that in chapter 4), in which photography is inherently marked with death. Bornefeld’s consideration of this survival-extinction dyad with regard to both humans and photographs draws attention to the fact that photography’s powers are never just representational, regardless of whether we are talking about purposeful and staged photographic practice, amateur snapshots, or even automatic recordings by unmanned cameras placed in car parks, on drones, or in the Hubble Space Telescope. In every one of these cases, photography’s power is first and foremost creative: it produces what we humans refer to as “life” by carving out an image from the flow of duration and stabilizing it in a certain medium.

We could perhaps therefore reiterate, building on the argument outlined in this chapter so far as well as in the previous one, that photography is a quintessential practice of life. Photography records life, remembers life, or even creates it, bringing forth images, traces, and memories of the past while also transforming the latter into a different—clearer, more stable, less perishable—version of itself. Attending to this life-forming power of photography, however, involves needing to go beyond the established tradition of understanding perception and cognition in Western culture as agential processes controlled by the human, even if at times delegated to nonhuman automata. It also requires giving up on the molecular notion of the human—and, indeed, of photographs as outcomes of human production—for the sake of outlining instead what we might term a relational ontology of mediation, from which (human and nonhuman) photographers, photographs, and photography itself emerge only through temporary resolutions and cuts. Mediation is to be understood here as a dynamic and hybrid process in which economic, social, cultural, psychological, and technical forces converge and intra-act, producing a variety of temporary stabilizations. Some of those stabilizations will take the form we conventionally understand as “media”: scanners, cameras, photographs. As Sarah Kember and I have argued in Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, which postulates the primacy of the notion of mediation for understanding our human becoming with media and technology, it is “precisely in its efforts to arrest duration, to capture or still the flow of life—beyond singular photographs’ success or failure at representing this or that referent—that photography’s vital forces are activated.”⁷ This inherent “lifeness” of photography has the potential to animate the human. A similar vision is outlined by Bornefeld, both in the novel’s plot and in the author’s note at the end—which describes photographs as having “a life of their own.”⁸

Ruin lust

Figure 3.1 Shane Gorski, *Wasteland*, from the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository set, 2008, Flickr, License: CC BY-ND 2.0.

The sci-fi imaginings notwithstanding, there is yet another meaning of this “after the human” designation encompassed by our discussion, one that paves the way for a more radical imagining of the abstraction of life and death in a temporal sense, while also holding the horror of extinction at bay. I am referring here to the recent proliferation, in art and especially in photography, of the practice of imagining and imaging a certain future “after the human” from the viewpoint of the here and now (figure 3.1). Variously referenced as “ruin lust” or “ruin porn,” such (re)presentations of the vanishing of the world as we know it by artists, and the pleasurable and painful wallowing by viewers in the images of decay that show the world as it soon will be, have some clear historical antecedents. These stretch from the sublime romantic landscapes of ruined abbeys by the likes of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Hubert Robert, all the way through to paintings such as Joseph Gandy’s Rotunda, commissioned by John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, and depicting that bank as a ruin even before it was built.⁹ At the same time, this visual practice has gained a new inflection in a period in which the global economic crisis of the last decade and the impending climate catastrophe have come to be experienced and articulated with an ever increasing intensity: we can think here of the seductive and haunting images of Detroit, a financially bankrupt North American city with a glorious industrial and architectural past, which widely proliferate on the Internet. Incidentally, it is not just the fossil fuels that are said to have become depleted in the current era: according to writer and activist Arundhati Roy, democracy, too, has been “used up, together with the other resources of our planet.”¹⁰ For Roy, the global crisis also entails a crisis of political imagination, signaling as it does the inability to reimagine our current geopolitical formation beyond the tired clichés of our elected governments.

Figure 3.2 “Ruin Lust,” Tate Britain, March 4 to May 18, 2014, screengrab of Tate website by Joanna Zylinska, 2014.

Many accounts and images of the current global crisis—a crisis that extends beyond, even if never exceeds, the domain of finance to embrace areas such as healthcare, air quality, the climate, and politics itself—use the trope described by Ursula Heise as “the rhetoric of decline,” interweaving elegy and tragedy not only to point to the decline of nature but also to signal anxiety about our present culture’s narrative of modernization.¹¹ Brian Dillon even goes so far as to suggest that “Ruins seem … intrinsic to the projects of modernity and, later, Modernism.”¹² Tate Britain’s 2014 exhibition “Ruin Lust” (figure 3.2) inscribes itself in this rhetoric. As explained on the show’s website, the term refers to a long-term fascination with representations of ruination “through both the slow picturesque decay and abrupt apocalypse.” The exhibition was partly inspired by a 1953 book by Rose Macaulay titled Pleasure of Ruins, in which the author contrasted the horrifying ruins that were widely encountered in the aftermath of World War II with the much more pleasant, historical, and historicized ruins upon which nature has exerted its softening touch, such as Pompeii and the Parthenon. The good ruin of the past, “a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings,”¹³ had offered Macaulay a contrast to, and a relief from, the unbearable ruins that spoke of the more recent atrocities. Relics depicted in “Ruin Lust,” from Turner’s Tintern Abbey (1794) through to John Savage’s photographic series Uninhabited London (1977–2008), function as a mournful reminder of the passage of time—individual, historical, and cosmic. The exhibition was framed, both in its publicity and in the actual entrance space of the gallery, by a magisterial image by Jane and Louise Wilson, Azeville (2006), showing one of the many abandoned World War II coastal bunkers along the Atlantic Wall defense fortification in Normandy. A black-and-white photograph covering the whole of the wall facing the entrance to the exhibition space, it depicts a huge building in a state of decay which looks like a squatting giant, the black hole of its entryway resembling a gaping mouth. Shot with a large-format camera to capture as much detail as possible, the image gains a certain visual tenderness due to the layer of vegetation covering the building’s top, like some sort of incongruous thinning hair, or perhaps a hat on top of a giant head. Dismaying as this idea may seem, are we allowed to read this image as a depiction of a moment in time when the wartime ruin has moved beyond its sheer horror, to enter Macaulay’s space of the picturesque and the pleasant? To suggest this may be the case is not to diminish the trauma and destruction generated by World War II, but is only to point out that all sorts of catastrophic events eventually lend themselves to both monumentalization and aestheticization, as a way of containing the shared trauma and moving on. And, to follow this line of thought, if even the images of Nazi ruination or 9/11 destruction (as evidenced, for example, in Joel Meyerowitz’s evocative book of photographs, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive)¹⁴ are now becoming “good ruins” and entering the space of the picturesque (or at least the pictorial), what kinds of horror do they stand in place of? What kind of apocalyptic event would then constitute their “bad ruin” counterpart? Are the good ruins of exhibitions and events such as Tate Britain’s “Ruin Lust” or the British Council’s A Clockwork Jerusalem at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale actually attempts to confront and ward off the total ruination and annihilation of the earth, the human, and life as we know it, in both economic and biological senses?

Visualizing the eco-eco disaster

We can indeed argue that the urgency of the recent set of calamitous events in our global economic and ecological systems, dubbed an “eco-eco disaster” by Tom Cohen and a “great acceleration” by J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke,¹⁵ is precisely what has ushered in this new set of visualization codes and practices—perhaps in an attempt to hold off the political and ecological apocalypse by enclosing and enframing it in a series of horrifying yet ultimately digestible images. Popular culture, especially mainstream film and TV, have long been at the forefront of turning catastrophe into visual entertainment as a form of relief: we can mention classic movies such as The Day the World Ended (1955), Armageddon (1998), and Children of Men (2006), as well as TV series such as ABC’s Invasion (2005–2006). Yet, arguably, something has changed of late: a new sense of total disaster and total obliteration, without any notion of heroism or hope, is being ushered in by more recent productions such as the History Channel’s Life after People and HBO’s The Leftovers. Ecological cataclysms and the irreversible human-induced changes to the structure and dynamics of our planet have also become a frequent aesthetic trope in art, and fine art photography in particular. We can think here of projects such as Andreas Gursky’s monumental studies of commerce, global tourism, and the environment (Dubai World, Bangkok, or Ocean, to name but a few), or the equally large-scale photographs arranged into series titled Oil, Australian Mines, and Water by Edward Burtynsky. These mainly desolate landscapes by Gursky and Burtynsky imagine a world in which the human is no more, although a human artist is still, of course, performing both the imagining and the accompanying imaging. The “after the human” designation, which is one of the main concerns of this chapter, functions in their images predominantly as a certain aesthetic and visual trope. It thus references ruination and extinction as a particular art historical mode of re/presentation and aestheticization. And, like all art historical tropes and trends, despite the irreversibility of the change it depicts, it is likely to pass long before the human has either solved the global economic or environmental crisis—or, indeed, has become extinct. Yet since this visual trope is very much with us at the moment, it may be worth dwelling in and on the ruins for a while, with a view to imagining what could perhaps be described as “better ruination”: not in the sense of Macaulay’s picturesque but rather in an attempt to reimagine our relation to the world just before the ruin, in the little time we have left.

Figure 3.3 Tong Lam, *An outdated and abandoned theme park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province*, 2013. Reproduced with permission.

This is precisely how Jason McGrath proposes to read the work of Canadian-based photographer Tong Lam.¹⁶ Lam’s 2013 book Abandoned Futures: A Journey to the Posthuman World and his exhibition “Unreal Estate” from the same year depict derelict spaces in China: unfinished and abandoned theme parks, shopping malls, and housing projects now overgrown by vegetation. McGrath locates Lam’s deanthropomorphized gaze in the political context of China’s march toward postindustrialization: “A rusted old locomotive, an abandoned factory: some of the modern ruins of Lam’s photos are reminders of a now mostly suppressed alternative modernity, an abandoned future of liberation from capitalism itself.”¹⁷ McGrath reads Lam’s images as an exposition of the failure of the mentality of limitless growth. The coupling of the crisis of the American-Chinese dream of unrestrained consumerism with the human abode’s inability to sustain that dream in all its actualizations also serves as a reminder—one that is issued to us historically located humans—of the deep time that encapsulates and exceeds the temporality of our existence as both individuals and a species. According to McGrath, “The posthuman gaze at modernist ruins reminds us that, no matter how many new objects we produce, consume, and discard, those objects will in many cases far outlive us and the purposes to which we put them. The fake sphinx may go unappreciated by any human observer, but its head will continue to make a fine perch for a bird” (figure 3.3).¹⁸ This look at human history from the perspective of cosmic time need not be seen as a sign of political quietism or planetary-scale existentialist paralysis of the “why do anything if we are all going to become extinct?” kind. Rather, it can introduce a certain humility into our political frameworks, from which a new image of the world, and of ourselves in this world, can then emerge.

Figure 3.4 Dennis Skley, *Time isn`t passing … [Urban Explorer]*, 2012. Flickr, License: CC BY-ND 2.0.

This mode of (re)imagining the known is not restricted to popular culture or to fine art. The subcultural practice of urban exploration, as investigated in Bradley Garrett’s 2013 heavily illustrated book Explore Everything: Place-hacking the City, relies on photography not just to document the visited ruins but also to depict the “after the human” landscape that for now remains obscured from public view, but which offers a chilling premonition of things to come, for all of us (figure 3.4). Garrett—who is both an urban explorer and an academic—rebuts accusations that urban exploration is just a rite-of-passage pastime for affluent youths, for whom ruins are slightly edgier and more exciting versions of theme parks, places they can always leave in order to return to their cozy upper middle-class abodes. Instead, Garrett foregrounds a darker and more philosophical dimension of this practice. “Residing in the ruin, or even the construction site,” he writes, “triggers affective associations, leading to a crisis of memory as one realises that everything is always already being lost. The reliance on photography, then, is an effort to capture not that transition, but the experience of being present in the flow of time.”¹⁹

Imag(in)ing a postcapitalist world

Garrett’s statement can help us comprehend a unique role that photography—as a device capable of stopping time and conjuring things out if it—plays in the human engagement with ruination. The philosopher of duration Henri Bergson claims, “We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect.”²⁰ Time cannot be grasped, then, either with a camera or the intellect, because to capture time truly would mean to stop it. Instead, time can only be experienced and enacted, repeatedly. The imaging process presents itself as primary and ontological here. We could perhaps go so far as to say that through photography the world becomes something for us, and then does it over and over again. We could then ask, together with the anthropologist Tim Ingold, “Could it be that images do not stand for things but rather help you find them?”²¹ This idea can be traced back to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, in which he argues that our experience of the world, which is made up of sensations, takes place through images. “And by ‘image’ we mean,” explains Bergson, “a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’”²² To put this another way, the creative impulse of life takes life beyond representation as a form of picturing what already exists: instead, life is a creation of images in the most radical sense, a way of temporarily stabilizing matter into forms. Photographic practice as we conventionally know it is just one instantiation of this creative process of life. If, after Bergson, time, aka “duration,” equals creative evolution and hence life itself,²³ we are once again presented with the vision of photography as effectively enacting and allowing one to sense, rather than just represent, what I earlier called “lifeness.”²⁴ It may seem paradoxical that it is by capturing something as potentially lifeless as ruination and decay that the practice of photography is able to create this life-enhancing sensation. Yet it is not only by sensing life but also by being able to envisage its alternative arrangements and articulations (the way Bornefeld’s novel and Lam’s photographs also attempt to do) that the photographic trope of ruination can lend itself to a planned world-making purpose—which is another name for politics. As Garrett suggests, drawing on Susan Buck-Morss’s account of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, “the image of the ‘ruin’ is emblematic not only of the fragility of capitalism but also of its inevitable destruction. … As people become more curious about what a post-capitalist world would look like, urban explorers can supply imaginative depictions.”²⁵

These combined spatiotemporal senses of the “after the human” designation addressed here arrange themselves into an articulation not only of a particular visual sensibility but also, therefore, of a certain ethico-political responsibility. Visualization becomes a way of engaging with a political and existential problem of great magnitude—even if it does not yet offer any specific and definitive solutions. It is precisely here that art and photography have the potential to become truly ethical (rather than just moral or, worse, moralizing and moralistic), as they can depict and outline this human-nonhuman relationality qua responsibility. This line of thought develops from my book Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene,²⁶ the aim of which was to think seriously about human (and nonhuman) extinction, and about the kinds of ethics and politics that are ushered in by the horizon of extinction. It is thus linked to an attempt to imagine what is still principally an abstract concept for us: not just the death of ourselves as individuals but also the death of all of us as a species. The Anthropocene can serve as a thought device to help us visualize the multiple event of extinction—but also to intervene in the timeline of the extinction of various species. The term itself names a new geological period in which the human’s impact upon the geomorphological and biological setup of planet Earth has become both momentous and irreversible, via processes such as excavation, deforestation, urbanization, and globalization. It is also a period that is experiencing a mass extinction of various species as a result of anthropogenic factors. Even though scientists are still debating the accuracy of this term, many philosophers, cultural theorists, and artists have adopted the Anthropocene as a driving concept in recent initiatives: Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt ran a two-year Anthropocene Project in 2013–2014 which culminated in the publication by the MIT Press of a three-volume set, Grain Vapor Ray: Textures of the Anthropocene,²⁷ while the Serpentine Gallery in London put on an event in 2014 called “Extinction Marathon: Visions of the Future.” Both of these attempted to investigate, by means of critical discourse as well as artistic practice, how the understanding of planetary processes can offer inspiration to reimagine the ways in which humans are living on earth.

I should mention that some have questioned whether the concept of the Anthropocene is politically conservative, as it seemingly apportions blame to this nebulous entity called “the human” without providing a more detailed account of the inequalities of power and capital involved in our having an impact upon the planet. Yet obviously not all humans, or even all groups of humans, have exerted the same amount of agency in enacting these changes: just as global derivatives traders have contributed more to the economic crisis than, say, subprime mortgage buyers, international oil petroleum companies have contributed more to the eco-pollution of the Niger Delta than have local farmers. As Etienne Turpin indicates in the introduction to his edited collection Architecture in the Anthropocene, the Anthropocene is a kind of grand leveler, because it “implicates all humanity equally in the production of a geophysical stratigraphy that is, and has been—since the ‘beginning’ of the era, which is also a matter of debate—asymmetrically produced according to divisions of class, race, gender and ability.”²⁸ Rather than read this statement as depoliticizing, we could see it as pointing to an inherent element of justice that such a deep-time perspective entails: in the Anthropocene framework, even the very rich cannot escape extinction. At the risk of sounding flippant, I want to suggest that bringing this framework to bear on global capitalism is the only way to show definitively that this particular systemic arrangement will inevitably die out! I realize this statement may fill some readers with glee and others with horror, and that not everyone’s horizon of conceptual or spiritual fulfilment involves the death of capitalism. Yet wherever one stands politically, the concept of the Anthropocene can become a powerful tool in shaking up politics-as-we-know-it, across the whole political spectrum. This is because—as many scientists have pointed out by highlighting the increase in the earth’s temperatures, the rise of ocean levels, and the depletion of fossil fuels—carrying on as before is no longer an option.²⁹ Again, no matter what one’s political stance, it would be hard to deny that the Anthropocene thesis is almost a perfect antidote to the politics of the status quo: it is also the first science-backed account of the death of the postindustrial capitalism of the globalized world—as well as the death of that world.³⁰ This is not to suggest that we should all therefore just sit back and wait for extinction to happen, or extinguish all hope for material and political change in the near term, contemplating the ruin porn while wallowing in our own transience. Still, extending the temporal scale beyond that of human history by introducing the horizon of extinction can be an important first step in visualizing a post-neoliberal world here and now, even if further steps will require us to shorten this scale again. In a 2003 essay for the New Left Review, Fredric Jameson recalled a saying that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” yet he suggested: “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”³¹ The neo-cyberpunk landscapes of China’s Pearl River Delta and London’s South Bank, with their empty money boxes in the sky for some future investors, are a premonition of the world after the human, in which a row of decaying high rises will be overgrown by posturban vegetation. Yet to say this is not to indulge in some more ruin porn. The framework of the Anthropocene can instead be mobilized to help us take some steps toward imagining what Rory Rowan has termed “a better geo-social future,” beyond both the “secularized eschatology of catastrophism” and the “sunny machismo” of much of current Left politics.³²

The temporal scaling of photography

As already mentioned, numerous attempts have, of course, been made to domesticate the abstraction of extinction (including, or rather especially, human extinction) via all sorts of science fiction and artistic visualizations. And photography has been particularly prolific in engaging with the Anthropocene. Indeed, I want to suggest that photography is uniquely placed when it comes to exercising what might be termed the geological sensibility and reimagining the eco-eco disaster. There are two reasons for this. First, the activity and presence of light as an enabler and enforcer of temporary stabilization and as a marker of the passage of time offers a different perspective on the problems of extinction, climate change, and the depletion of natural resources. As discussed above, photography allows us to apprehend time as duration precisely by making incisions in its flow: it gives us a concept of the flow, while also enacting incisions in it. We could suggest that photography becomes a supplement to process philosophy in that it foregrounds moments when things stabilize, when they become things. Even though these moments of stabilization and isolation are temporary and impermanent—no matter whether they are enacted on a mirror-like surface of metallic silver, paper covered with silver halide, or a CCD sensor—they scale down the “deep time” of nonhuman history to the human measure of duration and perception, while also reconnecting us to a temporal flow of matter and energy. Photography thus becomes a device for us to look at the world, a world we are constantly making (and unmaking). Significantly, light not only represents change in the world but also becomes a carrier of that change: we can think here, for example, of Nadav Kander’s photographic series Dust (2014), which captures the radioactive ruins of secret cities on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia. These “empty landscapes of invisible dangers,” to use the artist’s own phrase,³³ feature dilapidated or collapsing buildings, with overgrown shards of concrete arranging themselves into absurd apocalyptic sculptures. Enveloped in gentle pinkish-bluish haze and glow, the cities of Priozersk and Kurchatov are an inversion of William Bornefeld’s Fullerton. Strangely encysted in domes made from beautiful dispersed light, they contain radiation, contamination, and ruination. Because light is always coupled with dust, clouds, rain, and other elements, it becomes visible to us humans in this very coupling.³⁴ As James Gibson puts it in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, “We never see light, only illuminations.”³⁵ In Kander’s series, photographs become not just carriers of traces of light but also reminders of our deadly solar economy, with its inextricable link to fossil fuels. (The next chapter will develop this point by tracing the parallels between photographs and fossils, in an attempt to rethink our relationship to light, the sun, and the energy sources at our disposal.)

There is also another sense in which photography yields itself particularly well to zooming in on the “after the human” perspective. This has to do with its inherently nonhuman ontology and status, whereby, as already intimated in chapter 2, the human-driven practice conventionally known as photography is part of a wider “photographic condition.” Photography has always been nonhuman because it has been shaped by what Vilém Flusser has identified as “the photographic apparatus” that supposedly “lies in wait for photography”³⁶ and that leaves an algorithmic mark on it—one executed by the machine, the cultural conventions of photographic representation, or human photographers’ DNA. This nonhuman trace is not decisive—that is to say, it does not determine which images will or will not be taken, or whether they will be taken at all, but it does affect the so-called nature of both photographic technique and photographic practice. The photographic condition whose existence I postulate refers to various living and nonliving things—such as, say, satellites in the sky or cells in our body—participating in the process of imaging across many levels and scales. As mentioned in the previous chapter, biologist Lynn Margulis claims that the principal characteristic of all living organisms is their ability to perceive, i.e., to recognize and make an image of something. Imaging is therefore positioned—not just by Margulis but also by many philosophers (and proto-philosophers) of posthumanist thought, such as Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Claire Colebrook—as a fundamentally creative process of life. Seen in this light, photography can be said to be ontological, or world-making, establishing as it does what I have earlier termed the “photographic condition,” which exceeds human photographic practices. It is this dual proposition—that, since its very inception, photography has always been nonhuman, and that the human-driven practice conventionally known as photography is part of a wider photographic condition—that underpins my effort to think photography “after the human” (i.e., beyond its traditional humanism and human-centrism). Therefore, rather than understand the photographic projects under discussion in this piece (or, indeed, any other photographic works) as complete(d) photographs to be inspected and interpreted, we should think of them as nodes “in a matrix of trails to be followed by observant eyes.”³⁷ Through this idea, we are introduced to a different mode of understanding artistic practice, beyond a split between viewer and image, mind and world, and into a dynamic and ongoing movement of intra-actions. That movement, according to Ingold, “is nothing less than life itself, and it is the impulse of life that gives rise to the forms we see.”³⁸ If all life is imagistic or photographic, we do not actually need photography to enact it for us. Yet photography in its various guises, both amateur and artistic, is particularly well placed to bring this image-making condition of life to light. Looking at the photographs that imagine the world “after the human” as discussed in this chapter, but also arguably looking at any other less apocalyptic photographs, “[w]e cannot help but imagine these scenes as eventually having no human observer at all; rather than a modern subject apprehending such objects, there will be only the objects themselves ‘prehending’ one another,” as McGrath writes.³⁹ In spite of my earlier reservation, I seem to have returned here to Barthes’s argument outlined in Camera Lucida, in which photographs of other humans serve as reminders of their inevitable death. Seen in the Anthropocene framework, photography does indeed remind us of the passage of time across larger scales: it brings home the fact that there will be a time not just after the life of our mother, say, but also after the life of any other human on earth. Yet, in a twist to Barthes’s argument, photography also incises time to bring forth things, here and now: it therefore both makes life, and can make life better.

But how can photography perform this role with regard to the “eco-eco” crisis discussed in this chapter? Arguably, this kind of total yet distributed event can never be looked at just from outside: it can only be sensed and apprehended. Even though the “after the human” imagery analyzed so far can potentially act as a trigger for various humans to intervene in the precarious conditions of planetary life, as already said, it also poses the danger of impeding the understanding of the crisis by abstracting it into a series of limited photographic tropes: “emptiness,” “abandonment,” “eerie landscape,” “ruin.” With this in mind, let us take a look at some more interventionist attempts to deal with the issue of climate change, where photography is being mobilized not just to imagine the Anthropocene but also to halt it.

How would you photograph a mammoth?

The first category of images I want to focus on relates to what could be described as representationalist “rescuism”: an attempt to prevent extinction with a techno-fix. The resurrection biology project is a case in point. This movement, proudly embracing a conservationist agenda, has featured prominently in the media due to its plans to revive the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), which became extinct in the early twentieth century. The possibility of bringing back mammoths has also been raised. Perhaps unsurprisingly, photography has been instrumental in selling the idea of de-extinction to the public. In March 2014, the New York Times Magazine published a series of de-extinction images by Stephen Wilkes, headed by the ominous announcement, “The Mammoth Cometh.”⁴⁰ Wilkes is an American photographer who, interestingly enough, is principally known for his photographs of ruined landscapes and abandoned structures. His foray into species rescuism resulted in a series of stunning photos of several now-gone animals, all looking uncannily alive. No doubt keen for the public to know that the production process did not rely on any computer-generated imagery but only used traditional photographic techniques, plus a mastery of light, Wilkes was happy to discuss his method openly. And thus we learn that the image of the passenger pigeon (extinct in 1914) was taken in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, while the Tasmanian tiger (last spotted in Tasmania in 1930) came from the Mammalogy Department at the American Museum of Natural History, with the stuffed animal pictured against the background of a printed transparency from the photographer’s prior visit to Australia. The eponymous woolly mammoth, extinct about 4,000 years ago, was captured at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia. “The fun part of the project,” confessed Wilkes, “was pushing the boundaries of what is real and what is fake, creating an illusion. As well as understanding the tricks that make the mind think something is alive.”⁴¹

In producing the images, Wilkes resorted to old-school lighting and background simulation tricks to achieve the effect of liveness. Yet in the digital era, photography increasingly merges with visualization and data rendering, using algorithms and earlier representational frameworks to envisage new ones. This is why the seemingly absurd question of how you would photograph a mammoth is offered a nonabstract answer in the form of de-extinction images. Photography is tasked in de-extinction efforts with providing us with images of the life forms we have lost but seemingly want back. The problem with the de-extinctionist mode of thinking is that it sees organisms as individual entities that can simply be reinserted into various environments, rather than as mutually constituted with them. It thus slides over the issue of our human responsibility toward the biosphere by focusing on singular successes of the survival and revival of “charismatic megafauna”: the useful and the cute.⁴² Ignoring the complex relations and processes that organize cross-species populations, the de-extinction project reduces any efforts to supposedly “conserve” and bring back certain species to a human exercise in species vanity, a capital-fueled effort to beget life in a godlike manner. Matter is reduced here to a mere substrate for human creation, albeit one that requires a good dose of venture capital for this process of creation to be carried through.⁴³ Photography, in turn, becomes a mere visualization tool in this game of techno-fixes, losing its lifeness in an attempt to beget life.

The very last pictures in the universe

So how can we reimagine and reinvent life (and death) otherwise, beyond the instrumental, the narcissistic, and the pointless? How can we move beyond representationalism in photography to imagine the Anthropocene better? I would like to see these as more than just technical questions that call for an engineering solution. Instead, in what follows I want to explore the practical possibility of ushering in different kinds of images that exceed the rather conservative efforts of bio-resurrectionists. American artist Trevor Paglen poses similar questions by way of framing his 2012 project The Last Pictures. Citing biologist Susan Oyama, Paglen wonders how we can envisage and capture the abstraction that is the ecological collapse given that “the things that most threaten us are those for which there are no images.” He asks:

What does a picture of global warming look like? (A terrified polar bear on a piece of melting ice?) What does rampant resource depletion look like? (A clear-cut rainforest?) What sort of picture signifies ecological destruction? (An aerial image of an oil spill?) What is a photograph of economic inequality? (Portraits juxtaposing the lives of rich and poor?) What does a picture of capitalism look like? (A factory spewing filth into the sky? A day trader in front of computer terminal?)⁴⁴

The Last Pictures, developed in collaboration with the Creative Time agency and a number of engineers and scientists, involved sending into space a golden disk etched with one hundred images that are indicative, even if not representative, of what we understand as humanity. Attached to the EchoStar XVI communications satellite, the disk thus became “a future alien artifact.”⁴⁵ For Paglen, the project is not “a grand representation of humanity” or “a portrait of life on earth,” but rather a “collection designed to transcend the Anthropocene and to transcend deep time itself. A collection of pictures designed for the time of the cosmos.”⁴⁶ Paglen knows the chances that some future civilization will find this artifact are almost nil. However, the point of The Last Pictures is not to convey something as complex and simultaneously abstract as humanity—even though the history of photography and the history of space travel are full of examples of similar misguided ambitions, from Edward Steichen’s exhibition “The Family of Man” to Carl Sagan’s collection of images sent with the Voyager mission and dubbed a “Rosetta Stone for aliens” by author Mike Davis.⁴⁷ For Paglen, the gesture is more meaningful than any future act of interstellar deciphering, because the very idea of meaning “itself breaks down in the vastness of time.”⁴⁸ Nothing manifests the abstract scales of time as poignantly as a plastic coffee cup which, Paglen comments, “is meant to be sipped for a few minutes but its Styrofoam takes more than a million years to biodegrade.”⁴⁹ The plastic cup then becomes another “hyperobject,” to use Timothy Morton’s term (i.e., an object that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”).⁵⁰ Alongside the photograph of the fake sphinx from Tong Lam’s photographs, “unappreciated by any human observer” even though “its head will continue to make a fine perch for a bird,”⁵¹ the image of the Styrofoam cup serves as a time machine for us humans, one that helps us not only to imagine ourselves gone but also to see the limitations of our own “this-worldly” horizon and perspective.

“Photography after the human,” understood in the multiple senses engaged in this chapter, must not be seen as a pointless intellectual or artistic exercise. Rather, it is an important ontological and ethical challenge, as it can help us create, here and now, a vision of a world which is not human (i.e., which is not of or for the human). Built upon the abstraction of our human death and eventual extinction, a world picture of this kind shatters the traditional images of this world, along with those representational practices that have driven the humanist and human-centric tradition of photography and image making. Claire Colebrook, one of the most interesting thinkers of extinction—and of the human restrictions on being able to think oneself out of and beyond extinction—outlines a posthumanist theory of imaging that goes beyond any kind of melancholia or mourning. She writes:

A certain thought of delimited extinction, the extinction of humans, opens up a variability or intrusion of a different side of the image. This is a geological, post-anthropocene or disembodied image, where there is some experimental grasping at a world that would not be the world for a body, nor the world as body. … In the era of extinction we can go beyond a self-willing self-annihilation in which consciousness destroys itself to leave nothing but its own pure non-being; we can begin to imagine imaging for other inhuman worlds. That is to say: rather than thinking of the post-human, where we destroy all our own self-fixities and become pure process, we can look positively to the inhuman and other imaging or reading processes.⁵²

The introduction of that inhuman perspective will allow us to reorient our embodied human eye that is stuck in its own present spectacle by cutting into the flow of time and speculating about this flow’s future direction.⁵³ In liberating vision from the constraints of the embodied human eye, with its established set of visual relations and the limited directionality of its outlook, a possibility arises of glimpsing another setup, or rather, of glimpsing it differently. This seemingly minimal intervention (when compared, say, with direct action or political engagement) can actually have earth-shattering consequences, because it plants in our human minds a radically different set of images and imaging practices, one that transcends the subjectivism of the human eye. Unseeing ourselves and what we are calling “the world” in this way must be a first step in any kind of concrete and responsible reconfiguration of our here and now.

3 Photography after the Human

After what?