It is commonplace to state that digital technology has played a significant role in the transformation of the photographic landscape, from the practices and modes of production of commercial and art photography through to amateur practice as well as photojournalism. As a result of the proliferation of photo-sharing platforms such as Flickr, Instagram, and Tumblr, amateur photographers can post their work next to that of seasoned professionals, while the very legitimacy of those traditional skills- and income-based divisions is being put into question. The convergence of different media has resulted in cell phones doubling as both still and video cameras.1 Photo imaging is now also arguably faster, more immediate, and more accessible than ever, both financially and geographically, with photographs becoming modes of communication, or forms of “digital touch,” rather than continuing to serve primarily as objects of visual appreciation.2 This transformation in media use and distribution has been fueled by the vacuously optimistic slogan “Everyone is creative!”3 Promoted by advocates of the neoliberal paradigm of cultural industries, in which creativity is positioned as a tradeable commodity, this slogan seems to have been embraced wholeheartedly by the YouTube and Instagram generation4—to some extent naïvely perhaps, yet partly also in defiance of the media giants that promote a top-down model of cultural production. Contributing free labor to those platforms while also getting various forms of connectivity and sociality in return, “everyday creatives” have become key agents in altering the increasingly interconnected processes of media production, distribution, and consumption today, and thus in shaping a new future for media institutions and media networks.
As part of this transformation, the very ontology of the photographic object has become much more multiple, fluid, distributed, networked, and, with the proliferation of practices such as interface photography and QR codes, often not even aimed at the human viewer. As Asko Lehmuskallio and Edgar Gómez Cruz point out, “Automation processes, algorithmic photography, metadata and big data are only some of the keywords recently used for describing changes in photography.”5 The context for this final chapter of the book is provided by this very transformation of the media environment in the digital age. However, my aim here is to explore deeper issues and anxieties that digitization has raised over not just photography’s future but also thehuman future by looking at how stories about various media often serve as an articulator of wider anxieties and crises. I also intend to query some of the ways of envisaging and enacting this future via multiple strategies of representation, archiving, and data storage. Although I will be looking at the problem of digitization through the lens of photographic arts, my concerns in this chapter are sociocultural, political, and economic as much as they are aesthetic. The chapter thus takes a step back from my considerations of the future “after the human” in the earlier parts of this book to look at what we might term “the near future.” Yet deeper concerns about the material and economic precariousness of our planet and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, and about ways of envisaging it in and with the photographic medium, are still very much at the heart of this chapter.
But this will not be yet another discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of digitality. Even though digital technology as applied to the photographic medium functions as an entry point for the argument presented here, and even though this chapter carries with it a subtle warning against any kind of antidigital hysteria, I am not proposing to see the conversion (photographic or other) of information into binary code as a good or value in itself, or suggesting that we must all be fascinated—or, equally, horrified—by it as a technical process or cultural phenomenon. But what we do need to do is reflect on others’ as well as our own desires and affective investments that have shaped not only the discourse around digitality but also the material processes of image capture, encoding, archiving, reproduction, and distribution in the digital age. “In any case,” as Geoffrey Batchen observes in Each Wild Idea, “even if we continue to identify photography with certain archaic technologies, such as camera and film, those technologies are themselves the embodiment of the idea of photography or, more accurately, of a persistent economy of photographic desires and concepts.”6 So this chapter is first of all about affect rather than technology—where “affect” means more than just emotion located in a singular skin-bound subject, and stands instead for “something that perhaps escapes or remains in excess of the practices of the ‘speaking subject.’”7 The term is largely inherited from the Deleuzian project of trying to grasp and articulate “all of the incredible, wondrous, tragic, painful and destructive configurations of things and bodies as temporarily mediated, continuous events.”8 It names passions and actions enveloping a variety of human-nonhuman configurations and intra-actions taking place, in our case, in the photographic milieu. Affect and technology are therefore never entirely separate, as Batchen’s earlier book, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, poignantly illustrates.
This “persistent economy of photographic desires and concepts” clearly comes into play in the assessment of the photographic industry by Steve Macleod, creative director at one of London’s leading art printers, Metro. In an interview with Simon Denison, Macleod complains: “For too many years we have seen digital as the great white hope for photography but there was actually nothing wrong with what we had. It wasn’t broke so why try fixing it?”9 To defend photography in its earlier, or what Batchen calls “archaic,” forms, Macleod resorts to the rather ambiguous term “fixing.” He expresses his desire not to fix—that is, not to repair—things, because there was nothing “wrong” with the photographic state of events in the first place. But he also reveals his contradictory ambition to fix images precisely the way they used to be developed (i.e., by dissolving the remaining silver halide grains that were not turned into black metallic silver in the developing process), at the time that it was still possible to stop the incessant flow of data. This (impossible) fixation of photography, both analog and digital, opens it onto another metaphor that is associated with cultural production in late postindustrial capitalism: that of “liquidity.”
Liquid culture
The term “liquidity” carries a certain sense of melancholia—to be heard, for example, in Marshall Berman’s famous phrase “all that is solid melts into air,” which he borrows from Marx. In a similar vein, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote for many years about “liquid modernity,” “liquid life,” “liquid love,” and “liquid fear.”10 For Bauman, all these liquid states seemed to be opposed to some fantasy period in the past, when social relations, individual emotions, and worldly affects were supposedly much more solid and stable. Images of liquidity—in the form of sea waves, ocean depths, floods, and drowning—are also frequently mobilized to convey a general sense of planetary catastrophe, especially that related to climate change.11 However, rather than join this mournful chorus, I want to argue here for an inherent liquidity of culture and its objects—including photographs. Liquidity provides us with a model for understanding cultural objects as permanently unfixed and unfixable. It also helps us move beyond the ontological concerns that have occupied photography scholars from the medium’s inception (that is, the perennial “What is photography?” question) toward photography’s acts, affects, and temporal effects. Such an attempt to redefine photography in terms of its inherent liquidity does not situate us outside the ontological framework, because any such redefinition inevitably entails saying something about photography’s being, but it opens up a rather different set of questions through which photography can be approached and understood. The notion of liquidity also allows us to address the problem of memory and archiving in relation to photography without the anxiety, technophobia, or hysteria that have often accompanied discussions about the future of this medium.12 What changes in this particular articulation is not a cultural object as such—a photograph, or even the discipline or practice of photography—because these are understood here to have always been unstable, liquid, and only ever stabilized temporarily. What changes instead is our way of understanding this object, and of speaking about it.
One recent development drawing on this idea of the inherent liquidity of culture is the Liquid Books project initiated by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall in collaboration with the Open Humanities Press, an international open-access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide.13 Liquid Books is a series of experimental digital “books” which are published under the conditions of open editing and free content. As such, readers are free to annotate, tag, edit, add to, remix, reformat, reversion, reinvent, and reuse any of the books in the series—and, indeed, they are encouraged to do so. This project, Hall and Birchall explain, “is decentering the author and editor functions by making everyone potential authors/editors.”14 It also raises broader questions about the extent to which “the ability of users to remix, reversion and reinvent such liquid ‘books’ actually renders untenable any attempt to impose a limit and a unity on them as ‘works.’”15 Moreover, the Liquid Books project makes us query what the potential consequences of such “liquidity” are “for those of our ideas that depend on the concept of the ‘work’ for their effectivity”: those concerning attribution, citation, copyright, intellectual property, and so on.16 The reader cannot “finish” and hence claim to “know” such a liquid book in quite the same way as she perhaps can with a conventional print-on-paper text.
Could we think along similar lines to embrace the idea of liquid photographs, liquid exhibitions, and liquid galleries?17 To some extent, Flickr and other online photo-sharing sites18 encourage such a process of liquidization, with their multiple tagging systems, comment boxes, and even open competitions, in which participants are encouraged to reprocess a raw file in many different ways. But what kind of future for photography is this conceptual transformation offering? Will such a process of liquidization not lead in the end to photography’s liquidation, its disappearance in the flickers of the constant data flow? Shouldn’t we, then, try to “fix” it somehow? The final part of this chapter will discuss a publishing-archiving project I have been involved in called Photomediations: An Open Book, which builds on the Liquid Books series discussed above and which explores the questions posed here in the context of photographic and archival practice. But, for now, I would like to probe deeper some of the conceptual assumptions behind photographic liquidity in its past, present, and future forms.
Photographic flow
Most narratives oriented toward the future cannot avoid an emotional, if not literal, excursion into the past. Or, to put it differently, any plan or project to build an archive—which is by itself future-driven, as it is a way of conserving the past, or at least a version of it, for the upcoming generations—requires a trip down memory lane. In my own exploration of photography’s future, I now want to turn to complex passions, or affective investments, of both artists and art critics, as manifested in the recent interest in found images in their “material” guises, i.e., old and often anonymous photos salvaged from flea markets, car trunk sales, and family attics, and then repurposed for art projects. I am putting “material” in quotation marks to query the oft uncritical use of the term “materiality” with regard to analog photography, which is then set against the supposed immateriality of the digital. This (mis)perception is only possible if one ignores the materiality of the screen on which one views digital images, the materials that make up the camera or cell phone which are part of its system of production, the network cables that participate in its transfer, etc. However, my interest in this section of the chapter is precisely in the materiality of the analog photographic object, and in the immaterial affects invested in this object by many photographers and viewers of images. Taking as my framing device Tacita Dean’s 2001 art book Floh—whose title means “flea” in German, but which also resonates with the words “flow” and “flaw” in English—and Mark Godfrey’s 2005 article, “Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean’s Floh,” I will explore the extent to which Dean’s art project, based on images she came across at German flea markets, displays a certain nostalgia toward the world of yesteryear, an imagined place that tells us as much about the artist’s idea of the past (and the present) as it does about the past itself. Even though Godfrey positions Dean’s work as emerging precisely “at a moment when the flood or blizzard or jumble is being tamed, cleaned up, and organized—at the moment of digitalization,”19 Dean’s project, together with Geoffrey’s comments on it, are not actually about digit(al)ization as such.20 I would go so far as to suggest that Dean’s Floh and Godfrey’s interpretation of it are not even so much about photography. Instead, they can be read as symptomatic of broader anxieties concerning modernity, anxieties that find their way into the celebration of the analog, the dusty, and the dead. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Godfrey’s and Dean’s political and aesthetic preference is actually much more for the modernity of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin—with what I would call its historicized and hence “ordered mess”—rather than for the more unordered and messy postindustrial modernity of today.21 Digitization, as we shall see later on, functions as a screen for the projection of these fantasies and anxieties about a particular idea of modernity—and, more importantly from a political viewpoint, about its social and economic consequences. The analog image and the found object—both as concepts and as material entities—serve as anchors for the increasingly precarious self that is trying to locate itself in a world where the roles of the producer and consumer of media images (but also, more broadly, the role of the self as a cultural and economic agent) are becoming increasingly ambiguous and uncertain.
However, the aim of this analysis is not to correct Dean’s and Godfrey’s reading of “the found image.” Indeed, my engagement with Dean’s Floh springs first of all from a certain work of seduction that her project has inflicted on me. I find myself mesmerized by the ascetic beauty of her found photographs, the pastel, painterly colors of the reproduced images, the amazing quality of Steidl’s printing, the elegance of the book’s pale-green linen cover. I am also enticed by the clearly not accidental and hence rather uncanny choice and arrangement of the untitled snapshots: two photographs on facing pages of two white Audis parked alongside each other, one with (presumably) the drivers standing next to their vehicles, the other showing just the cars; two shots of a woman in an oversized hat with a wide brim and a coat with rather large lapels; a single photo of a group of young men and women in what appear to be military uniforms, with the faces of two women in the last row mysteriously gouged away with a blue pen.22 It is out of this affective seduction that my intellectual interrogation of Floh arises. I desperately want Dean’s project to be more than a beautiful object of nostalgia, a mere presentation of “aspects of photography that will soon be gone,” or only “an example of a mode of photographic finding that is nearing extinction.”23 Neither is the aim of my argument to claim that various art projects that engage with found images can all simply be reduced to their authors’ anxiety, or that every desire to find traces of the past, and to collect and archive them, is merely a cover for a longing for order, meaning, and locatedness in a universe which is ultimately “indifferent” (although some archiving projects may indeed be motivated by such longing). Also, we must recognize that the use of “the found image” in art has not been uniform: we can think here of projects as diverse as Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, Walid Ra’ad’s work with The Atlas Group, or Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs. There is something specific, however, about Dean’s engagement with found images that reveals the artist’s nostalgic attachment to the past, coupled with her sense of discomfort about what is to come. An affective frame for this reading is provided by the artist’s confession in her profile featured in The Guardian in 2009: “Pet hate: Digital photography.”24
Archive fever
The recent theoretical turn to the idea of the archive in art criticism, as evidenced by publications such as The Archive edited by Charles Merewether and Okwui Enwezor’s Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, has demonstrated a number of complex ideas and concerns over the relationship between the past, the present, and the future, and, in particular, over memory and its preservation. As Merewether puts it in the introduction to his volume, the archive functions “as the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored and recovered.”25 We can see from this description that archiving is an effort undertaken by an individual or institution—an artist, an amateur historian, a museum—not only to preserve the past but also to construct a certain version of this past and a memory of it, by including certain objects and traces while excluding others. It is also an effort to shape a future by preparing a cultural repository from which historians and artists will be able to draw. Of course, the process of constructing an archive, as we can see in Dean’s flea market project, is never fully conscious: it is underpinned by the collector’s own unacknowledged passions, desires, preferences, and omissions. As Freud explains in his essay “A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad,” “an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces seem to be mutually exclusive properties in the apparatus which we use as substitutes for our memory.”26 An archive is as much a form of institutionalized forgetting and of the erasure of traces as it is a practice of their preservation, and thus of remembrance. Therefore, Floh is not providing a random collection of images which leapt at Dean like fleas while she was browsing through bins full of discarded photos at German markets and which she later placed in her book. Instead, we are presented with an archive of conscious and unconscious choices, decisions, and affective reactions that are gathered under the heading of “randomness” (itself perhaps a synonym for the flea market?).
The word “archive” (from the Greek, arkhē), as we learn from Jacques Derrida’s opening words to his Archive Fever, signals both a commencement and a commandment, and thus a requirement for authority, order, and the law.27 But at the same time, it points to the fundamental absence of any such transcendental law and order. Otherwise, why would philosophers have been so preoccupied with tracing and identifying arkhē as the organizing principle of the world (water for Thales, air for Anaximenes) if it had already been there, waiting for them to get hold of it? What is more, if order was already there, if it was to be found easily, why institute the commandment to archive, store, and hence remember and re-remember things? An archive, any archive, is born out of a fundamental recognition of transience, of the passage of time, and thus also of what I am calling, for the purposes of this chapter, liquidity. This awareness of transience perhaps explains the anxiety or even panic behind many archiving projects. My argument may look Heraclitean or, to give it a more contemporary inflection, Deleuzian, but even if everything is indeed in flux or flow, I want to emphasize that temporary material stabilizations do matter to singular, culturally framed embodied subjects, who will use various strategies to apply cuts to this flow in an effort to make (sense of) the world, and of themselves in this world. Archives are examples of such stabilizations, which is why their cultural signification—including the signification of the desire to archive this and not that at a particular moment in time—must be subject to careful analysis.
Significantly, Benjamin Buchloh argues that a “mnemonic desire” to remember, preserve, and archive traces of the past is “activated especially in those moments of extreme duress in which the traditional material bonds between subjects, between subjects and objects, and between objects and their representation appear to be on the verge of displacement, if not outright disappearance.”28 He is writing here about two periods that instigated what Hal Foster calls “an archival impulse”:29 the time of Aby Warburg’s 1925–1929 Mnemosyne Atlas (i.e., the era of the withering of the “European humanist”) and that of Richter’s Atlas (i.e., postwar German culture, unable to come to terms with Nazism and throwing itself insanely into consumerism). Just as those two atlases were not, in the first place, about photography or imaging in the broader sense, neither is Dean’s. The upheaval she is trying to capture with Floh seems to have to do with a broader reworking of the relations of production and consumption in the digital age, but also with the radically changing position of the artist in the age of user-generated media, collaborative and net art, and the elevation of the amateur: the blogger, the hacker, the YouTube and Vimeo “movie director.” At a deeper level, the present time is also a period in which the human’s relationship to his or her environment as both home and protective envelope has changed. In the Anthropocene, a sensibility which is very much part of Dean’s work (as evident in her films, such as Disappearance at Sea, about an ill-fated sea voyage, and JG, exploring connections between J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Voices of Time” and Robert Smithson’s earthwork and film Spiral Jetty), “the home” has first and foremost become a site of loss and longing.
Always already digital
If Dean’s Floh project, but also perhaps her practice at large, is indeed situated “at the moment of digitalization,” as Godfrey suggests, it is worth asking to what extent the Floh archive she has constructed is an attempt to erase digital traces that are imprinting themselves on our visual imaginary with ever greater intensity from “art history proper,” and an effort to keep art history a certain way: intact, orderly (even if apparently random), dead. There is something both heroic and tragic in this undertaking. It is heroic because Dean takes up the baton from many earlier artists as preservers of value and the past, as keepers, against all odds, of a certain world that (allegedly) once was. However, this effort is also tragic—but not because digital imagery has really flooded the public imagination to such an extent that to fight its proliferation with a few faded analog snapshots seems amusingly futile. It is tragic because it is based on the fundamental misrecognition of digitality as being somehow different from photography per se, as something that has arrived only after analog photography was already fully formed.
Batchen provides us with a very different framework for understanding not only the history but also the ontology of photography. Revisiting the early photographic processes and looking at the narratives and artifacts that accompany them, he argues that W. H. Fox Talbot’s lace photographs—or, more specifically, photogenic drawing contact print negatives—conjure the “electronic flow of data that the photographic image has become today.”30 Consequently, Batchen positions them as a “fledgling form of informational culture.”31If we thus read digitality as the interlacing of an ON/OFF pattern that is translated, or rather transcoded, into different material media—light-sensitive papers, silicon chips, and so forth—we can see thatphotography, even at its very inception, reveals itself to be always already digital. Indeed, photography always consists of a recording of a binary pattern: the presence and absence of light—even though, in its analog “encoding,” this presence-absence dualism reveals itself to a human viewer as visual contiguity. The frequent use of lace in Talbot’s photographic experiments was also a harbinger of another feature of the digital era: lossless reproducibility. As Batchen explains, “Talbot’s photographs of lace were often produced using the same specimen, as if to show that his medium was capable of a repeatable, even mechanical reproduction of a given set of visual data.”32
Yet this repeatability can also pose a threat. In a rather symptomatic passage, a tone of anxiety or even hysteria creeps into Godfrey’s otherwise reasoned scholarly argument, as evidenced in the following account he provides of the condition of the photographic medium in the digital era:
[W]hat is crucial here is the impact of digitalization on the amateur treatment of photography both at the moment of exposure and at the moment of storage. Digitalization discourages people from saving or printing out “mistaken” photographs—they can be erased from a camera’s memory before they have physical presence, erased without any superstitious misgivings. All this might be heralded in the name of cleanliness, affordability, and efficiency, but the implications of digital handling are potentially troublesome: “To be actually able to delete an image in the moment of its inception is quite an enormous thing,” Dean comments. “It pushes beyond democracy and becomes almost totalitarian. It [parallels the way] society is trying to organize itself to get rid of anything that is dysfunctional or not up to the standard. It’s a horrifying concept to me if I think about it.”33
The whole complex network of processes connected to the representation and transmission of data through binary code, when applied to the context of digital photography, seems to be reduced here by Godfrey—and Dean (whose words Godfrey draws on to support his lament)—to a fascist attempt to cleanse and order the world. It also implies, rather naively, a bizarre kind of technological determinism, i.e., a belief that if a technology itself allows a user to delete data almost instantly, then every user will automatically do so. This belief, which ascribes the overriding power to change users’ behavior to technology itself, is also coupled with a conviction that all users have developed a sense of the photographic standard, and that they are willing and able to evaluate what counts as dysfunctionality. But what presents itself to Godfrey and Dean as a terrifying result of “digital eugenics,” I see merely as a different set of possibilities in photographic practice—possibilities as yet undetermined. This is not to say that some users will not be employing the Delete button on their digital cameras or phones frequently or even obsessively; but only to contend that the results of this deletion of data will be as accidental, unforeseen, subject to the “random floe,”34 and hence as far from totalitarian, as those of analog photographic practice. A quick browse through any amateur photo-hosting website or social media platform, from Flickr through to Instagram and Facebook—sites which are full of such “mistakes” and “dysfunctionalities” resulting from poor framing, blown highlights, camera shake, excessive Photoshop manipulation, or over-the-top Instagram filter use—provides experiential, if not scientific, support to my argument.
Also, the same processes connected with the selection of data were already in operation with analog photography on a number of levels: many photographers used to decide (and still do) which frame to print by evaluating the negative on a light box. Many waded through their test strips or the “print-and-develop” packages they received from a one-hour lab around the corner in order to choose “the keepers” and discard those that did not match “the standard.” Of course there were always those photographers for whom an accidental multiple exposure or an unexpected camera shake conjured much more interesting results than those resulting from the application of the dominant norms of “the photographic standard,” a standard that advised correct exposure, the rule-of-thirds framing, and impeccable sharpness. However, this preference for a different aesthetic among the photographic avant-garde—both institutionalized and amateur—has been the case with digital, as much as analog, photography.
Does this mean that nothing has changed in the digital era? Not at all. The material process of selecting data takes place differently with analog and digital photography; different things get discarded and lost (film strips and print snaps versus memory cards and USB sticks). The possibility of digging out old faded analog prints from bins at flea markets will undoubtedly become less ubiquitous in the age of digital photography. But it is not only finding images in this way that will become less likely. Rather, the space of the flea market itself is under threat in a culture where goods are becoming obsolescent faster and faster, and where global production and trading practices alter the nature of their flow. We should not be too hasty in announcing the demise of the flea market, though: after all, commercial initiatives such as eBay or noncommercial ones such as Freecycle can be seen as its new incarnations in the Internet age.35
Beyond digital hysteria
What perhaps predominantly concern Godfrey and Dean are thus the conditions of global capitalism, with its striving toward uniformity, efficiency, and totalization, more than the end of analog photography or the disappearance of the flea market for images. Yet, even though a similar political concern is close to my own heart, I am still puzzled by the inward-looking, even narcissistic, drive of their “high art” project, one which seems to be driven by a desire to preserve a particular role and position for both the artist and the art critic. As Godfrey puts it toward the end of his article, “At the moment of its obsolescence, analog photography … is [to Dean] like a structure that initially held utopian promise, but despite nineteenth-century hopes for the medium, it became—in the hands of its amateur users—a chaotic floe, as often treated rationally as it was superstitiously, as often prone to mistakes as it was able to capture an intended image for posterity.”36 Here perhaps lies the clue to understanding what Dean’s project is actually all about. Motivated by fear of the amateur photographer with her hobbyist excesses, Dean takes on the heroic role of attempting to stop this madness of imag(in)ing-without-end, by introducing some kind of ban, barrier, or dam, in the shape of her art book, to tame this incessant proliferation. This proliferation was already initiated in the early twentieth century, when, thanks to Kodak, photography became a pastime available to most people in industrialized countries. Digital photography is thus a continuation of users’ practices enacted with the analog medium; only it is faster, even less permanent, and even more excessive. Commenting on the final image in Dean’s book, in which a man stands alone on a sand dune against a church, with the landscape elements turning out to belong to a painted backdrop of a stage set, Godfrey (reluctantly?) admits that “analog images were every bit as tricky as digital manipulations.”37
At the same time, analog photography is perhaps the last moment when this tide of crazy amateur imaging can be halted; when the artist can still attempt to intervene without herself being drowned by the “floe” of images found and lost. This may explain why Dean prefers her photographs and her sources frozen, immobilized in the bins at flea markets, neatly stowed away in a place that shouts “debris,” waiting for the artist to lend them a revitalizing touch and gaze, to choose them from among others, to restore life to them. It is the repetition of the Duchampesque gesture of pointing at things on Dean’s part that designates these few select everyday snapshots as “art,” even before they find their way to her beautifully printed volume. In this way, even if photography has become deskilled, the position of the artist as designator and legislator of what counts as art is confirmed. In the process of working with found images in this particular fashion, Dean takes on the role of the artist as a guarantor of the authority of “good choices” in culture, a gatekeeper of quality, but also a magician who—through careful selection, through the application of the “less is more” principle—transforms trash into gold. Yet, ironically, Dean’s own art project is part of the very same mechanical cycle of media production and exchange that she and Godfrey criticize in so-called mass culture. As Martha Langford has observed, not without irony, “Today, 4,000 people can refer to their signed copy of Floh as ‘my Tacita Dean.’”38
Even though I am aware it may read like a denouncement of Dean and Godfrey, this chapter is actually an attempt on my part—as a philosopher and media theorist who is also a photographer—to come to terms with anxieties similar to those troubling Godfrey and Dean. These can be formulated as a set of questions: How do we continue photographing “seriously” in the digital era? How do we deal with the amateur photographer who “masquerades” as an artist? Can we see photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and Instagram as twenty-first-century versions of the flea market? How do we cope with digital excess, the über-democratic proliferation of equipment as well as interesting (and not-so-interesting) imagery? How do we decide what to delete and what to keep? Hal Foster offers a defense of this “archival impulse”39—which he identifies in the work of Dean but also in that of Thomas Hirschhorn and Sam Durant—in the following terms: “Perhaps the paranoid dimension of archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition—its desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia.”40 The archival impulse behind Dean’s Floh can thus perhaps be read as a paranoid but ultimately salutary effort to do (a minimal) something rather than nothing, to keep going rather than freeze, and to try to turn the data and image flow into a more manageable data stream.
From lace to code
So, indeed, how can we continue engaging “seriously” with photographs today, as image makers, curators, and archivists, without becoming too paralyzed by the anxieties brought on by the digital age? I would like to showcase two different interventions into the nexus of photographic affects, ideas, and fixations developed from my own scholarly and artistic practice, as an attempt to think and work through this supposed liquidity of culture. Even if, as I suggested at the opening of this chapter, all photographs are inherently liquid, I wish to interrogatewhether we can shoot and curate in a way that visualizes this liquidity and makes it explicit. Wouldn’t such an attempt inevitably involve working against the archive, as it were? This is another way of saying: can we create images and collections that challenge the concept of a fixed repository while also inevitably hinting at the need (and desire) for some kind of closure, or cut, to the liquid flow of data? Could being trapped in and by the archive be seen as a state of possibility, not an impasse, one that inevitably requires some physical and conceptual readjustment, a movement-with and within?
Figure 6.1 Joanna Zylinska, We Have Always Been Digital, 2009.
The first project, a diptych titled We Have Always Been Digital II, revisits, for the purposes of this book, a series of images I originally made in 2009 (figure 6.1).41 The purpose of that original series was to explore digitality as the intrinsic condition of photography, both in its past and present forms. The images highlight the formal role of light in the constitution of a pattern, suggesting that the seemingly contiguous analog aesthetics of light, as captured on various surfaces, is underpinned by what Batchen has identified as the ON/OFF logic of information culture—which, as discussed earlier, he traced back to the work of one of photography’s inventors, Fox Talbot. This ON/OFF logic is visualized as a pattern, enacted as a play of shadows and lights—or, in other words, as lights’ presence and absence. The nine images of light patterns displayed on the wall, furniture, and human body were taken with a DSLR camera. They are accompanied by a tenth panel featuring a sequence of 0s and 1s which I randomly typed. That last image hints at the computational logic of both photography and the world at large,42 while also withholding any possibility of their meaningful decoding.
In making that original project, I was inspired not only by Talbot’s photogenic drawings of lace (figure 6.2) but also by his photograph of light falling through the window panels in Lacock Abbey (figure 6.3), a set of images Talbot allegedly sent to his friend Charles Babbage, the inventor of the differential engine (i.e., the first computer). Yet, as Batchen has aptly observed, Talbot’s pictures are not so much images of lace or a window, but rather photographs of the object’s “patterning, of its regular repetitions of smaller units in order to make up a whole.”43 With this reading, Batchen seems to have proposed an analogy between the invention of photography and the invention of computing as two ways of capturing a pattern in different media. Interestingly, when introducing the lace picture in The Pencil of Nature as “the first example of a negative image,” Talbot outlined a number of oppositions through which the early history of photography became subsequently framed: negative versus positive; black versus white; absent versus present—even if the image itself broke the rigidity of these oppositions precisely through the fuzziness of its boundary lines and light traces. He wrote:
The ordinary effect of light upon white sensitive paper is to blacken it. If therefore any object, as a leaf for instance, be laid upon the paper, this, by intercepting the action of the light, preserves the whiteness of the paper beneath it, and accordingly when it is removed there appears the form or shadow of the leaf marked out in white upon the blackened paper; and since shadows are usually dark, and this is the reverse, it is called in the language of photography a negative image.
This is exemplified by the lace depicted in this plate; each copy of it being an original or negative image: that is to say, directly taken from the lace itself. Now, if instead of copying the lace we were to copy one of these negative images of it, the result would be a positive image of the lace: that is to say, the lace would be represented black upon a white ground. But in this secondary or positive image the representation of the small delicate threads which compose the lace would not be quite so sharp and distinct, owing to its not being taken directly from the original. In taking views of buildings, statues, portraits, &c. it is necessary to obtain a positive image, because the negative images of such objects are hardly intelligible, substituting light for shade, and vice versa.44
Figure 6.2 William Henry Fox Talbot, Lace, from The Pencil of Nature, 1845. Public domain.
Figure 6.3 William Henry Fox Talbot, Window in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey, made from the oldest photographic negative in existence, 1835. Public domain.
We could suggest that Talbot moved beyond analog human perception to highlight a deeper algorithmic logic at work in image making, a logic that would later be embraced by code writers and digital camera manufacturers to replicate the look of “traditional” photographs. Interestingly, in the 2000s, digital camera manufacturers went to great trouble to ensure that photos produced with their equipment looked “less digital.” Yet this desire to reproduce the original analog look as closely as possible, to the point of deceiving the (expert) viewer, relied on the precise execution of computation so that, through its binary logic, the analog visuality of early photographs could be mimicked perfectly. This is why it is not so much of a leap to suggest not only that we have always been digital, but also, conversely, that we have never stopped being analog. The fascination with “Fuji colors” in the latest iteration of Fuji digital cameras, whose jpegs are said to perfectly replicate the look of popular Fuji films such as Astia and Provia without the need to postprocess the raw files, provides another illustration of this historical zigzagging between analog and digital. (Incidentally, Fuji cameras—to which I myself have a somewhat irrational affective attachment—first gained popularity among “serious hobbyists” due to their adoption of the traditional rangefinder look, if not functionality, thus signaling to both the outside world and the inner amateur circle that their users were serious about their pastime, that they were not just amateurs.)
In an attempt to probe this idea of perennial digitality further, I recently revisited my earlier photographic series We Have Always Been Digital to look at both the light patterns and the algorithmic patterns underpinning the images. Rather than attempting to discover any kind of ontological truth or technological essence behind them, I was interested in highlighting processes of translation and abstraction that were involved in all forms of photographic practice. I also aimed to bring focus to the black-boxing of technology that we tend to associate with digital devices but that was already at work—perhaps inevitably, given the nature of light-sensitive materials—with early large-format cameras, which were literally black boxes. In the second iteration of We Have Always Been Digital, I thus overlaid the nine original photographs from the first series in Photoshop to create an abstract composite image showing a textured palimpsest of light traces appearing on different surfaces (figure 6.4). The visual latticework obtained, corresponding perhaps to Talbot’s Lace, engages the analog and continuous nature of light while also becoming more abstract than the individual images from the first series. I then opened the composite jpeg file in a PC program called Notepad to reveal its code, which I then pasted (almost in its entirety) into a separate panel. The image obtained became the second part of a diptych to accompany the composite photograph (figure 6.5). This code-displaying image offered a different kind of abstraction, outlining a pattern which, at the scale and in the format in which it was presented, gained an alternative legibility for the human spectator: the image had been transformed from a command aimed at a machine with the goal of executing a visualization, to a visual abstraction presented in barely legible black marks on a white surface and arranged into another kind of latticework. The black-and-white conversion of the image added another layer of translatability to the process, while also foregrounding the fact that, as discussed in chapter 1, photographs have always been translations—and not transcriptions—of reality.
Figure 6.4 Joanna Zylinska, We Have Always Been Digital II, 2016.
Figure 6.5 Joanna Zylinska, We Have Always Been Digital II, 2016.
An anarchive of photomediations
The second intervention I want to discuss revisits the idea of the photographic archive in the digital age, in an attempt to think about the liquidity of culture beyond fear-inducing concepts such as image deluge and data flood. Titled Photomediations: An Open Book (figure 6.6),45 the 2014–2017 project—which I led in collaboration with Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney, Michael Wamposzyc, and Gary Hall—has involved redesigning a coffee-table book as an online experience with a view to producing a creative multiplatform resource for various audiences. Photomediations: An Open Book uses open (libre) content, drawn from various online repositories (Europeana, Wikipedia Commons, Flickr Commons), and tagged with open licenses. Through a comprehensive introduction46 and four curated chapters on light, movement, hybridity, and networks that include over two hundred images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells the story of the dynamic relationship between photography and other media. In the spirit of the Liquid Books project discussed earlier, the book’s four main chapters are then followed by three “open” chapters to which readers can contribute content: a social space, an online exhibition, and a reader. With an invitation issued to all readers to enrich and remix its various sections as well as individual images, the book challenges, as Kamila Kuc has put it in her article “A Curated Object and a Disruptive e-Anarchive,” “the hegemonic structures of a traditional repository, where … the haunting spectrum of history is too often shaped into a politically comfortable fiction.”47 Through this open approach on the level of both form and content, the book aims to enact a different history of photography in and for the digital age. A version of the reader, featuring academic and curatorial texts on photomediations, has also been published in a standalone book format by Open Humanities Press (figure 6.7).
Figure 6.6 Turning a page online in Photomediations: An Open Book: www.photomediationsopenbook.net. Image featured on the page: Bill Domonkos, George, 2014. (Domonkos combined footage from the Prelinger Archive with a photograph from The Library of Congress.) Source: Public Domain Review / The Library of Congress. License: CC BY-SA.
Kuc explains, “Through its unique hybrid format, Photomediations enacts a shift from the idea of the book, and hence the archive, as a repository of documents and thus of knowledge, to the idea of the archive as a dynamic tool of knowledge production.”48 Similar to Dean’s construction of the Floh archive, our curatorial work on the book embraced serendipity, playfulness, and visual correspondences in bringing together a vast array of divergent images from various open repositories (figures 6.8 and 6.9). In this way, Photomediations: An Open Book moves toward becoming “a living archive of innovative knowledge production rather than … a repository of old material”49—even though old images from known and unknown histories of photography were still very much of interest to us when putting together the collection.
Figure 6.8 The Ostrich, Fractal Landscape, 2002. A fractal landscape randomly generated with a custom-programmed algorithm and rendered using Terragen, Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 3.0.
Figure 6.9 mikrosopht [deleted], Glitch 127, 2007. Glitch image of the body, created by utilizing a temporary browser image caching error, Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.
With this anarchival impulse, to use Foster’s term,50 which manifests itself in a search for obscure traces and a lack of desire for completion, our Photomediations book offers a response to the inadequacy of the rigid formulations and categories through which photography has traditionally been perceived and approached, proposing instead that it may be time to radically transform, rather than just expand, its very notion. The concept of photomediations that underpins our open book is therefore offered as a richer and more potent conceptual alternative. To think in terms of photomediations is to try to outline a different narrative about the medium, one that remains more attuned to its radically changing ontology. The notion of photomediations aims to cut across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today, as well as its kinship with other media—and also with us as media. The framework of photomediations adopts a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social, and political flows of data that produce photographic objects.51 Etymologically, the notion of photomediations brings together the hybrid ontology of “photomedia” and the fluid dynamism of “mediation.” Allowing us to sidestep the technicist distinction between analog and digital photography, as well as—more radically perhaps—that between still and moving images, the concept of photomedia foregrounds instead what is common to various kinds of light-based practices under discussion. As Jai McKenzie argues, “regardless of technological change, light is a constant defining characteristic of photomedia intrinsically coupled with space and time to form explicit light-based structures and experiences.”52 For McKenzie, photomedia encapsulate not just photographic cameras but also cinema, video, television, mobile phones, computers, and photocopiers. This definition takes cognizance of the fact that, to cite Jonathan Shaw, over the last decade the photographic apparatus has been “reunited with its long lost child, the moving image, … (arguably) … having given birth to it many years ago.”53 The concept of mediation, in turn, highlights precisely this intertwined spatial and temporal nature of photography, pointing as it does to a more processual understanding of media that has recently been taken up by scholars and artists alike. We could perhaps go so far as to conclude that the photograph as such never just exists on its own. Instead, what emerges are multiple and ongoing processes of photomediation. Photography can therefore be seen as an active practice of cutting through the flow of mediation, where “the cut” operates on a number of levels: perceptive, material, technical, and conceptual. In other words, photography can be described as a practice of making cuts in the flow of imagistic data, of stabilizing data as images and objects. Performed by human and nonhuman agents alike, with the latter including the almost incessantly working CCTV cameras, Google Street View equipment, and satellite telescopes, those cuts participate in the wider process of imaging the world.
Although Photomediations: An Open Book is an open platform, it certainly does not associate openness with an “anything goes” approach (or, worse, “everything is up for grabs”). Part of the academic movement of “radical open access” that promotes open access to knowledge and culture,54 the platform advocates informed and responsible curatorial activity. It also recognizes the need, in the current media landscape, for singular ethical and political decisions to be made, over and over again, with regard to both the medium and its institutions, such as publishers, galleries, online spaces, and intellectual property and copyright. Media historian Siegfried Zielinski identifies “[p]ermutation, combinatorics, poetry from a machine; cutting up, taking apart, and putting together again” as gestures that the literary avant-garde in the 1960s used “to creatively attack the bourgeois tradition of the post-war manufacturing of culture.”55 In the early twenty-first-century culture of a supposed deluge of images and texts, predefined camera programs, and Instagram, an avant-garde gesture can perhaps lie first and foremost in efforts to remap the visual landscape—and to rewrite its discourses. Rather than pursue the possibility of taking an original photo of a wedding or a unique selfie, we would be better off engaging in the creative activity of photography by trying to arrange different routes through the multilayered landscape of photomediations. The editorial and curatorial paths proposed in our project are only one possible way of tracing such a new story of photography. They are also an invitation extended to others to engage with Photomediations: An Open Book and to mark their own photomediations routes in an anarchival spirit like the one that drove our original efforts.
What’s to be done?
Where will this anarchival spirit lead us? Is the recognition of the inherent liquidity of photography, of the perennial photographic flow that the digital age makes even more visible and perhaps overwhelming, therefore also an injunction against the archive and against archiving; an acknowledgment of the futility and ultimate stupidity of the archival impulse which is only going to make us crazy? Not necessarily. In exploring the philosophical limitations of photographic containment throughout this chapter, I have been in agreement with Derrida when he says in the closing pages of Archive Fever that we are “in need of archives.” To recognize this need means for Derrida “never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself.”56 Recognizing this need also means, I want to suggest, responding to this injunction to archive, to store things, to repeat, to remember—which is always at the same time an injunction to bury things, to forget about them.
Photography is just one of many cultural practices where such a dual injunction to remember and forget, to store things and throw them away, is enacted. But in its physical two-dimensionality, its anchoring in the index (no matter how much of a fantasy that anchoring is), and its existence in the mappable parallel trajectories of art, commerce, and amateurism, photography becomes a comfortable space in which one can suffer from archive fever. To borrow a phrase from a letter written by Louis Daguerre to Nicéphore Niépce in 1828, it allows us to “burn … with desire”57—a desire for order, for representation, for archivization, for memory, for the graspable other who can at least temporarily be mine, for the world I can hold in my hand or on my cell phone screen—without incinerating ourselves to death. To shift metaphors, whether archived in family albums, on social networking platforms such as Instagram or Snapchat, or in projects based on “found images” such as Dean’s Floh or our Photomediations: An Open Book, photography provides a safe space for exploring the liquidity of culture without drowning in its fast-moving waters. It is in this sense that we can talk about photography’s “lifelike”58 status: not because its digitized objects yield themselves to processes of self-organization, self-replication, and autonomy in the same way that other forms of so-called “artificial life” do, but because both in its amateur and art forms, it is capable of carving out new passageways in life, and of life, by moving us, and making us move, in a myriad ways.59 Interestingly, a recent survey of occupations that are likely to become obsolete as a result of computerization places “Photographic Process Workers and Process Machine Operators” at 99% probability of disappearance, and “Camera and Photographic Equipment Repairers” at 97%—while the likelihood of the job of “Photographers” disappearing is only 0.02%.60 It thus appears that photography’s future will remain entangled with the human future for a little while longer yet.
