Building on the argument of the previous chapter on photography after the human, I now propose to focus on the concept of extinction as a reference point against which we can think the ontology of photography and its agency. In what follows, I will consider what photography can do with and to the world, what it can cast light on, and what the role of this light (or, more broadly, of light as such, seen through the photographic lens) is in approaching questions of life and death on a planetary scale. Under the umbrella of “the Anthropocene,” the previous chapter dealt with imagining the irreversible changes to the bio- and geosphere brought forth by the human, changes that are expected to precipitate the disappearance of the human as a species. It also discussed some of the ways of imaging ecological disasters in visual arts and, specifically, in photography—as both a warning against environmental excesses by humans and a call for us humans to consider our political responsibility for our future. I suggested there that envisaging and portraying the world after the human is a conceptual device that could help us come to terms with our transience as individuals and as a species, while also placing before us the urgent task of having to slow down the speed of human (and nonhuman) extinction, and the processes that lead to it, while there is still time. The aim of this chapter is to slow down this imaginary passage toward the vanishing of the human and of life as we know it in order to consider what it would mean to dwell under the horizon of extinction, and to envisage what we are calling the world “after extinction,” in a different sense: not at a time when various species, including the one we are narcissistically most invested in—ourselves—have disappeared, but rather at a time when extinction has entered the conceptual and visual horizon of the majority of global citizens in one way or another (figure 4.1). Extinction will thus be positioned as a looming affective fact: something to be sensed and imagined here and now.1
Figure 4.1 Joanna Zylinska, still from Exit Man, 2017.
Thinking photography under the horizon of extinction will allow me to draw two temporal lines in the history of this particular medium: one extended toward the past, the other—toward the future. If we consider the history of photography as part of the broader natural-cultural history of our planet, as I propose to do here, we will be able to trace parallels between photographs and fossils, and read photography as a light-induced process of fossilization occurring across different media. Seen from this perspective, photography will be presented as containing an actual material record of life rather than just its memory trace. But I will also go back to photography’s original embracing of the natural light emanating from the sun to contemplate to what extent photographic practice can tell us something about energy sources, and about our relation to the star that nourishes our planet, and thus, about life as solar survival. I aim to do this via an engagement with photographers who have consciously adopted the horizon of extinction as their workspace—from the nineteenth-century geologist-photographer William Jerome Harrison through to contemporary artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Alexa Horochowski. I will also look at the postdigital practice of Penelope Umbrico, in which the work of the sun has been taken up as both a topic and a medium.
How to grasp geological change
In a certain sense, we have always lived in a time “after extinction” and hence under its horizon. In a paper published in 2008, US scientists David Wake and Vance Vredenburg reminded the scholarly community that five mass extinctions had taken place during the history of our planet, each time wiping out significant populations of living beings. The first one supposedly occurred “during the late Ordovician period, some 450 million years ago, when living things were still mainly confined to water.”2 The most devastating mass extinction took place in the Permian period around 250 million years ago, while the most recent and familiar one—which wiped out the dinosaurs and the ammonites, among other species—arrived “at the close of the Cretaceous period.”3 Having analyzed extinction rates among amphibians across geological epochs, Wake and Vredenburg concluded that “an event of a similarly catastrophic nature was currently under way.”4 This event-to-be, brought to the awareness of a wider public by science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert in her eponymous book, has gained the moniker “the Sixth Extinction.”
All these scientific attempts to identify and count extinctions notwithstanding, it is worth emphasizing that extinction is primarily a process rather than an event: it is an inextricable part of the natural selection that drives evolution. Indeed, on studying the marine fossil record, David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, paleontologists from the University of Chicago, argued as early as 1984 that, “in addition to the five major mass extinctions, there had been many lesser extinction events.”5 This is why geologists also talk about “background extinction”—a relatively prolonged course of action unfolding across scales of cosmic time, with the average “background extinction rate” of mammals roughly calculated as 0.25 per million species-years.6 Mass extinctions are instances during which the rate of this process is considerably disturbed, i.e., when a “significant proportion of the world’s biota” is eliminated “in a geologically insignificant amount of time.”7 Mass extinctions can therefore be described as moments of intensification on the timeline of continuous expiratory duration. They are significant not only because they represent a curious scientific anomaly but also because of their consequences for the biological makeup of our planet. In what seems to be a reconciliation between the earlier position on extinction as a gradual process called uniformitarianism and catastrophism, present-day geology “holds that conditions on earth change only very slowly, except when they don’t.”8
Even though we have always lived “after extinction,” extinction did not enter our human conceptual spectrum until the eighteenth century. As Kolbert points out, “Aristotle wrote a ten-book History of Animals without ever considering the possibility that animals actually had a history.”9 Brought in to provide an explanation for the existence of fossils for which no living correlates could be found, the concept of extinction “challenged predominant Christian notions of the Great Chain of Being in which Nature was understood as a complete whole, created by God without gap or imperfection.”10 Curiously, the theory of extinction, or of the existence “of the world previous to ours”—as outlined by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier at the turn of the eighteenth century—was established as a fact several decades before the acceptance of evolution. Even more curiously, Cuvier actually opposed the theory of evolution. It was only with Darwin that extinction started to be seen as part of the evolutionary process, although, unlike his rivals at the time, Darwin himself foregrounded the “smoothness” of this process rather than the geologically significant disruptions to it. This checkered history of the acceptance of the concept of extinction explains why the horizon of extinction under which we currently find ourselves is epistemologically precarious. Indeed, awareness of extinction as a bio-geological fact does not seem to have become fully embraced by the human population—or it has perhaps just receded to our collective unconscious. Biologist Ilkka Hanski claims that our present grasp of significant geological and environmental transformations is limited due to our “cognitive incapacity to perceive large-scale and long-term changes.”11 And, as “the apparent stability of the current state of the world is deceiving our senses,”12 we have not only failed to develop a responsible long-term response to climate change but have also so far foreclosed on the possibility of ushering in any kind of cosmic geopolitics. “Most of the time,” writes Hanski, “we only perceive and worry about what is going on around us, although we occasionally spare a thought for the relatively near future.”13
This is why the looming prospect of the human-influenced Sixth Extinction is something we can so easily remove from our consciousness, even if we have heard the facts, seen the diagrams and simulations, and studied the data. In this context, dwelling under the horizon of extinction without turning our gaze away from it presents itself as an ethical task, I suggest, as well as a condition of any meaningful long-term politics that exceeds the parochialism of the current parliamentary and nation-state political models. But if we are to devise a truly cosmic political project—for the humans of here and now, but also for their human and nonhuman descendants—we need to force ourselves to combat our cognitive and sensory limitations in order to grasp extinction not just as a concept but also as a set of material conditions. The exercise in imagining extinction, including the extinction of our own species, undertaken as part of this chapter, could perhaps be a first step in this process. Naturally, there is something self-defeating about this exercise in philosophizing across cosmic scales: it forces us to acknowledge that, after the extinction of the human, once the rats or the microbes have inherited the Earth, there will be no one to do philosophy or art—at least in the way we humans have shaped these practices. I do not mean to suggest that the event of human extinction will be more dramatic for the ecosphere as a whole than the previous extinctions (dinosaurs will, of course, have “cared” much more than we do about the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, which we have branded the “first”); rather, I wish to reintroduce the human standpoint into the theorization of extinction as a concept and a problem. I am proposing to do this not in order to inject a dose of humanism into our debate but precisely in order to avoid what Donna Haraway has criticized as a “view from nowhere”—a view which ends up smuggling back the (usually white, straight, male) human into the debate under the umbrella of its supposed nonhuman perspective.14 With this reservation in mind, I would like to pick up the exhortation issued by the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to “think of the event of extinction not as destructive or final, but as generative,”15 and to consider what happens to writing, theory, and philosophy—but also to art and photography—as vehicles for enabling a radically different set of arrangements for the world (i.e., a radically different politics) after thinking the event of extinction. Jan Zalasiewicz, a convener of the Anthropocene Working Group at the International Commission on Stratigraphy, claims that the extraordinary geological significance of our current period in which the human has become an agent of geological change will be reflected in the fossils left to future generations.16 Kolbert aptly highlights this idea with this rather humbling image: “a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”17 Geological significance always implies the insignificance of any event when it is seen on a cosmic scale.
Geomedia
The material manifestation of this geological significance is of particular interest to me here precisely because it allows us to confront the transience of our human needs, attachments, desires, and memories with the more permanent record of human and nonhuman life that endures in time. If we think in terms of deep history, we can say that the past leaves an imprint of itself in the rocks, or even—although this may perhaps still seem to be an association too far—that the past photographs itself. In what follows, I will argue that the link between fossilization and photography is more than just a metaphor and that this conceptualization can tell us something new both about the photographic medium and about its conditions, which are also the conditions of our existence: light, energy, the sun. This proposition brings us back to one of the key lines of argument of the present chapter, and of the book as a whole: namely, that photography as a conventionally recognized human practice is just part of what we earlier termed the photographic condition of the universe.
Thinking about media in geological terms inscribes itself in what Jussi Parikka identifies as the wider “drive toward geological and geophysical metaphors in media arts and technological discussions.”18 This drive can be explained by the fact that science itself “implicitly perceived the earth as media,” analyzing fossils as it did, and still does, in terms of “records,” “indices,” and “biofilms.”19 Writing, reading, and interpretation therefore seem to reside at the very heart of what have become known as the earth sciences.20 Indeed, John Durham Peters explains that for both Darwin and his close friend Charles Lyell—known as the founder of geology—“the earth is a recording medium,” even if a “profoundly fallible one. At best it inscribes ruins, enigmas, and hieroglyphics; at worst, blank stretches of oblivion. In their conviction that history can be memorialized only in fragments, Lyell and Darwin form one strand in a modern conversation about the nature of media inscription.”21 For Peters, such historico-geological interpretations inevitably involve distortions that result from temporal transmissions across deep time. He reminds us: “Knowledge is necessarily historical, even in sciences where history might seem irrelevant. The universe is a text, a distorted text, that comes from afar—a classic hermeneutical situation.”22 This conclusion should not be misread as an attempt to “reduce” everything to textuality, the way proponents of materialist thinking sometimes tend to dismiss references to language, but should rather be seen as an intimation that the universe presents itself to us through the tropes, tools, and media we ourselves have forged as part of our becoming-human. (It may indeed present and reveal itself entirely differently to different species or classes of beings, but our knowledge of that presentation will be limited to the material and conceptual tools at our disposal, including our very concept of “knowledge.”) For this reason, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, Gary Hall explains that the currently championed opposition between textuality and materiality is actually something of a red herring, because “a written mark, for it to be capable of being understood, must have a sense of permanence. This means it must be possible for it to be materially or empirically inscribed. In short, the condition of writing’s very possibility is the material.”23 It is thus impossible to separate the materiality of photography from what our human history has designated as “photographic practice,” with all of the values, ideas, and narratives about it—to which I am also contributing with this text, of course, even if my book is also an attempt to expand the concept of photography beyond its association with that historically specific human activity.
Photography as “drawing with light” has been intrinsically connected with inscription from its early days, yet the actual process of making a mark on the surface was originally seen as a function of a nonhuman agent. In the aptly titled The Pencil of Nature, one of the first commercially available books of photography, initially published in installments between 1844 and 1846, William Henry Fox Talbot writes that “the plates of this work have been obtained by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper. They have been formed or depicted by optical and chemical means alone, and without the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing. They are impressed by Nature’s hand.”24 Significantly, it is the human-specific “art” aspect of the practice, one associated with a unique, historically acquired skill, and not its “drawing” part, that Talbot highlights as remaining in opposition to human activity. The leaving of marks can be cultivated, but, as Talbot himself discovered in the context of his self-avowed inability to draw well, nature beats the human in precision. As illustrated by the examples of images of landscapes, people, architecture, and still lifes included in The Pencil of Nature, the eye of the camera is both more accurate and more powerful than the human eye.25 Talbot was very much aware of the fragility of the resultant photographic recording; indeed, he put much effort precisely into trying to reduce this fragility and to fix an image on paper. But the very idea of light acting as “the pencil of Nature,” making semipermanent inscriptions to be detected and interpreted by others, positions photography in its nascent state alongside the then newly emergent discipline of geology (as Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published between 1830 and 1833), resulting in photographs being seen as thin fossils.
Let us dwell for a moment on this link between photography and geology as different forms of temporal impression by turning to the work of William Jerome Harrison, a nineteenth-century English scientist, teacher, and writer. Harrison authored two seemingly unrelated volumes that reflected his personal and professional interests: A Sketch of the Geology of Leicestershire and Rutland (1877) and History of Photography (1887).26 In his intricate reading of Harrison’s work, Adam Bobbette shows how, for Harrison, “photography and geology are constituted by similar processes.”27 Full of painstaking detail but perhaps rather tame conceptually, Harrison’s prose in History of Photography occasionally raises from the everyday to quasi-sublime heights in an attempt to say something bigger about the material at hand. And thus, among the thorough accounts of the different methodologies of the dry and wet photographic processes, Harrison boldly pronounces that “There is nothing new under the sun—especially in photography.”28 This link is not just metaphorical: “Harrison characterizes the protagonists of the art form as apprentices of impressions. According to his assessment, ‘impressioning’ is a process as ancient as the tanning of human skin under the sun, or the bleaching of wax by the sun. In each case, the sun has created an impression on a body. For Harrison, this was the earliest and most basic form of photography.”29
Specifically, Harrison looks at the working processes of one of the many simultaneous inventors of photography, Nicéphore Niépce. We can see a clear link between photography and fossilization in Niépce’s account of photography (called heliography, or “sun-writing,” by him), in which light “acts chemically upon bodies” and “augments the natural consistency of some of these bodies,” “solidifies them even; and renders them more or less insoluble.”30 This link becomes even more evident in Harrison’s noting that “Niépce studied lithographic forms of image reproduction, the geological implications of which are evident: litho [sic]31 is Greek for stone, and lithography is the process of imprinting an image onto a stone. … Niépce considered, radically, that light could be substituted for human labour as the agent for copying images into stone.”32 We could conclude that Harrison saw the history of photography as literally a geological history. Peters makes this point even more explicitly, arguing: “Harrison’s discovery is this: light’s transmission is also a recording. The endless record is found in the motion of light through outer space. The transmissions of light across the cosmos constitute a mobile archive. Recording (saving time) and transmission (bridging space) are indistinguishable in his picture.”33 Harrison therefore can be described as the first narrator of the nonhuman history of photography. Indeed, in the closing words of History of Photography, he considers the photographic process to be part of the geological history of the Earth, pointing out “how beautifully it exemplifies the theory of evolution, process rising out of process.”34 Photography is thus revealed to be also coupled with extinction. And fossils lie at the very origin of the history of photography in yet another and more literal sense: one of the first photographs presented by Niépce’s competitor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre as evidence of his newly discovered photographic process featured rows of fossils (figure 4.2). Daguerre’s 1839 Shells and Fossils, showing deep-time artifacts carefully arranged into a sculptural grid reflecting light at various angles, placed photography in its very nascence between science and art, while also hinting at its geological entanglement.
Figure 4.2 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Shells and Fossils, 1839. Public domain.
In making the connection between photography and fossilization, and thus extinction, Harrison not only pinpoints the nonhuman element of the photographic inscription, but also seems to intimate that photography has always been there, in cosmic deep time. It “just” needed to be discovered and then fixed for a little longer—rather than invented. If photography and fossilization are both practices of “the impression of softer organisms onto harder geological forms,” then photography is not a new process but, instead, a “modern, mediated extension”35of the ancient-long “impressioning” activity enabled by light, soil, and various minerals. The human element comes into the picture, literally, as the “apprentice to impressions enabled by the technical-material apparatus of the camera, plate, chemicals and light.”36 As Bill Anthes points out, this process of nonhuman impressioning by light was also “demonstrated, with gruesome effect, by the shadows of passersby etched permanently into the granite buildings near the hypocenter of the blast when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War Two; the blast of light imprinted permanent photograms of passersby onto buildings and pavements.”37
Photography beyond the tomb
This step into deep time—on Harrison’s part, but also my own—can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the history of photography as part of human history, a history that is driven primarily by human motivations and needs. The key representative of that humanist approach to the history of photography would be André Bazin’s argument in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in which he links photography, along with other plastic arts, with the “practice of embalming the dead,”38 as a way of achieving victory over time by stowing the body away “in the hold of life.”39 Even though something approaching a geological vocabulary of “impressions” enters Bazin’s discourse, with photography being described as “a kind of decal or transfer,” resembling “a fingerprint” and contributing “something to the order of natural creation,”40 he ultimately connects the process to the human’s “deep need” to have the last word in the argument with death. It is precisely this understanding of photography as both an attempt to overcome death and a constant reminder of it that set the tone for the discourse on this medium in the twentieth century. No text made this link more explicit and conserved it for future scholars of photography more strongly than the celebrated Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes.41 Barthes’s slim volume is a protracted meditation on the death of his mother, prompted by seeing a photograph of her, and, more broadly, on images as affective devices that become placeholders for melancholia and mourning. Yet this narrative, as well as the very choice of images in Camera Lucida, arguably end up confining photography to a permanent struggle against death. The photographic medium ultimately becomes here a memory aid and a mausoleum, with life preserved as a death mask. An attempt to tell a “deep history” of photography as part of the history of the Earth—a history that transcends human desires and needs—the way I have endeavored to do here, through Harrison’s work, can allow us to outline a different approach to the photographic medium and process. If we recognize that the Earth is “a source of invention through the entanglements of form and matter,”42 while the sun is a source of energy and ultimately life on this Earth, we can read photography as partaking of their vibrant and life-giving (rather than just life-conserving) properties.
Fossilization of time
From the perspective of cosmic time, fossilization can be seen not just as the preservation of life but also as the transmission of its evolutionary principle, with all the nonlinear unpredictability and diversity it entails. It is therefore perhaps apposite to try, together with Claire Colebrook, to “Imagine a species, after humans, ‘reading’ our planet and its archive: if they encounter human texts (ranging from books, to machines to fossil records) how might new views or theories open up?”43 For Colebrook, such a text would operate as “a force or disturbance not felt by the organism but witnessed after the event in its having always already occurred.”44 One attempt to envisage such an archive was undertaken by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto in the exhibition “Aujourd’hui, le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive]” held at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014.
The concept of fossilization underpins the whole of Sugimoto’s oeuvre. As the artist has explained in a TV interview with PBS:
Fossils work almost the same way as photography: as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography. So, that’s why I am very curious about the artistic stage of imprinting the memories of the time record. A fossil is made over 450 million years; it takes that much time. But photography, it’s instant. So, to me, photography functions as a fossilization of time.45
An attempt to preserve time as a record of the past that nevertheless carries a trace of life is arguably part of all photographic practice. Yet in Sugimoto’s work, fossilization as a way of recording time gains a unique visual and conceptual inflection, becoming more than just a figure of speech. As explained in a leaflet accompanying his show “Still Life” (London, 2014), the fossil is both a historical fact and a photographic conceit for the artist, serving as “a living record and point of departure into history, crystalizing a moment in time into a singular object.” Sugimoto is principally known for his restrained, minimalist images that record the passage of time: for example, his series called Theaters (1978–present), shot in old-style cinemas, captures a whole movie in a single frame by leaving the shutter open over its duration and thus rendering it as a glaring white rectangle; while Seascapes (1980–present) features the lines of the horizon as places where water meets air. Then there are his Dioramas (1976–2012), which engage the topic of fossilization even more explicitly. The series consists of elegant black-and-white images of the natural world, taken with a large-format camera inside natural history museums. What on the surface looks like classical images of open vista landscapes and wild animals is actually a very subtle rendering of the artifice that goes by the name of “nature.” The painted backgrounds, 3D foregrounds, and stuffed fauna create a slightly uncanny vision of wildlife, from which “the only thing absent is life itself”—not because photography mummifies and entombs life per se, but because the object photographed had been dead for a long time. Appropriately, thirteen large-format photos from the Diorama series were exhibited at London Pace Gallery (November 21, 2014–January 24, 2015) in the aforementioned show called “Still Life,” with its title a playful riff on the art historical desiccation of life from life.
Figure 4.3 Website of Palais de Tokyo promoting Sugimoto’s exhibition, screengrab by Joanna Zylinska, 2015.
“Lost Human Genetic Archive” dispels with the minimalism and visual elegance of Sugimoto’s earlier work by presenting the visitor with an extremely rich and diverse collection of objects amassed by the artist over time and arranged into a series of tableaux.46 The exhibition addresses the topic of the Anthropocene, so readily taken up by various artists today. Yet Sugimoto’s project seems to have sprung from more than just a recent fad: after all, he has been interested in ways of constructing, and responding to, “the natural world” since the early days of his practice. The recent Anthropocene sensibility seems to have just intensified this interest, or cast different light on it. “Intensity” is indeed the sensation that most adequately sums up the experience of visiting the show. Placed somewhere between Dante’s Inferno and an enormous toy store (with both Barbie dolls and sex dolls on display!) (figure 4.3), the cavernous basement of Palais de Tokyo was a delightful space to explore, presenting a Wunderkammer for the age of extinction in which new things popped up from every crevice and around every corner, on their way to going out with a bang. Each little room in the show staged an alternative “just after the extinction” scenario, throwing light on different aspects of the process. “Yes, we are going to die,” Sugimoto-the-roguish-curator-of-doom seemed to want to remind us, “but what a blast we’ve had—and yet,” he frowned, “look what a mess we’ve made.” (Just think of the plastic needed to make all these different dolls!) This dual emotion of playfulness and melancholia was conveyed by the conflicting visuality of the setup: the visitors wandered around in a corrugated metal mazelike structure, constantly presented with amazing objects: the Shinto god of thunder Kaminari-sama, astronauts’ poo, fossils from the Cambrian to the Eocene, one of Sugimoto’s own Seascapes. In a statement that was perhaps a variation on the established trope of the sublime in art, whereby the work evokes pleasure and pain for aesthetic as well as moral effect, Sugimoto mischievously declared: “Imagining the worst conceivable tomorrows gives me tremendous pleasure.”47
There is more to this phrase than just a manic hysteria in the face of an event about which we cannot do much, a kind of Anthropocene-era laughter at a time when tears seem like a belated response to the done deal. Many times in the show, in the context of various end-of-life scenarios, Sugimoto reiterated the statement, “The world died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know … ” As the Guardian critic Adrian Searle has explained: “Echoing the beginning of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger, which begins with almost the same words (‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday … ’), the phrase keeps recurring, leitmotif and chorus. Swapping ‘mother’ with ‘world’ implies a final, universal end of fertility and the breaking of the primal bond. It’s also fun.”48 The exploratory fun offered by the artist to the visitors to this Lunapark of the Anthropocene, full of excess and toys and stuff everywhere, carried with it a serious message: “Where is this human race heading, incapable of preventing itself from being destroyed in the name of unchecked growth?”49 With this opulent exhibition, the artist still managed to put his trademark minimalism at the center of the work—but this was minimalism conceived as an ethico-political decision, not an aesthetic affectation, one that was aimed to challenge our (including the artist’s own) desire to consume, conserve, and collect.
The contestation of both modernism and the accompanying minimalism as merely aesthetic choices has become a powerful trope for many other artists who are consciously working under the horizon of the eco-eco disaster. US-based artist Alexa Horochowski’s visually restrained if conceptually rich project Club Disminución (Club of Diminishing Returns), instigated during her residency at Casa Poli in Chile in 2012–2013, offers an interesting counterpart to Sugimoto’s opulent archive. Club Disminución takes to task the modernist dream of an ideal society which was to be arrived at through developments in technology and engineering in addition to the progress of the human mind. Casa Poli, a minimalist, cement cube, stands on a jagged cliff overlooking the Pacific, over a narrow cave, thus both foregrounding and suspending the differentiation between the (hu)man-made and what this human calls “nature,” between architecture and land. In an essay on Horochowski’s project, Christina Schmid suggests that “Casa Poli reads both as a tribute to Le Corbusier’s stark architecture and to the site itself, strangely in keeping with a place swept clean of all but the most resilient vegetation.”50 By blurring the boundaries between development and evolution, Horochowski has opened a rift in the modernist narrative of the seamless unification between citizens and their environment, with the promised Corbusian order resulting in a haunted space, exposed to the elements. Staying in this modernist masterpiece, literally perched at the edge of the world, the artist polluted its visual and conceptual purity with the objects and materials found outdoors: rubbish, fossils, kelp. This last material provides a conceptual thread for the Club Disminución show, first staged in 2014 at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis—one of the many places of traditional industrial production now regenerated into “cultural industries” zones. Kelp (Durvillaea antarctica) or cochayuyo, as it is called in Chile, is a shore seaweed that resembles a thick cable and that arranges itself into unusual quasi-sculptural tangles. Attracted to its rubbery texture and its strange beauty, Horochowski started collecting the plant in large amounts during the early stages of the project, and then hung it in various places in the white modernist cube of Casa Poli. As a plant that could easily pass for a technological object, cochayuyo thus became an inspiration for her to interrogate the intertwining of nature and culture, extinction and obsolescence. The “diminishing returns” refers in part to Horochowski’s seemingly pointless activities such as straightening the kelp, drying it, and fitting it into cuboid shapes.
Figure 4.4 Alexa Horochowski, from Club Disminución, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
The visitors to Horochowski’s exhibition at The Soap Gallery were greeted by large-screen videos showing this cable-like product, with images cut and mirrored on screen to form a kaleidoscope of poetic movement. Rippling and revolving before our eyes, the videos offered a poignant reflection on the regurgitation of naturecultures, always with diminishing returns. In the show, the products of nature and culture were rendered indistinguishable in what became a meditation on human pursuits in a world that escapes human control the more we try to order and own it. These were accompanied by another playful take on modernist visual art: cubelike structures which may have been made of kelp, cable, or metal wire. Even if we touched them, we were not entirely sure of their material. “Natural objects, flotsam, and ‘naturalized’ garbage, combined with studio-generated objects” arranged themselves into what the artist has described as “a post-human natural history of the future,” whereby “a fossil of a credit card [one of the most intriguing objects in the show (figure 4.4)] heralds a post-consumer future, beyond the era of the Anthropocene.”51 This particular artifact raises an intriguing question: what will future generations make of the fossils of those small embellished plastic rectangles that the humans of the late capitalist era have endowed with so much value? Yet Horochowski offers us more than the familiar lamentation over the passing of man and his worldly wealth. Schmid writes that the artist’s “more-than-vaguely vaginal imagery suggests a gendering of the dialogue: macho modernism’s tragic-heroic quest for mastery”52—so evident in the jeremiads by the various Anthropocene-era male prophets of doom and gloom, who seem to take delight in pronouncing our imminent death53—“quavers, about to be engulfed and swallowed up by an entirely different sensibility.”54
Club Disminución envisages a future beyond the human. Just as in Tong Lam’s photographs (discussed in chapter 3) of the fake sphinx’s head, unappreciated by the human, that makes “a fine perch for a bird,”55 this is a future when piled-up kelp hints at “a life beyond human purpose.”56 The project thus becomes a quintessential example of “art after the human,” still appreciated “as art” from our human position of here and now, yet appreciated precisely for its placement against the horizon of extinction. In its playful reflection on the passage of time, Club Disminución seems to be “encouraging the United States to join the club of formerly great nations and have-beens who lament the waning of past glories. Celebrating diminishing economic opportunity anticipates the twilight on the horizon: come, have a seat amid the lengthening shadows.”57 Yet Schmid insists—and I would agree with her—that “Club Disminución is not a depressing show,” although it may be a melancholic one, disturbing and disorienting as it does our typologies and classificatory systems. “Calmly and not without humor … , Horochowski proposes that we dare look into the dark,” Schmid concludes. “We can face the sunset, her work argues. Club Disminución gathers in the fading light and dwells, affectionately, in the lengthening shadows of the human age.”58
On how to face the sunset
So, if we humans can never face the sun, what does it mean for us to be able to face the sunset? This question has been addressed, although from a slightly different vantage point, by photo artist Penelope Umbrico, perhaps best known for her large-scale project Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr (figure 4.5). Begun in 2006 (when “sunset” was the most tagged word on the image-hosting website Flickr), the project explores ideas of originality and replication in the culture of online sharing. The artist zooms in on a snapshot she finds that features a sunset, cuts out the sun from it, resizes it, and adds it to the ever growing grid of burnt-out white globes (a testament to the majority of users’ relying on their cameras’ automatic exposure, without compensating for the contrast of this particular scene) placed against an orange-red background. These sun tapestries are then displayed as large printouts on gallery walls, but they also return to the Internet in different guises—as small grids, a screensaver, a set of virtual postcards available in the virtual environment Second Life.
Figure 4.5 Penelope Umbrico, Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, 2006–ongoing. Screengrab by Joanna Zylinska, 2015.
Umbrico’s principal interest is not the banal visuality of the sunset but rather participation in the collective practice of sharing something you cannot claim authorship over. She also admits to being interested in the sun as our light source, and in the transformations this light source is undergoing, as both image and matter:
I thought it peculiar that the sun, the quintessential giver of life and warmth, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D … and so ubiquitously photographed, is now subsumed to the internet—this warm singular object made multiple in the electronic space of the web, and viewed within the cool light of the screen.59
Alongside her exploration of digital environments, Umbrico’s concerns are aligned with the traditional perception of photography as a practice of drawing with light, and with the energetic transformations its geological actions undergo on the Internet. In what sounds like a playful rebuttal of the more solemn tenor of certain philosophical propositions about the death of the sun, Umbrico pronounces that “the sun is dead but we make our own light”60—and then goes off to rephotograph the suns from Flickr as displayed on the screen with her iPhone, and to explore the new light effects produced in the process. The result is a follow-up project, Sun/Screen (2014), in which sunset-like hues merge with a moiré pattern caused by the superimposition of the pixel grids, meshes, or dot patterns upon an image. The image then emits an uncannily beautiful light, which does not belong to the sun any more, but which is not entirely ours either. Yet our human perception, with its specific visual apparatus and its color recognition capabilities, is required to acknowledge this very denaturalization of the sun into a moiré pattern. In other words, the denaturalized sun needs the human body to experience this denaturalization: otherwise, the process and the concept, and even the artwork, do not make sense—even if they can still take place beyond or outside the human.
Umbrico’s seriously playful projects can be seen as an unwitting response to the philosophical problem posed by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his essay “Can Thought Go On without a Body?,” first published in 1987 and included in The Inhuman. Lyotard declares that the “sole serious question facing humanity today”61 is the solar explosion that awaits us in 4.5 billion years, as a result of which “everything,” including thought which can think this “everythingness,” will come to an end. The sun’s death presents itself to us as the ultimate event of extinction and thus as the ultimate sublime. It stands for the most dramatic and final horror vacui, the horror of there being nothing at all, but also for the end of the sublime as the end of “the human,” and of the human’s philosophical horizon, with its acquired terms of reference. As Lyotard points out, “after the sun’s death there won’t be a thought to know that its death took place.”62 Yet the universe of course will “know” about this death; it will “see,” “record,” and no doubt “respond” to it, but in a language that far exceeds human communication models and structures. Having outlined this somewhat bleak yet still rather remote prospect of the total annihilation of life, Lyotard then proceeds to mock the efforts undertaken by the cyberneticists of technocapitalism to “make thinking materially possible after the change in the condition of matter” by shifting life to other galaxies in order to liberate it from the throes of the dying sun. This process seems desperately grotesque as, for Lyotard, embodiment constitutes the very condition of thought: our “software”—mind, philosophy, language—is codependent on, i.e., constituted by and constitutive of, our hardware (the body). However, imagining the solar demise—that is, conducting philosophy under the shadow of not just individual human death but also the extinction of humankind—reminds us that the Earth is a “transitory … arrangement of matter/energy.”63 It also casts different light on our “local” human wars and conflicts—not to mention “philosophical debates” and “passions.”64
The serious tenor of the essay changes when Lyotard adopts a persona he calls “SHE” in the second part of the piece. As Jerry Aline Flieger puts it, “‘She’ insists that a certain human capacity is associated with a field of vision that is not the sweep of satellite surveillance but which is limited to a human sphere.”65 Even if we see embodiment as epiphenomenal rather than fundamental in the development of the human, SHE allows us to recognize that, rather than entertain fantasies of extricating human intellect from its material shell, we would be better off getting to the bottom of the desexualized yet so-very-gendered dream of disembodied posthuman thought. From this point of view, the actual disaster that should concern us would involve the disappearance not of the solar system as our matrix of reference but rather of the body, i.e., the extinction of the human as we know it—while we are still around. Accusing philosophers of extricating matter from their writings, Lyotard reminds us at the same time that the materiality of the human and of the universe as we know it needs to be read alongside its technicity, with matter being taken “as an arrangement of energy created, destroyed and recreated over and over again, endlessly.”66 He pinpoints:
As anthropologists and biologists admit, even the simplest life forms, infusoria (tiny algae synthesized by light at the edges of tidepools a few million years ago [now termed Protista]) are already technical devices. Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulatory effect of behavior—that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment, so as to assure its perpetuation at least. A human being is not different in nature from an object of this type.67
Lyotard thus reads the emergence of life in early microorganisms as a technical process. With this, he goes beyond the humanist logic of originary technicity that has shaped the work of many other French philosophers, such as Bernard Stiegler, whereby it is the human that is seen as constituted by, and emerging with, technicity (fire, tools, language). For Lyotard, technicity is already the condition and driving force of primordial life, long before the emergence of the human. Picking up on this idea, I want to suggest that the process of the emergence of life also reveals itself to be inherently photographic, because light is needed to initiate photosynthesis, i.e., to make a lasting change on an organism, and then to trigger further changes. Yet, even if we continue pursuing this expanded understanding of photography as a nonhuman process that exceeds human acts involving cameras and photosensitive material (as we have been in this book so far), we are nevertheless returned here, with Lyotard, to the phenomenological experience of light cast upon a human body, located on the Earth which is still being lit by its middle-aged sun. Indeed, for Lyotard, corporeality is the condition of knowledge but also of the phenomenological experience that enables and conditions openness, generativity, and generosity—and that allows for the transmutation of the technical action of transmitting and receiving information into an ethical act. This returns us to the issue of the human’s inability to face the sun, yet still having to take on the task of facing the sunset. The death of the sun, the universe, and the extinction of everything we know and do not know is thus repositioned here from an ontological to an ethico-political problem. Being able to face the sunset also means coming to terms with the problem of energy—and of the depletion of resources not only in the solar domain but also in the more parochial, terrestrial (or, more specifically, subterranean) realm. Being able to share the sunset, as Umbrico does, hints at the possibility of thinking, even if not yet actually implementing, a more generous, less exploitative, mode of engaging with those resources.
Fossil nonsense
Figure 4.6 Joanna Zylinska, still from Exit Man, 2017.
It is precisely humans’ (mis)management of energy sources as fossil fuels that is referenced as one of the symptoms of the Anthropocene, a state of events that has resulted in the change of the composition of the atmosphere—and thus in the alteration of the nature of the light that reaches us through it. As Kolbert writes, citing the chemist Paul Crutzen (the original author of the term “Anthropocene”), “Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled.”68 Facing the sunset is therefore a way of suspending what Finnish philosopher Tere Vadén has called “fossil sense”:69 an assumption that, because things have been a certain way for the last 150 years—with the intertwined logic of economic growth and fossil fuel exploitation shaping our modern way of life—they will always be this way. Fossil sense is therefore actually nonsense: it is an example of thinking that encapsulates the “derangements of scale”70 and that involves a forgetting of the deep time of history, fueled by myopic self-interest and species narcissism (figure 4.6). Vadén claims that our lives are so intertwined with fossil fuels that “[o]ur desires are the desires of oil, our dreams the dreams of coal.”71 The modern human is himself fossil-fueled, with the very core of not just his physical but also his economic and sociopolitical identity being shaped by hydrocarbons. To extend the concept and metaphor we have been working with, we can go so far as to suggest that, while our own bodies are made of the (same) starstuff, they now also carry a record of industrially processed hydrocarbons: shards of coal, remnants of oil. Or, indeed, that we ourselves have become a photograph—and a fossil—of our way of life. As Antti Salminen puts it in his poignantly titled essay, “Photography in the Age of Fossil Nihilism,” “When a life form lives off fossil fuel, it will gradually become fossilized itself.”72 Salminen continues:
There is something distinctly un-dead about this image [of modern man being “made of oil from top to toe”]: if it is the case that the modern humane and self-conscious identity was based on an enormous volume of ancient metabolic waste from (marine) organisms, the Western man modernized the world using energy generated from the countless deaths of non-human beings. Ultimately, behind this image too lies the sun’s gaping madness, the source of all the earth’s energy, excluding tide, geothermal energy, and fission. A culture based on subjective individuality is structurally dependent on the vast amounts of energy, which it consumes entirely subconsciously, in volumes that a human being, left to his own devices, could never hope to match.
In other words: the subject cannot be sustained through manual labor alone. The subject’s very existence and ongoing survival is contingent upon energy borrowed from oil, a light distilled from death. In order to have the energy to be a subject, to be modern, we humans must sift through layers of ancient, non-human death. The modern man, in his current individualized incarnation, is, quite literally, a fossil brought to life by the death of the sun.73
Living under the cloud of oil fumes and global pollution, like characters from William Bornefeld’s novel Time and Light inhabiting a domed city of Fullerton discussed in chapter 3, we seem to have forgotten about the sun. Grand as this proposition may sound, I want to suggest that photography can be mobilized to address the present fossil crisis in two ways: by expanding the temporal perspective from which this issue is normally seen (or not seen, as the case may be), and by helping us outline a different, less deadly solar economy. Some claim that photography can most easily undertake this task by serving as a record of the terrible damage done to the environment. We can reference here, for example, the series called Oil by Edward Burtynsky, which features large-scale images of oil fields in Azerbaijan, the United States, and Canada; discarded or burning tire piles in California; and oil refineries. These predominantly bird’s-eye view images of what, from above and afar, look like digitally enhanced landscape paintings for the HDR age,74 with their rich colors, billowing clouds, and a remarkable amount of detail, are intermingled with equally large images of ruined car factories, shot face-on. Burtynsky admits that what began “out of a sense of awe at what we as a species were up to” has ended up as a meditation on our conflicting relationship to oil “as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat.”75 This kind of representational art is no doubt important in being able to visualize environmental destruction and our damaging relationship to various sources of energy, including the sun. Yet there is also a danger that these conventionally beautiful images, even if shot “under the light of the black sun,”76 will actually cause what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called “a loss of perception,” and thus perpetuate our forgetting about the sun—with beauty acting as an anesthetic against the urgency of the environmental situation.77 As the increasing proliferation of images of disaster and suffering in various media testifies, there is no evidence that perception is a trigger for (moral) action. Indeed, sentimentalism or moral outrage aside, visual oversaturation may actually lead to nonaction. Scientist Ilkka Hanski argues that, due to the way our sensual and cognitive apparatus has evolved, we humans “are only able to perceive a small region of space and a short length of time.”78 We could therefore conclude, perhaps a little crudely, that evolution has made it impossible for us to truly see evolution—and hence also extinction: or rather, that once we have seen it, it is very easy for these kinds of long-term events to disappear from our visual and conceptual horizon.
Thus, we should not overestimate the role of documentary and representational photography that takes environmental issues as its topic. To state this is not to argue for photography’s inherent weakness, however. Indeed, the argument of this chapter—and of the book as a whole—is that photography is a quintessential practice of life, not just in the sense that it records our lives nonstop, on both a micro and a macro level, but also in the deeper philosophical sense of encompassing life as duration through making incisions in it. In other words, all photography, with its capacity to capture light and make it act upon surfaces, acts as a cue for the goings-on of deep time, well beyond human control and human existence. Salminen goes so far as to suggest: “In the fossil nihilist age, photography acts as a reminder of the sun, to which the fossil man can turn for little else than leave to simply expire.”79
It is here, in this image of photography as a reminder of the sun, and thus of life itself, that the two temporal lines of this chapter—one orientated toward the past, the other toward the future—come together. Photography as an embalmer and carrier of imprints testifies to the continued existence of solar energy and to its photosynthesis-enabling capabilities. To say this is not to rewrite the traditional narrative about photography as being about life rather than death in any straightforward and naïve way. Yet rhetorically placing photography under the horizon of extinction—a horizon under which it has arguably unfolded on a material level since time immemorial—has allowed us to come out on the side of life, and to think fossils beyond the currently dominant fossil nihilism. In the closing pages of his book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction Thom van Dooren develops an idea that could be described as “ethical mourning”: a way of responding responsibly to the horizon of extinction by telling stories about ongoing extinctions. Of course, we need more than just stories of extinctions past, even if telling such stories can play an important and salutary role for our current biosphere. Fossils and/as photographs can therefore be seen as more than just forms of memento mori: they are also ethical injunctions, pointing and reaching out to life, in both its actual and virtual forms. Citing grief counsellor and philosopher Thomas Attig, van Dooren writes that “In choosing to grieve actively, we choose life.”80 This is precisely where photography as a process of fossilization that keeps a record of time becomes an ethical task, a form of countermourning the passage of time by casting light on solar light. By turning and returning to the sun, we can take first steps toward envisaging a new energetics, one that develops a more ethical relationship to fossils as “layers of ancient, non-human death.” Photography as an original practice of light, now undertaken under the glow of electricity as often as under the glow of the sun, can get us to engage with light anew—even though, in its present digital setup, it is also, in Salminen’s words, “contingent upon energy borrowed from oil, a light distilled from death.”
