Dear Hester,

I take the liberty to understand our topic of “Where” in a first step, geographically, locally, and to argue from my practice as a curator. My formatting years fall in the seventies and eighties, and I remember well at the time how often and violently I enervated myself over photography exhibitions. With a few exceptions, they were mostly boring, uninspired and sometimes terribly hung. Do you also remember the endless sequences of photographs in black frames, matted, hung with a bias cut and with a distance of 4-5 cm from the next image like a millipede through the rooms? And as the image-addicted, narrow queue of viewers is jostled along this millipede, with passing prohibited?

The eighties were a bad decade for classic photography. Except for matting, framing and hanging in a single row, neither the exhibition organisers nor the photographer had any ideas. Why was that so? What were the reasons? Central exhibitions in the twenties and thirties (Lissitzky), and even more the otherwise often derided Family-of-Man-Exhibition in the fifties (Steichen), indeed delivered enough illustrative material on how an exhibition can be made more attractive, more exciting, and more substantively more coherent, and more discursive.

I think that photography has become its own wish, its own claim that has proved fatal. In the seventies and eighties, photography changed its status, taking out a new passport, as it were. It was now increasingly at least perceived as art, as art photography, even if former journalistic photography was ennobled by later admission to the museum. It is this change that gave it the tame corset of matting and framing, all of it often somehow cut obliquely. The finally achieved cultural appreciation and its ignorance in exhibiting put formally strict, conservative reins on it for a long time. (I’m not talking about artists who have worked with photography) For admission to the museum, to go from functional to free, purposeless photography, for a while it paid a self-inflicted, heavy price.

Thereafter, i.e. in the nineties, the active photographers discovered mounting on aluminium. What seems clever in the exhibitions by Paul Graham in 1993 or by Astrid Klein 1995 was quickly captured and then repeated endlessly. So long and so intensely until, depending on the camera format, you also could no longer see mounted photographs in sizes of 80×120 cm or 100×150 cm. The exhibition walls were tiled with hard-laminated, photographs offset like tiles in paralysis-induced shock.

I curated my first exhibitions, as Henri Cartier-Bresson, and with him all of “Magnum“, began to enlarge their photographs up to three and four times bigger than before, and omitting the context in which they arose, and sometimes even the legends. The photographs once created to order, for a specific purpose, were supposed to thus transform into autonomous works. At that time, as a young curator, I asked myself the question: How can you use photographs to create exhibitions that really make sense, exhibitions that are more exciting than photography in the book? Photography and museum, photography and exhibition space means switching one medium into an another medium, one or more framings into another framing. Sometimes, the photograph (and the institution) is prepared for it, designed for it (in the case of art with photography), sometimes, it is almost set against it, if the exhibition had not been thought of all along in the emergence of the photographs. Imagine industrial photography suddenly in the “White Cube”, on the clean, white museum wall. Commissioned photography, formerly often realised nameless, authorless, is then edited and stored by a retouching team. The aim of this photograph was to advertise a brochure for company X, which is to present this new machine. So it was a propaganda photo, as advertising was called at the beginning of the 20th century. With many large magnesium spotlights the factory hall was brightly lit, torn from its gloominess to skillfully cover both the actual origin of the object and the object of the recorded image. And this – nevertheless life photography, factual photography – so-called recorded image was suddenly exhibited in the context of a white cube, in which Gursky and Goldin, Stieglitz and Strand, Weston and Wegmann were otherwise exhibited. How should this photography be read and understood?

The introduction of photography into the museum context poses a number of problems. This transition is usually part of an artistic work, an artistic act, because it is strived for, because of the glowing white space, the effect of distance, of proximity, the framing and the rhythm are considered from the start and co-ordinated with the concept of the work. Then the works and the hanging and the appearance in the space are read as a common, intentional score, as the visible result of an occurred performance of imagery. With resources such as serial, sequential arrangement, addition, the cloud-like grouping, the cluster-type block, the counterpoint, the change of pace and the break, the pictures can be put on the wall, in the room, incorporated into the architecture, images can be sunk therein such that they “swim” or stand out from it.

Quite different, as I said, all the photographs, which were not created for the museum purpose. Journalistic photos are integrated into and function in the dense newspaper and magazine layout, but they are hung on the open, white museum wall, then they “flutter”, often seeming helpless, unguided. Journalistic photos, taken in a certain order for a certain journal at a particular time, and published together with a specific language framework – title, text, legends -, often ‘stumbled’ into the museum without warning. They thus ended up in a completely different context, which was less the narratively, illustratively emphasised as the work, its presence, its openness. In the classical format of 40×50 cm or 50×60 cm, they were strictly arranged in single row, possibly without any text, without contextualization – and were only put upon themselves, i.e., now suddenly exclusively dependent on a possible idle aesthetic power. Thus, the vision, intention and attitude of photojournalists have slipped by, dissolved. Context and information disappeared. Multiple misunderstandings were inevitable.

At the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur Photo Museum), we broke through with the first exhibitions of classical photography, with applied photography tentatively, then with the lines more prominent, introduced showcases, block hangings, met the immense industrial photography in part with large-scale cloud, cluster of photographs. With sensitive issues like Hoffmann and Hitler, we deliberately subdued the aesthetic presentation. Frames yes, but no matting, only photo corners, and actually too many small images in the same frame. For Gilles Peress Farewell to Bosnia, we staged a sarcophagus-like small space in which the images that were mounted on a kind of tarpaulin were hanged claustrophobically tightly together: there was no escape for the viewer either.

The principle of the cluster, the cloud, the airy salon hanging collapsed with the publication of photographic exhibitions in the early nineties. It was the first step to conquer the wall, to involve the space, strictly in Blossfeldt, associatively with Anders Petersen; the work “Candlestick Point” by Lewis Baltz contained within itself, a new thinking, a new approach to the wall. The individual images acted as information frames, one after another, with breaks or failures, gaps in the communication system.

Only now, as the single row was broken through, it was possible to reinstated the single row distinctively for a particular job, attitude, for a subject. It regained its speech, strictly carried out as with Roni Horn’s “You are the weather”. Awareness of the framing as signifier was weakly formed in photography for a long time. Gursky made clear, prominent, iconic placements in space. The images were protected, highlighted by the white border and lifted onto the tray by the heavy wooden framing. By contrast, Zoe Leonard moves like a weasel in the exhibition space, creeping along the walls, wanting to disappear in them. Works and wall/space are a single piece, not the wall as a background and the stage and the work as lead singer, as preacher, but rather a new whole, fused into a wall-picture/picture-space.

The exhibition “Trade – Commodities, Communication, and Consciousness”, was furnished, equipped with cool office furniture. Art and applied photography began to be shown next to each other or on top of each other. Erosion, mountain erosion brings much debris and dirt and stones and rocks and mud into the valley. For Hans Danuser, it was therefore clear and key that his works of debris flowing into valley fields must be presented lying on the floor. The White Cube found its challenge for the first time with Nan Goldin’s coloured AIDS space, then with Shirana Shahbazi’s picture-space-colour concepts. The exhibition of Ai Weiwei finally conquered the space entirely, the theme of the city circulation in Beijing was simulated by photographic grids fitted directly to the walls. Stefan Burger turn developed a creative confusion with the theme of “exhibiting”.

Photography hardly knows now, finally, how it should be shown in exhibitions, in spaces, in 3-D – the exhibitions are now become more exciting worldwide, more dense, more thrilling, more consistently reflected, more contextualised -, the digital dam failure has occurred. Hardly were the exhibitions created more complex in form and content, conquered the spaces, the Internet once again offers and demands total simplicity in dealing with photographs. The striking gesture on the tablet best illustrates the worlds of imagery that unfold in a single row on the Internet, this radical demotion of the complexity of a possible visual narrative on the sequence of individual images. The concretion “Photography here-and-now-in-this-constant-spatial-semantic field”, this momentous “Where” thins itself straight back out, violently and repeatedly: it loses not only its ancestral support, but also equally all extremities, all tentacles that finally gave it the opportunity to combine a weakly coded photographic sign with other signs into a legible and understandable network of image information. It now becomes a volatile Baudrillardian sign that, if at all, can take on any meaning at any. An attractive picture sleeve which can uncontrollably, often cluelessly slip from the context family history and family into advertising, history, nature documentary and even art.

Quo vadis, picture?

Next “Correspondence” by Hester Keijser will be published on June, Thursday 9th.

“One of life’s great ironies seems to be that after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are now all living under surveillance, forced to negotiate the shifting boundaries between public, private and personal”

Dear Urs,

You asked me to join you in this conversation because, as you said, I am from another generation. While I am not a true digital native, my practice in the field of photography has been dictated by the pace of the internet, first punctuated by the sound of the dial up modem, signaling how fast browsing and downloading would be, and nowadays only disrupted when working with photographers in places where internet connections are patchy, or censored by the state. One of life’s great ironies seems to be that after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are now all living under surveillance, forced to negotiate the shifting boundaries between public, private and personal.

Your letter made me travel back in time, although I cannot follow you to the 70s and 80s, a period that is still notably absent from the internet archives – meaning I could not find records of what the exhibitions that aggravated you so much, looked like. Photography found me in the early 90s, at a time when Inez van Lamsweerde used Paintbox to create Thank you Thighmaster and Final Fantasy, her first series of digitally manipulated images. In line with your characterization, they were produced as large Cibachrome prints, sandwiched between aluminum and Plexiglass. Seeing them now, the work has the awkwardness of a pre-teen on the cusp of adulthood. ‘Oh man, that’s terrible photoshopping’, is what I overheard millenials exclaiming on a school trip to the museum. It seems the past has never been forgotten faster than in the 21st century.

Your account reads as a history of technology as much as a history of exhibition design. In the 90s, the sizes of C-prints exploded, because the new digital enlargers allowed them to be so, and of course many photographers, whose practice has always been co-dependent on technical advancements, went all out on printing at the biggest size possible. Naturally, the novelty wore off after a while, and now large prints have become one more extra option to consider among many others. In fact, the options available to young photographers can seem endless and overwhelming: do I shoot analog or digital; what size do I print my images and on what paper; how to frame them, if at all; what edition size should I chose when working with a gallery, or am I best off publishing my work in a book because it can potentially reach a much wider audience than in an exhibition space?

Strangely, the question of the viewer, for whose sake the work is produced in the first place, doesn’t take predominance in their considerations. Likewise, in your letter, the museum visitors are largely present in their absence. Yet they are inscribed in every paragraph you wrote – because it is with their physical bodies that the viewers populate the museum space, and it is them you aimed to seduce with different exhibition concepts. The only direct physical interaction appears in your closing paragraph, where you speak of the sweeping gesture on the tablet, conjuring up a ghostlike hand moving across the confined space of the screen.

So when you asked ‘Quo vadis, picture?’, my immediate reaction was: where else, if not in the mind of the viewer, where it can become a memory, however inaccurate, fading over time or, when the imprint is strong, lodging itself there as an object of reminiscence and contemplation.

I came to photography from a practice as a visual artist with a theoretical background in philosophy. Together with my collaborative partner we made mixed-media installations and interventions in public art spaces, and initiated several community arts projects. Our practice demanded that I question the space where works of art would be shown in terms of its properties and the interactions it allowed. This included the backstage mechanics of logistics, suppliers, cultural politics and labor hierarchies. In other words, the ‘where’ of a work for me is a priori located in a complex web radiating outwards from the work in ever so many directions. As the central node within that constellation, the work becomes the interface – part transparent veil, part solid wall, part mirror – between the viewers and all the causes that have brought about its production and the conditions under which it is viewed.

For our joint experiment in thinking out loud, I propose to single out two strands from this web: the body of the viewer as one place where the image goes, and ask how embodiment is inscribed into the work itself from the start. The other strand – a suggestion for the second part of our conversation – concerns the picture in its physical materialization as a printed, framed object and its removal from public view when it gets locked away in private collections stored in freeports around the globe, where it may linger unseen for decades. This may not be too problematic for the photographs that exist as digital files which can be disseminated over the web virtually ad infinitum or at least until the internet is powered down, but it does take historical works out of circulation and denies them having a further part in shaping history. A whereto, in this sense, can also mean an away from.

Embodiment is the word I use for the way an image doesn’t speak to the eyes only, but calls on our other senses like smell, hearing and touch, affects our breathing, our posture and our vestibular sense, which helps us orient ourselves in space, and ultimately addresses and transforms our way of being in the world. Embodiment is not a very fashionable topic in current day art criticism[1] – perhaps because the close reading of single images that it requires is at odds with the speed with which we consume them – but maybe it will become more so when the virtual reality experience of the Occulus Rift finds a foothold within the visual arts and photography. An example that I often use to explain embodiment, is the writing of Thomas Bernard, who suffered from severe asthma. Reading his texts, your breathing unconsciously follows his in the rhythm that he gives to his sentences, leaving you equally struggling for air.

The photographic image, especially (but not exclusively) the kind that retains its indexical link to a reality as perceived by the human eye, always presents the viewer with a perspective (or the conspicuous lack thereof), to which our somatosensory system involuntarily responds, has to respond, because we are by nature wired to do so. For instance, when a photographer is exceptionally tall and consistently photographs his subjects by looking down on them, he imparts his perspective of tallness on me as a viewer. For me, being on the short side and therefore frequently being looked down upon, especially by men, this may feel like an unpleasant perspective, because it elevates me to a position that I prefer not to occupy.

While the issue of the perspective and the distance to the subject are quite obvious examples of the way embodiment is given with the image, I am still surprised to find how few photographers use their hold over the viewer’s body to their advantage by taking conscious decisions about their position – or the position of their camera, to be precise – when conceiving of an approach for a new work.

A case in point is Mari Bastashevski’s long term project State Business, which identifies the different agents engaged in conflict commerce, represented in photographs of nondescript buildings and seemingly insignificant scenes paired with tersely written accounts of their dealings. The distance at which the subjects are photographed is decided through her negotiations with the parties involved. The lack of photographic showmanship being the point here: it brings a highly political and largely secretive business back to a pedestrian perspective that is quite literally at level with commoners. It tells the viewer to take heart: if the artist as an ordinary person can forge this access, then so could you. These matters of importance, spelling life and death for civilians caught up in conflicts, are not completely out of your power to trace, record and lay bare for what they are.

Urs, could putting the body of the viewer back in the center shift your concern regarding the “radical demotion of the complexity of a possible visual narrative to the sequence of individual images” as “the Internet once again offers and demands total simplicity in dealing with photographs”? Complexity is already developing, albeit not of the same order that allowed “a weakly coded photographic sign [to be combined] with other signs into a legible and understandable network of image information”. In fact, you yourself hinted at a alternative way to address the body in the digital domain: through our sense of touch.

Whereas in a museum visitors are often only allowed to visually interact with the images, I believe that a connected virtual reality will want to gain ground by facilitating other sensory experiences. If indeed, as Ellen Esrock asserts, an “action-directed mode of visual perception is actually the dominant orientation we have to the world”, then the next logical step would be to let us complete these actions for which our bodies are “unconsciously preparing” when actively viewing photographs[2]. Unsurprisingly, the realm of the erotic will be one of the first (after the military complex, of course) to explore these options, either for financial gains or for educational purposes. As a very recent instance of this development I can cite an article about an interactive app developed by a Lovable Hat Cult, a Danish collective, which “lets you bring a virtual vulva to climax by moving your fingers in various motions around the screen.[3]” In other words, in the online environment of the future, the still image might not hold still for much longer.

Next “Correspondence” by Urs Stahel will be published on June, Thursday 16th.

[1] Ellen Esrock, Professor in literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is one of the few currently active researchers I am aware of who focuses “on the role of mental images, particularly visual and somatosensory, in our experience of visual art and literature”. See for instance her article “Embodying Art: The Spectator and the Inner Body” published in Poetics Today, 2010 Volume 31, Number 2: 217-250.

[2] Ellen Esrock, “Embodying Art: The Spectator and the Inner Body”, Poetics Today, 2010 Volume 31, Number 2, p. 226

[3] Lisa Felepchuk, “There’s a new app that will improve your orgasms”, The Loop, June 6, 2016.

http://www.theloop.ca/theres-a-new-app-that-will-improve-your-orgasms/

Dear Hester,

Thank you for your response. It will be an exciting open-jaw flight. Enough difference in the perspectives, enough mutual interests. That will fit. The term “embodiment” that you introduce sounds like a sound box, like a drum when it’s pronounced loudly. Physical “feeling” is a central theme for me. These days, I regularly curate at MAST (Manufacture of Arts, Experience and Technology) and so I’m often in Bologna. I soon became almost addicted to running through Bologna’s large medieval old town. It is very densely built, its pavements are almost always covered by arcades, outside floors (terrazzo) are used how we know them from interior spaces so that inside and outside seem to merge together, so that I have the feeling of snaking through a body, through the vessels of this big, compact architectural body. It’s an indescribable feeling because it doesn’t nest in my body sparsely, but instead broadly and mushrooming.

“Pictures are today often more central, more formative than lived experiences, as physical reality”

Embodiment and photography however, that sounds at first like fire and water, like a paradox. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ euphoric demand at the start of the history of photography to photograph the world in order to experience it immaterially and then burn it[1] formulated for the first time the idea that photography is an abstraction of the (physical) world, that it became part of the great abstraction process that we humans pushed for, livened up and passed through in the last 200 years. Engine and carriages in one. Since then, we have gone faster and faster down the path from substance to the surface, from material to symbols, from the world to the photograph of the world and found that pictures are today often more central, more formative than lived experiences, as physical reality. In the 20th century, the visual sense has increasingly dominated the other senses, digitalisation finally desensualises (completely) the photographic image itself. The alchemy of photography has disappeared, the image is thrust into the light, so to speak, and has been disembodied. The volume of data remains, shining brightly on the screen, easy to control, to design, to animate and to distribute throughout the world as quick as a flash.

It really is a paradox to want to embody this photography. But a lot of force and tension is often generated precisely by big contradictions, a kind of superconductive vacuum, in which visual information and visual feelings are successfully shared. At exhibitions, we so far used to have the opportunity to create photography spaces with several different staging means, which the spectator (your second missing term) entered into, and which he explored and experienced intellectually and physically. We can design the spaces to be as hard or soft, as discursive or sensual, as physical or intellectual as possible for the visitor. We all work with the concept of the exhibition as an “open work” (Umberto Eco[2]) that the audience completes with their active vision and thoughts, but there is no cure for the non-haptic surface of the photograph and, in terms of interaction, our hands are bound as tightly as before. Exhibitions can be 3D films with the option of rewinding, but not games consoles. Exhibitions can still not be animated in such a way that the visitors can relocate the photographs throughout the room and re-group them. For the time being. Let’s see what the developing virtual reality, the Oculus Rift you talk about will bring. It will surely not become more tactile in the original sense -will a complex perception system shuttle the viewer between contemplation and action for this and facilitate, with triggers, a type of contact, a secondary tactility?

In exhibitions, the images, their curators and viewers find themselves in an ideal situation, at least theoretically in an almost optimal situation. A visitor has made a decision to go out, to pay the entry fee and concentrate as he moves, sometimes talking with a friend or partner, through the rooms, through the network of photographs in very different materialisations. On the other hand, a museum, a curator, a photographer, a team of photography experts have set out to put together, after careful consideration, a certain number of photographs on a certain theme, alone or in combination with texts (and several other tools). The intersection between these two intentions, these two paths is the moment of the controlled encounter, which leads to intended, but also uncontrolled experiences, insights and feelings. The “communication” system that can occur here is so good, so perfectly installed that the rare case, this “lucky coincidence” of successful communication, as Jürgen Habermas argued in his “Theory of Communicative Action”[3], should actually happen regularly. In the successful case, everything is so well laid out that the photographs and the intentions of the curator, the photographer whisper straight into the viewer’s ear with a horn that the viewer communicates directly with the photographs’ field of intention.

“How then does this communication, this mutual encounter between image and viewer function in all other situations where photography appears?”

But, even in such a perfectly designed communication situation, visitors stay in front of a photograph for an average of 11 seconds, as a 2009 research project at the St. Gallen Art Museum in Switzerland discovered[4]. Specialists and the uninitiated tackle whole rooms in a similarly short time, crossing them diagonally at a rapid pace. This is sobering and does not bode well for an in-depth understanding. But photography is not just seen in the museum. How then does this communication, this mutual encounter between image and viewer function in all other situations where photography appears? Photography, as we know, is used in every conceivable situation, in every conceivable place on this earth, for every conceivable purpose. Since the explosion of digital photography, one can increasingly describe our actions by: Instead of remembering, photograph. Instead of experiencing, photograph. Instead of thinking, photograph. Instead of knowing, photograph. Instead of talking, photograph. Instead of loving, photograph. Instead of reading, photograph. Exhibition visitors photograph every gallery text, with the intention of reading it at home. And many of them run their public course through any private, public, free or pay media channel and pop up before our eyes, before the viewer, asked and unasked.

Video: http://www.mapping-museum-experience.com/sites/default/files/documentation/videos/tft/index_6.htm

“We are living today through the enchanting myth of the universality of photography. And we link this with the idea that we will understand every picture the same across the world”

What happens to all these images, I asked at the end of my first letter? Where do they go? Which people understand them, where, for what reason (or why not)? You write: “Where else, if not in the mind of the viewer, where it can become a memory, however inaccurate, fading over time or, when the imprint is strong, lodging itself there as an object of reminiscence and contemplation”. With some museum photographs, yes, with impressive press photographs, likewise, also thanks to the title, text, legend, but otherwise? We are living today through the enchanting myth of the universality of photography. And we link this with the idea that we will understand every picture the same across the world. That sounds good, but it is an ineradicable error, as we know. Jean Mohr and John Berger, for example, at the start of the 80s presented a series of photographs to ten people[5]. And the result was that none of the individual descriptions of the photographs agreed with any of the others. Photographs

make perfect litmus paper, perfect slides for our projections, they are realistic looking Rorschach tests which assume a different meaning depending on the context, depending on the viewer. And because we have never enjoyed an education on and with photography (photography has largely not been taken seriously enough), because we are therefore photographically, visually illiterate, we are today faced with the awkward situation to stand in a world where photographic communication is increasing so rapidly – without understanding anything really, at least not the same as the neighbours next door, as the global neighbours. Photographs trickle over us, like cherry blossom leaves after a storm: looking beautiful, touching, attractive, with a lot of likes – but also compulsorily accompanied by numerous misunderstandings, programmed into the tools of communication. The “Where” of the photograph implies, amazingly strongly, the precondition of an option of “reading” and understanding a photograph, no?

Next “Correspondence” by Hester Keijser will be published on June, Thursday 23th.

[1] Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859), in: Bernd Stiegler (Ed.): Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie, Stuttgart 2010. p. 26 et. seq.

[2] Umberto Eco, The open work. Frankfurt am Main, 1962

[3] Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. (Volume 1: Reason and the rationalisation of society, Vol. 2: A Critique of Functionalist Reason), Frankfurt am Main 1981

[4] EMotion – Mapping Museum Experience. Head of the project Prof. Dr. Martin Tröndle, WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production, Zeppelin University of Friedrichshafen. Cited according to http://www.mapping-museum-experience.com

[5] John Berger, Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling. Munich/Vienna 1984.

Dear Urs,

It took time to gather my thoughts, as they had been dispersed, dispatched to sound out the topics that resonated in your letter^[1]. Or should I say: that had lit up like nodes in those neural network maps that are so popular – perhaps because they allow us to visualize our mental activities as somehow aligned with artificial networked environments, encouraging us to accept a not too distant future in which both are ‘naturally’ intertwined and entangled.

Apart from what is wrong with this analogy, I cannot deny that I have grown to depend on online resources when shaping my thoughts, and by now I am accustomed to the necessary scattering of myself among search results. Like everyone else, I succumb to the exhilarating appeal of letting oneself drift from one hyperlink to the next, which always brings with it a temporary loss of focus on the everyday tasks at hand, and I can easily imagine spending a lifetime absorbing what others have shared, often for free.^[2]

You may wonder why I underline an experience that has become so commonplace in the astoundingly short time span of twenty-six years since the World Wide Web went public. Yet isn’t it these online habits that visitors nowadays bring to photography exhibitions at museums, festivals and fairs? It would account for the eleven seconds^[3] that both specialists and the uninitiated spend in front of each image. Likewise, I am not surprised that the distinction between professionals and amateurs has thus collapsed, because these groups are not distinguished by how they behave online, even if their browsing histories are quite different.

“Disengagement, as the relinquishing of any sense of agency, is in the nature of entertainment”

 

Furthermore, let’s be honest: what is at stake for people who can visit museums or aimlessly lose time online? Nothing is required of us when engaged in these activities, except when our jobs or educational commitments prompt us to record a response that can be scrutinized and evaluated. Disengagement, as the relinquishing of any sense of agency, is in the nature of entertainment. As the author Dave Eggers observed when visiting a Donald Trump rally in Sacramento, California^[4], entertainment is a force so formidable that it even threatens to predominate what Hannah Arendt^[5] identified as the sphere of human agency per excellence: politics.

“Nothing in Trump’s platform matters. There is no policy that matters. There is no promise that matters. There is no villain, no scapegoat, that matters. If, tomorrow, he said that Canadians, not Mexicans, were rapists and drug dealers, and the wall should be built on that border, no one would blink. […] Americans who have voted for Trump in the primaries have done so not because they agree with all, or any, of his statements or promises, but because he is an entertainment.”

In the face of such overriding power, what can a photography museum do to create even as much as elbow room for an incisive encounter between the exhibited works and the visitors? Do we even know what conditions should be met that will enable the viewers to regain themselves as agents capable of action in the face of the work you wish them to communicate with – as per your reference to Jürgen Habermas? I completely understand your ambition as a curator to regard the viewers as equal conversation partners, but I do wonder how you square that with the position museums occupy in the pertaining glocal economical, social and political realities? In other words: is the contemporary museum as an institution (still) the designated place for your ambition to take hold?

In a recent address to the Redeye National Photography Symposium in Derby^[6], I suggested that instead of obsessing over the preservation, documentation and communication of the past and present state of photography with a contemporary audience in mind, we should give more thought to the question how to act in the interest of generations who will inherit the earth in a more distant future, may they be human, post-human or even non-human. Doesn’t this require a much broader scope of imagination, one that challenges us to project an unknowable future into the present times?

I think we can agree that the future of life on earth is looking pretty grim, and it is not exactly easy nor pleasant to face the many deaths we will have on our conscience through the havoc our collective actions are wreaking on the climate, the biodiversity of the ecosystems, or through the exhaustion of resources and cheap labor forces. If you want to use the metaphor of the train, of being “engine and carriage in one”, then by and large we are traveling into the future facing backwards. Watching our past unroll, there is very little opportunity to act upon it other than in archival gestures, conservational efforts or by recounting the manifold and contested versions of our shared history. Dieter Roelstraete, curator at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art MuHKA, has called this with some exasperation an “inability to grasp or even look at the present, much less to excavate the future.”^[7] Roelstraete sees this “tragic flaw” of the “current historiographic turn in the arts” compensated by the “intensifying of our bodily bondage to a world” through the “hard and dirty” work of scratching “the surface (of the earth, of time, of the world) rather than merely marvel at it in dandified detachment”, producing “not so much an optics as it does a haptics”.

Our correspondence orbits around the where of photographs and of photography. “Where” is a directional question, which can be understood in both a spatial and a temporal sense. Within that framework, I keep coming back to the body as the pivot point, however paradoxical that may seem to you. Sarah Kember, professor at Goldsmiths University in London, offers a handle on this in her contribution to Martin Lister’s The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. The consensus in this collection of essays is that “photography appears to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously” ^[8] – and this ubiquity of photography, which she relates to ubiquitous computing, is also the premise on which Kember builds.

Her aim in Ambient Intelligent Photography is “to track both the goal and the evolution of the ubiquitous computing project as it enrolls photography and strives to transfer it from a context in which it is everywhere” ^[9], to one in which it becomes an ‘everyware’ that ‘insinuates’ itself into everyday life. She continues by pointing out a concern that I share with her, viz, that up till now, informed reflections on the question of the “where” of photography” haven’t been far-reaching enough.^[10] Lacking the space to summarize her article, I want to highlight what drew my attention first and foremost: her observation that the current developments in ubiquitous photography hinge on “a re-ordering of life (biological and social) under the cover of practices of media and communication that are deemed ordinary, everyday, user-based, personal, private and vernacular”, which makes the everyday “a highly contested realm – a realm of biopower.” ^[11]

“In the end, we are the subject and the intended targets (of warfare, of surveillance, of marketing, of data strategists) of the transformations we are observing. It is not merely the ontological status or condition of the photographic image that is at stake, it is our own as well”

Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis also touch upon this point in their essay Algorithmic Photography and the Crisis of Representation: “Because the image is not given as meaning to an existing audience, but establishes the idea of audience by demanding participation, a certain reversal is taking place: it is not the human subject who receives a ready-made image but the image that makes (or unmakes) the subject.” ^[12]

In other words, we can speculate and theorize all we like about the future ‘wheres’ of the photographic image, but we completely miss the point if we fail to understand that we ourselves are drawn into these developments, and that in the end, we are the subject and the intended targets (of warfare, of surveillance, of marketing, of data strategists) of the transformations we are observing. It is not merely the ontological status or condition of the photographic image that is at stake, it is our own as well. This is exactly why for me the human body is central in our conversation, and why I spoke of “the perspective and the distance to the subject” as being ways in which our embodiment is prescribed (coded) in the image. La Petite Mort, the interactive app that I referenced, which invites users to bring a virtual vulva to climax, is just one (and seemingly harmless) instance of everyware that aims to assert itself in Kember’s realm of biopower.

Urs, I must thank you for helping me bring to light what at first was but remotely sensed, even if it meant I had to take you on such a detour. So to answer your last question, if “the “Where” of the photograph implies, amazingly strongly, the precondition of an option of “reading” and understanding a photograph”: Yes, indeed it does, very much so. Even by engaging in conversations about how each of us understands a photograph, we are already contributing to the re-ordering of ourselves as the new subjects of this ubiquitous, ambient intelligent photography. And I must add: all of this at our own peril, because I cannot free myself from the impression that we stand to lose something vital in the process.

NB: all hyperlinks retrieved June 20, 2016

Next “Correspondence” by Urs Stahel will be published on June, Thursday 30th.

^[1] For instance, your description of moving through the old centre of Bologna conjured up the ever potent image of the labyrinth, and I was immediately reminded of Olaf Nicolai and Jan Wenzel experimental publication “Four Times Through the Labyrinth” (Spector Books, 2012). Drawing on Jan Pieper’s study “The Labyrinthine: On the Idea of Concealment, Enigma and Complexity in the History of Architecture”, the book opens with a question: “The shocking impact of the city: is this what lies at the heart of the ancient myth of the labyrinth?”

Still today, the labyrinth offers itself as a productive-seductive metaphor to speak about our experience of moving through a tangled world, and I briefly toyed with the idea of structuring my reply on the basic constituents of the myth – the structure itself, the path through it, the figures of the main hero, Theseus, and his tragic opponent, the Minotaur – yet I (thankfully) managed to resist that urge. I do wholeheartedly recommend this book, for it is incredibly rich in references, and it’s very inspiring for the new connections it allows you to make between fields that you never may have understood as thus related.

http://www.spectorbooks.com/#labyrinth-four-times-through-the-labyrinth

^[2] Hito Steyerl has repeated spoken of exhaustion as “a widespread standard of the contemporary condition”, and how “free labor and rampant exploitation are the invisible dark matter that keeps the cultural sector going.” See for instance: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-art-contemporary-art-and-the-transition-to-post-democracy/

http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned-2/62143/hito-steyerl-politics-of-post-representation/

^[3] Coincidentally, 11 seconds is also the duration of thousands of mysterious videos uploaded to a Youtube account with the name Webdriver Torso. Watching one of these will give an idea how long a 11 second engagement with an image feels. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsLiV4WJfkTEHH0b9PmRklw

At some point Google revealed to be behind channel, which is used as an internal testing utility for YouTube’s performance. The phenomenon, which had been the topic of speculation, has spawned a number of dance remixes, incorporating the tones and the visuals of the original videos in performances, see for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csMFyBRSw54

^[4] Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/17/could-he-actually-win-dave-eggers-donald-trump-rally-presidential-campaign

^[5] Arendt explored this in depth in her groundbreaking account of the vita activa in The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(book)

^[6] Keynote Address “On clouds, islands and diversity in the digital biosphere – a call for climate change in online photographic communities” for National Photography Symposium, 2016. http://www.uknps.org.uk/2016/03/

^[7] Source: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-way-of-the-shovel-on-the-archeological-imaginary-in-art/

^[8] The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Martin Lister, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2013, p.5

^[9] ibid, p.56

^[10] “So far, I suggest, our answer to this question has been rather too parochial (concerned with the fate of photography as a medium), politically naïve (as if the manifestation of photography everywhere was itself democratic, or as if the everyday was a neutral, uncontested, or even inherently politicized realm) and constrained by disciplinary boundaries unable to address the life in everyday life (as being biologically as well as socially mediated) or to respond adequately to the technology industry’s seemingly all-encompassing vision.” Ibid. p.56.

^[11] Ibid. p.58

^[12] Ibid, pp.32-33

Dear Hester,

Thank you for your intense and dense “detour,” as you called it.

On the one hand, I would like to continue poking around with the needle into our previous haystack. Speed and mass stand out quite strongly. These are among the themes and concepts I have addressed in public discussions that have been more or less met with acceptance, or at least a willingness to listen. On the other hand, the banal thesis that we live in a special time today, in reality and virtual-reality, with extraordinary challenges and many unsolved issues – that we live in a precarious time – has been quickly met with surprisingly strong public resistance.

For example, when asked about the digital revolution and its impact, a public of managers, of leaders gave a slightly aggressive response: “It was no less profound than Gutenberg’s revolution with the printing press.” It’s a counter-argument, like many others that attempt to mitigate, if not to cover up, the explosive nature of the present.

When it comes to speed and mass, however, we receive an endorsing nod. Speed ​​multiplied by mass and justice and globalization: it’s something we hardly know how to deal with. We are not equipped for it, even if we can develop supercomputer solutions. We are mentally and emotionally incapable of responding to such rapid, voluminous, and complex issues, for which we would have to first perceive the situation, and then analyze, understand, and ultimately agree on a common action. Speed ​​and mass are also central parameters in dealing with photography today. The mass of production and the speed of dissemination, combined with numerous de- and re-contextualizations, both de-materialize and uproot the dataset “photography.” The abstraction of abstraction of abstraction results in the alienation of photography and visual communication.

“Industrial photography is a phenomenon of mass production, but not of mass perception. Business-to-business generates far fewer public images than business-to-consumer”

But I’ve decided to take an alternate route: into the world of applied photography. After all, we only have four double sessions – four times two letter exchanges – and we are already at the halfway point. In response to the question: “Where?” I would like to offer a meandering reply and ask in return: 1. In the archive. Properly stored, or dusty and damp? 2. Nowhere. Because lost, stolen, or digitized? And I’d like to offer two examples regarding forms of localization and displacement in photography.

The first is an example from my experience at MAST in Bologna, from my work on and with industrial photography. For a century, photography was intensely, elaborately, and in a certain sense perfectly executed. We’ve only ever seen a fraction of what was produced. Industrial photography is a phenomenon of mass production, but not of mass perception. Business-to-business generates far fewer public images than business-to-consumer. Still, such photographs were often properly stored in archives.

Then, with the growth of industrial capitalism – in the course of land consolidation, mergers, and sales that have intensified since the 1970s – the visual, and often the written, recorded history of industry and industrialization was thrown away. Into the bin it went, by the ton. New owners showed little interest for the old stories. At the same time, outsourcing was introduced. This had a negative impact on industrial photography, which was especially strong in the machine industry, where large retouching and lithography departments were now shut down. Small-format and amateur photography entered sometimes the field. The quality of the photography, along with the interest for the industrial image, rapidly declined.

Only recently have we turned critical attention to industrial photography, and noticed how we had essentially suppressed half of the world, half of history – and how the industrial manufacturing world actually offers us valuable information concerning our lives, our thoughts, and our actions. The first attempts to address industry in museums – let’s call it the musealization of industry 1.0 – have sparked confrontation with the visual history of industrialization. Gradually a netherworld is becoming illuminated – as long as the photographs of it are still available.

And here’s a second example: Three years ago, an amazing, fabulous book won the History Book Award at the Photography Festival in Arles and at Paris Photo. It bears a seemingly mysterious title: AO1 [COD.19.I.I.43] A27 [S | COD.23], which is embossed in small, discreet lettering onto a standard plain gray cardboard cover.[1] Further down is the name “Rosângela Rennó”. Everything is in italics. There is no additional information, neither on the back cover nor on the spine. Two slabs of thick gray cardboard enclose the large book, 34.5 cm high and 29 cm wide; the spine is made of dark, slightly faded blue canvas. The endpaper reminds me of the pattern on the waxed paper that my mother used to line the kitchen drawers when I was a child.

The book exudes a kind of “backstage” aura. It makes us feel as if we are participants – with a bit of a time lag – in the archival and inventory of 27 albums from the Pereira Passos/Malta Collection, which is stored in the city archives of Rio de Janeiro. Album covers and the backs of photographs with rudimentary handwritten inventory notes and curt descriptions of the depicted scenes alternate with a series of photographs scattered throughout the book that for the most part seem to describe city life in Rio. Leafing through the book we begin to suspect something that becomes clear upon reading the introduction: this is the story of a robbery. It relates the egregiousness of the gradual or rapid disappearance of many valuable documents from the city archives, including 19 of the 27 albums from the Pereira Passos Collection, which mainly comprises photographs by the city’s official photographer, Augusto Malta, and his sons made during the first half of the 20th century. The theft was first discovered in June, 2006. Most of the boxes were still on the shelves, but their interior revealed numerous signs of vandalism. Photos were cut out and stolen, pages torn, and on a few occasions, book covers that were completely devoid of their contents. Sometimes everything was missing. There were no signs of forcible entry into the rooms. To this day, it remains unclear whether everything was stolen all at once or gradually over an extended period of time.

The book title, AO1 [COD.19.I.I.43] A27 [S | COD.23], reflects the classification system for the original inventory of 27 albums. The combination of a simple gray cardboard cover with gilt edging is a playful reminder of the double role of documents in archives. On the one hand, they are simple documents; on the other, they are valuable mementos, small visual monuments to local history and pieces of the puzzle that is collective memory. Should they disappear, gaps are created that can never be closed. This could be compared to the gaps in thinking and remembering that occur during dementia. Three or four years before the publication of this book, Rosângela Rennó addressed a similar case in a similar format: 2005-510117385-5 is a visual report on the aftermath when 751 photographs were stolen from the D. Thereza Christina Maria Collection, a private collection of 23,000 photographs that Emperor D. Pedro II donated to the National Library in 1889 following the proclamation of the Republic of Brazil.[2] Rennó photographed the backs of the 101 photographs that were recovered. They document the damages and changes made to the photographs, for example the attempt to etch away the library stamp so that the images could be sold more easily.

In these two archival books, Rosângela Rennó uses her visual material quietly yet precisely, in order address the issue of cultural amnesia and the careless handling of cultural heritage in Brazil. In an interview, Rennó noted how the young country is pressing forward with devouring strength, and that in doing so has deliberately and systematically displaced the order of what has gone before, the memory of the past. Using appropriation to counter forgetting is the driving force behind her work, in which she collects and reworks materials and their stories – to create a visual history of Brazil.

Where and how is something photographed and under what circumstances? Where is something archived and with what intentions, carefully or carelessly? Where is something discarded, stolen, vandalized intentionally, or unintentionally? What happens when a major magazine and newspaper publisher wants to scan its photographs, but of the 7 to 10 million photographs only 5% is selected?

These are few of the many issues that arise when dealing with photography in archives. How applied photography is dealt with by business, the media, and in archives also reflects our relationship to the production conditions of life, society, the economy, and our production of consumer goods. Often the approach is: We sometimes cover, disguise, drape, paint, and conceal the crooked wall, the aging face, the chipped plaster, the dented car. We like to arrange our world so that its origin, its mechanism, and its operation are no longer visible, so that it appears before us as a perfect shiny box that we can look at and admire. Actions disappear into results, while inconsistencies, shortcomings, and mistakes are concealed, gaps edited away. We like the result, the appearance, the action, the event, and the glamor – and retouch the in-between and the absent, while the undesirable gets swept off into the real or virtual trash bin. Thus our image of the world often consists of performances (personal, professional), of successful acts, of high profile publicity. Meanwhile, gaps – the waiting, the not-done, boredom – and “dirty laundry” – hard labor, poor working conditions, pollution, etc. go unseen or are intentionally hidden.

Anton Holzer: “Catalogs, like archives in general, have the same function that freezers do. They freeze items, hold them securely, so that we can later thaw and reuse them. Catalogs conserve not only things, but also the cultural relationships and hierarchies between things.”

This attitude is reinforced by shifting, overlapping traces of memory. Harald Welzer, in a lecture entitled “Pictures in the Mind – Truth and Remembrance” (held in 2006 at the Centre for Photography in Winterthur), said: “The consolidation of an individual memory includes not only what actually happened, but how it was interpreted, and especially how it was communicated. Memory is always the event plus the memory of the memory, and each new recollection of the memory will overwrite the existing engram, meaning the specific neural link that represents the perception, storage, consolidation, and retrieval of past events in the brain. Memory research now provides ample evidence that the brain does not always distinguish between imagined and actual events, and especially that the repeated communication of an event increasingly consolidates the memory, providing it with a higher content of subjective reality. False memories look just and feel just like real ones.”[3]

“Well, where is photography?” In this case, our answer to the question might be: Hopefully in a good archive, a good balance of analog and digital, with attentive labelling, preserved in the best way possible. And labeled, sorted, dated, and inventoried, so that the images cannot escape, not be discarded or stolen, or vanish into an anonymous mass of archival entries.

During that same symposium with Welzer, Anton Holzer noted that “Catalogs, like archives in general, have the same function that freezers do. They freeze items, hold them securely, so that we can later thaw and reuse them. Catalogs conserve not only things, but also the cultural relationships and hierarchies between things. It is their nature to protect – or in other words, to act ‘conservatively.’ Without freezing there is no archive – and without thawing there is no living visual memory. The memory of the archive is alive and available only when it is associated with the culture outside of the archive, with the present. And when the archive is posed questions that the initial archivists did not – or could not – ask.”[4]

Especially given the speed that we are currently experiencing, which is vigorously rattling our brains and blowing our minds, photographs, along with their equally intelligent and preserving storage, can continue to play an important role in retaining the personal, societal, eventful, despite all doubts and problems. Right? But it depends on how interested or lazy we are. If we want to know something, then we’ll pay attention, otherwise we forget, confuse, lose, and despise it.

What do you think, Hester?

Next “Correspondence” by Hester Keijser will be published on July, Thursday 7th.

[1] Rosângela Rennó: AO1 [COD.19.I.I.43] A27 [S | COD.23]. Rio de Janeiro 2013.

[2] Rosângela Rennó: 2005-510117385-5. Rio de Janeiro 2009.

[3] Harald Welzer: Lecture abstract for the symposium “Visual Memory,” Centre for Photography, Winterthur, 26 June 2006.

[4] Anton Holzer: Lecture abstract for the symposium “Visual Memory,” Centre for Photography, Winterthur, 26 June 2006.

Dear Urs,

By turning to applied photography you lead the way deeper into the maze that our question ‘where is photography?’ has opened up. As an assiduous Ariadne, I have threaded your steps in your last letter, and laid them out before me in order to make it easier to not only follow you, but also to find my way out again. So let me recount…

You propose we consider the following: “Where is photography? Hopefully in a good archive, a good balance of analog and digital, with attentive labeling, preserved in the best way possible. And labeled, sorted, dated, and inventoried, so that the images cannot escape, not be discarded or stolen, or vanish into an anonymous mass of archival entries.” You wish that these applied photographs end up in a good archive, because “photographs, along with their equally intelligent and preserving storage, can continue to play an important role in retaining the personal, societal, eventful, despite all doubts and problems.”

You underpin this proposition by highlighting two case studies dealing with historical photographic materials, one directed at reexamining industrial archives, and one relating to a burglared municipal archive from Brazil. As a motivation to engage with these archives, you argue that “how applied photography is dealt with by business, the media, and in archives also reflects our relationship to the production conditions of life, society, the economy, and our production of consumer goods”, which “offers us valuable information concerning our lives, our thoughts, and our actions.”

Secondly, you identify a need to protect the integrity of archives in order that we may counter deliberate and systematic displacement of the order of what has gone before, which could lead to rents in the fabric of our collective memory. In short, you define the relevance of the archive by its capacity to be productive for the present generation, which you underline by quoting Anton Holzer: “The memory of the archive is alive and available only when it is associated with the culture outside of the archive, with the present. And when the archive is posed questions that the initial archivists did not – or could not – ask.”

All this is set against the background of concerns over “something we hardly know how to deal with”: mass and speed as “central parameters in dealing with photography today”.

Within the span of 2000 words you managed to open up an Augsburger Puppenkiste full of characters that populate the contemporary photographic discourse. Tumbling out first, because it was the biggest and heaviest of them all, came the figure of the good archive, which you had given a handsome, utopian profile. A somewhat avuncular presence, who secures the past in a meticulously kept mansion protected against burglary through camera surveillance and strict entry codes, but who needs frequent visits from relatives to rekindle his crumbling memories through the incessant and sometimes impertinent questions fired at him by younger generations.

It occurred to me that the good archive bears resemblance to another important archive: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is financed by post-capitalist industry giants such as Bill Gates, Rockefeller Foundation, Syngenta and Monsanto, companies that are involved in various forms of coding (organic or digital) of information, and whose activities in the realm of intellectual ownership, copyrights and patents are frequently cause for public outrage. In the Svalbard vaults, chosen seeds are preserved under strict conditions, as in any good archive, with an eye on research and for future restoration. These seeds, sometimes referred to as backup copies^[1], may at some point become the originals from which future food crops are grown. In that case, control, access and ownership of these could become a business to have a vested interest in. Meanwhile, outside this high-tec, high-security vault, natural plant-life evolves unhindered, cross-breeds, adapts to new climatic conditions, or is preserved in informal or even illegitimate networks of seed sharing. Slowly a realm of rogues and bastard weeds is created artificially by the establishment of the Svalbard exclusion zone, which at the same time is a zone of exclusivity.

What Steyerl coined as the ‘poor image’ is the remaining 99% that have to fend for themselves outside of this zone, where they will lead demonstrably poorer, but also more exciting, perilous and possibly explosive existences.

Likewise, the inclusion in institutionalized archives with their ideal conditions will become the prerogative of a very select set of photographic materials, the selection of which is delegated to professional librarians, museologists, collectors and historians, and in some part left to chance. Since there is no such thing as infinite storage capacity, difficult choices will have to be made with respect to what to keep and what to discard from the dizzying amounts of photographs that are born into the world.

Let’s call the materials that are admitted to these good archives the 1%, in conscious analogy to the 1% of the population that owns a disproportionate share of capital, political influence, and the means of production. What Steyerl coined as the ‘poor image’ is the remaining 99% that have to fend for themselves outside of this zone, where they will lead demonstrably poorer, but also more exciting, perilous and possibly explosive existences^[2].

Since you proposed to consider “how the way we deal with applied images reflects our relationship to the production conditions of life, society, the economy, and our production of consumer goods”, shouldn’t we also take a look at this divide between the rich and the poor images and how they mirror the growing inequality facing the global population?

“In many instances, access to the original images is only granted through permission from the council of those who preside over their safekeeping”

Your own description presages this: in the good archive the photographs are well kept, labeled, sorted and dated with great attention – but like the 1% they are for the most part kept out of sight in gated communities. Often only their whereabouts are known, and sometimes even that is a mystery. In many instances, access to the original images is only granted through permission from the council of those who preside over their safekeeping. Photographic archives – even in public and university libraries – are not really open to the public, with the images living on only in their digitized, dematerialized forms, stored in databases that are generally not very user friendly to navigate. Yet it is in these good archives that are kept what will become the seeds of future history as written by the accredited specialists who obtain access to them – but it could be the history of the 1%. In this sense, the good archive, however well intentioned, can become a threat to the diversity of images that are circulating outside of the archival safe spaces, left as they are to their own devices of long-run survival.

In that sense, your plea for the good archive already answers how we deal with the mass of photography that is produced. For isn’t it so that the faster the surfeit of images grow, the stronger our desire to master what threatens to escape from our grip, and the more urgent our concerns about archival practices and other forms of information management become? In our attempts to stem and regulate these floods, we inevitably create inequality – and that inequality mirrors the prevailing economical inequality in rather uncanny ways.

[A remark in parenthesis on the mastering and management of the speed and mass of information. You wrote: “We are mentally and emotionally incapable of responding to such rapid, voluminous, and complex issues, for which we would have to first perceive the situation, and then analyze, understand, and ultimately agree on a common action.” It may be that many find themselves incapable of responding, and I am not surprised you encountered endorsing nods when speaking of “speed multiplied by mass and justice and globalization” to an audience of managers and leaders. However, there is a group of people who can’t afford not to respond, but who have to make do as they go along, because it is their responsibility to manage large amounts of data.

It would be worthwhile, if we had time, to take a tour through the research spaces of archivists and librarians who are forced to come up with solutions, however provisional, to deal with big data collections and the overabundance of materials to archive, code and classify. I am sure you must have heard of the ‘computational turn’ in the ‘digital humanities’, to which these disciplines have come to belong. For instance, reading a report that “examines how the archival perspective can be useful in addressing problems faced by those who design, manage, disseminate, and preserve digital information^[3]”, I came across many passages that echo the various social, technical, political and legal concerns voiced by the photography community. There is no reason why we should not listen to specialists in fields adjacent to photography, we just seem to forget that they are there for the asking.]

Let’s return to our quest for the current wheres of photography. By creating inequality, we create two different ‘wheres’ at once: inside the sanctuary and out in the wild. Often this means that the original work – and this extends to the limited edition digital file stored on a physical data carrier – is withdrawn from circulation, hidden in secure storages with access privileges, from where it actively empowers the proliferation of its ‘poor’ digital offspring. In short: the material object retreats only to foreground the digital image, the representative copy, which now becomes the reality that the majority of people deal with on a daily basis.

Moreover, the digital copy validates the original work every time it is shared, downloaded, forwarded, tagged, resized, instagrammed, or even stolen, cropped, and used for a meme. Within this economy, going viral is the highest good. To perform such labor – for it takes our time to engage in this manner with photography – the ordinary internet user is called upon. Every time we circulate an image, the original of which is held in public or private possession, we increase its value for the owner, who “gets money for nothing and chicks for free”. Or rather: higher prices at auctions, which is what puts public archives at risk of being sold off by governments needing to liquify ‘their’ assets in times of austerity, which in turn can threaten the societal role of the archive in keeping alive a collectively shared identity and history.

“Isn’t all photography applied, used towards an end, be it to function within the arts industry or any other industry? Aren’t the contemporary visual arts fully integrated in the neoliberal worldview – as entertainment or as investments in moveable assets?”

But enough about archives now! I want to end on something that has been sitting at the back of my mind all along. You introduced a new turn by taking “an alternative route: into the world of applied photography”. Applied photography: this has an odd ring to me. Always has had. In this day and age, isn’t all photography applied, used towards an end, be it to function within the arts industry or any other industry? Aren’t the contemporary visual arts fully integrated in the neoliberal worldview – as entertainment or as investments in moveable assets? There seems to be no place left outside of that system, at least not in those parts of the world that are fully under the governance of the globalized economy. Without wanting to retreat to super-fundamental questions such as what even qualifies as art within the current framework, I would like to know what for you is the importance of a distinction which somehow no longer seems to pertain to the reality I find myself living in. Why do you reserve a special place for applied photography in our journey to find out about the where of it? Help me see, for I must be blind.

Next “Correspondence” by Urs Stahel will be published on July, Thursday 14th.

^[1] In this context it is interesting to remember that seed banks also deal with questions of longevity and integrity of their stock, and face potential corruption of the original in the process of copying, similar to the risks of data loss due to image compression and copy errors in digital images.

“Institutions that hold seeds in long-term cold storage must grow out their stock every so often. If they just put seeds in their vaults and forgot about them, sooner or later they will die, because nothing lasts forever. And this relates back directly to how “copies” are made. Quite simply, seed banks plant some of their seeds, grow the plants and harvest fresh new seed. But the process can be tricky, because you want the new sample to contain the same diversity in the same proportions as the original sample. You don’t want what is known as “genetic drift” wherein each time a crop is grown out it changes slightly through the conditions of the grow-out. To a certain degree this is unavoidable, but scientists work very hard to make sure that copies are copies.”

Retrieved July 5th, 2016 from source http://www.seedsoftimemovie.com/faq

^[2] Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, retrieved July 4th, 2016 from http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

^[3] Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland, Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment, retrieved July 4th, 2016 from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub89

Through its imagery, photography creates the world that we intend to remember and will remember. Photography generates the visual notion of our world. Photography has a key influence on our future images of the world and on our courses of action.

Dear Hester,

1

My brief response to your final question is different fields of experience! 🙂 Despite globalizing issues and global channels of information, diverse fields of experience, fields of activity and fields of reflection allow the spotlight of interest to cast a slightly different light on things, allow us to continue to see and evaluate things from different perspectives. You are right: From the perspective of a globalized economy, there is no longer an “outside,” no outside the system. That is the painfully deep experience of the last decades. What’s more, the field of what was once “noble” art is today nothing more than yet another economic field in which a great deal of money can be made or lost. Yet despite this realization that the filter of the globalized economy, the filter of consumerism, turns everything into a commodity, we don’t necessarily have to act accordingly, and there are nevertheless different where’s and how’s. The perception of the system should not limit the artist to perceiving his or her own art from a solely monetary perspective. The same holds true for an honest, intensive viewer, experiencer, “user” of art. The dominance and omnipresence of economic factors cannot be allowed to completely determine our existence.

“In the early 1990s, the artistic venues were only interested in an infinitesimal fraction of what is photographically produced and either neglect or manifestly reject the remaining 99.9%.”

2

My longer response, which hopefully sparks new questions and insights, begins as follows: In the early 1990s, when I pressed ahead with the establishment and opening of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, I was often asked why we were opening up a museum for photography at a time when contemporary art museums were starting to show photography. One of my resolute responses at the time was because the artistic venues are only interested in an infinitesimal fraction of what is photographically produced and either neglect or manifestly reject the remaining 99.9%. Because the field extends beyond artistic photography to include applied photography. Because photography is a medium that—aside from making art—allows us to capture weddings and other memories, colors and contours, stories and histories, and much more. Moreover, with regard to other museums of photography, I often added that the Fotomuseum Winterthur is interested not only in art, author photography, the highlights of photographic history and contemporary photography, but also takes an avid interest in all forms of photography, including industrial photography, police photography, medical photography, fashion photography, still-life photography and the photography of things, etc. And it does so not only from the perspective of a photographic-aesthetic canon, but also out of sociological interest, out of a curiosity about the function of photography within the social context, the connection between the visual and the sociological.

During the first ten years, we had difficulties making our exhibition concepts appeal to other museums or exhibition venues. As I illustrated in my last blog entry, industrial photographs were and continue to be thrown away by the ton, and it seemed that neither art museums nor museums of photography took any interest in these—in some cases—anonymous industrial photographs (such as in the exhibitions “Industrial Image“ or “Ecstasy of Things”). Even today, many museums of photography pursue a program of author photography, they adhere to the list of important names for each area and show one photographer after the next (and still exhibit the works of far fewer women photographers), but they steer clear of the large, broad, somewhat uncontrolled field of applied photography. During the 2000s, finally a number of themes broached by artists were seized upon and addressed for a while. Thomas Ruff, for example, tackled the area of photography of machines and then press photography. Within photographic circles, vernacular photography managed to generate a bit of hype. In German the term “applied photography” (“Gebrauchsfotografie”) still sounds usable—in English it may have a connotation that I have been unaware of—but what is more important here is that there exists this enormous field of applied photography, of non-artistic photography, and that it is far more comprehensive and can often serve more appropriately as a visual memory archive than photographic works in the field of art will ever intend or be able to do. And that this field still exists when artists and theoreticians have long since turned their gaze to other themes and other interests.

“When it comes to social recognition, photography has always been a poor cousin and only those images that are perceived within the context of art enjoy a high status and are attributed a financial value.”

Perhaps I was not clever enough in formulating my ideas (yet hopefully not quite as colorful and chaotic as a puppet showJ), but I am not referring to the protected gardens, the protected fields, the sanctioned archives filled with exquisite photographs. Rather, I am talking about the 99, the 99.9 percent. In my third blog entry, I spoke of the risks and opportunities of repositories for photographs as part of our visual-historic memory, as a treasure trove and perhaps a documentary trove for future research of the past, with regard to insights into our current and future lives. The problem with this photography actually is that it can generally achieve no commercial value; in fact, its storage and preparation constantly costs money. Not surprisingly, people around the world are gleefully throwing it away, discarding it. When it comes to social recognition, photography has always been a poor cousin and only those images that are perceived within the context of art enjoy a high status and are attributed a financial value.

I set out to designate the private archive, the company archive, the municipal archives, archives of public and private institutions as a central “where” for photography with its own principles, to emphasize its worth and, at the same time, make note of its precarious existence. You have made two key points here: Yes, we cannot collect and preserve everything and, yes, we always have to dispose of some images. And every decision, to retain or discard, creates inequalities, which is unavoidable and usually adheres to not only pragmatic but also ideological principles. But this realization should not keep us from becoming active and nevertheless taking action, right? Your comparison with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault slightly misses the mark, in my opinion, because the photo archive is always directed toward the past, while these gigantic seed archives (commercial and social) are aimed at ensuring our existence in the future. In one respect, however, they resemble each other: photographs in archives serve, among other things, to breathe life into memories, to breathe life into history, which is constantly being rewritten. In that respect, every trip to an archive with an open mind changes our image of the past, just as every blending of a seed bank and the outside world gives reality a good shake-up.

3

The museum and the analog or digital archive are just a fraction of the venues in which photography takes place, is used and collected. The thrilling and limitless, exciting and “dangerous” quality of photography is that, as I’ve said, it can be used for every imaginable purpose: for monitoring and controlling (police photography), for depicting and educating (medical photography, botanical photography), for contemporary fictionalizing and the creation of experiential worlds at the service of the economy (advertising photography), for molding identities and memories, forging sentiment fields, making gestures that merely affirm one’s existence (I’m here), and so forth. All of these “where’s” adhere to both common and unique principles at the same time and, in German, all of these “where’s” (Wo’s in our language) naturally give rise to a range of linguistically related forms to produce the following questions: Where to (wohin)? Where from (woher)? For what purpose (wozu)? From what (wovon)? Whereupon (worauf)? With what (womit)? These questions imply a system of rules, functions and semantic fields that finally conclude, as you correctly wrote, with the monetary “how much?” question. And the cycle, as you have clearly pointed out, has become far larger and faster: “Moreover, the digital copy validates the original work every time it is shared, downloaded, forwarded, tagged, resized, instagrammed, or even stolen, cropped, and used for a meme. Within this economy, going viral is the highest good. To perform such labor – for it takes our time to engage in this manner with photography – the ordinary internet user is called upon. Every time we circulate an image, the original of which is held in public or private possession, we increase its value for the owner, who ‘gets money for nothing and chicks for free’.”

“We have to be educated about images and well versed in the language of imagery to be prepared for the communication of the present and the future.”

I will allow myself to leave aside the monetary aspect here and, in exchange, conclude by clearly asking once again: And do we know what we’re doing here? Is there in addition to a “know that” also a “know how” for the use of photography? To put it another way: There is a central place where I totally miss photography: At everyday schools worldwide, at primary schools, secondary schools, high schools, or whatever each country and system chooses to call them today. On this point I remain astonishingly missionary, as one quickly notices in my introduction to a symposium: “The discussions and debates on ‘visual literacy’ have been in full swing for years now. Umberto Eco pointed out early on that we have entered an era in which visual communication will be at least as important as language, if not more important. His dictum is over 20 years old. In the meantime, we have entered a new visual, connected age and we experience on a daily basis, at work, in the media and in Internet culture how the word is being replaced by the image in such an incredibly powerful way, how language is being displaced by images on a massive scale. However, there is no education on the nature of the image, no teaching of our understanding of images, of visual imagery, of communicating and manipulating with images. We find ourselves in a situation in which we are all consumers but ultimately imagery illiterates. Coming to terms with the structures and functionalities of images thus has an eminently educational aspect. We have to be educated about images and well versed in the language of imagery to be prepared for the communication of the present and the future. The decisive aspect here is not just the reading and understanding of photographs, but rather the realization that photography goes beyond merely documenting events; in fact, it virtually creates them. In a mediatized world, all that is important is what is documented, shown, seen and “talked” about; anything else does not exist, is not there, is absent. Through its imagery, photography creates the world that we intend to remember and will remember. Photography generates the visual notion of our world. Photography has a key influence on our future images of the world and on our courses of action.”[1]

It is astonishing that even today hardly anyone bothers to delve into this issue, with the exception of very, very few specialists. When I google “coming to terms with images” / “education in images” / “educating about the image” / “photography and education”, then I hit upon, at best, a recreational workshop or the inverse: educating small children with pictures. But nothing on the question: What is an image? And how do images function? What do they reveal, what do they hide? What do they trigger? How are they structured? Why do they act like chameleons and alter their nature and meaning depending on the context? Why is it so easy to empty them as well as use them for everything else? How are things manipulated with images? And so on. I don’t intend to establish a new curriculum here, but merely point out that, aside from specialists, no one really has a profound grasp of how images function, while at the same time every Facebook posting without a picture is barely more than a blip on the radar, in other words, is largely ignored. This is a situation that I think is highly precarious and bizarre. Elementary schools normally always do their best to prepare their schoolchildren—all of us, really—for the most important aspects of life and the world, with lessons in languages, mathematics, physics, etc. But that’s still not the case here. The initiative by Eikones in Basel[2] working together with a high school class to integrate the “image” into the curriculum as a test phase is a rare exception. A gap is opening here that we need to close again as quickly as possible. Don’t you agree?

This concludes my entries to this blog. I had the initial, introductory word. You have the last, concluding word. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this intensive, refreshing exchange with you, dear Hester.

Urs Stahel

Next and last “Correspondence” by Hester Keijser will be published on July, Thursday 21st.

[1] Introduction to the ASIP conference “Bilderwissen / Décoder l’image” in collaboration with the Camera Arts in Lucerne. http://cameraarts.ch/updates/re-view-symposium-bilderwissen-decoder-limage/

[2] The Eikones program can be briefly summarized as follows: Iconic Criticism. The Power and Meaning
of Images. https://eikones.ch/eikones/introduction/?L=1

Dear Urs,

1.

Thank you for your frank and thoughtful final letter, written from the south of Europe, and ending with a resounding plea for visual literacy being taught in schools. Now I am writing from the north, facing eastwards, to Turkey, where this week ten thousands of people working in education were suspended or forced to resign from their positions after the failed coup of July 15th.

Visual communication, viral images, and the use of networked technologies such as Facetime have played a crucial role in the undoing of the coup by mobilizing the population to take to the streets in a stand-off with the military insurgents. It was extraordinary^[1] how a global audience was able to become live witnesses of the events as they unfolded, broadcasted minute by minute on Facebook Live Map, Twitter or mapped via the opendata-driven media platform Liveuamap. Despite or perhaps thanks to the overwhelming amounts of ‘visual content’ offered ‘in evidence’, everyone is still scrambling to understand what exactly took place, by whom, or how the recent upheavals will affect Turkey’s future. In all this, we should not forget that an overload of information that begs to be digested, can be an excellent tactic to prevent any common response from taking shape.

Let your questions about the lack of visual literacy in our education systems then be set at the heart of my final reply, for these questions are indeed pressing. It will allow me to close the open jawed flight that our exchange has turned out to be – as you had foretold – and leave the stage for Joan Fontcuberta and Geoffrey Batchen, the next correspondents to enter later this year.

2.

Looking back upon the ground we covered in pursuit of the whereabouts of photography in this day and age, it became more clear to me which differences had driven our exchange. For only where there is difference, can movements and shifts in focus occur, and can real advances in thinking be made. You yourself brought these differences to an acute point in your last letter when you said: “your comparison with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault slightly misses the mark, in my opinion, because the photo archive is always directed toward the past, while these gigantic seed archives are aimed at ensuring our existence in the future.”

Exactly this has been my critique of photographic archives: that they are not directed to the future. Might not our archival impuls be propelled by an over-estimation of our own significance for future generations? Blinded by such self-importance, we do not take into consideration that what we thus pass on could be detrimental, in the same way that nuclear waste depositories should be kept as safe as possible in order to safeguard and possibly save future life.

“I think we want to think about a museum that doesn’t represent a prison, in which there isn’t expropriated labor, there isn’t extinction, there isn’t genocide. What would that look like? And if we could imagine that museum, then we’d have done the work of visual activism I’m trying to do”

In a recent interview, in which he talks about his latest book, How to See the World, Nicholas Mirzoeff invites the reader to a thought experiment. He speaks of museums, but he considers them insofar as they are retainers of past histories – as archives in a way.

“Let’s ask what would it mean to have a museum complex that wasn’t about the colonial expropriation of other people’s bodies and property, and now we would also add the Anthropocene production of materials like cotton and silver and so on. What would be left? Not a great deal actually. You get at that step by step, until you reach the place where you’re willing to look at the challenge of making the new. In other words, not to imagine building a monument to the Anthropocene, as some people have been trying to do in Europe. I don’t think that’s the way to go. I think we want to think about a museum that doesn’t represent a prison, in which there isn’t expropriated labor, there isn’t extinction, there isn’t genocide. What would that look like? And if we could imagine that museum, then we’d have done the work of visual activism I’m trying to do.”

The visual activism he refers to – and now I’m quoting from the book itself – is this: “In visual activist projects, there is an alternative visual vocabulary emerging. It is collective and collaborative, containing archiving, networking, researching, and mapping among other tools, all in the service of a vision of making change.^[2]” So archives do have a place, but only insofar they serve a future shaped by the commons.

I suppose that siding^[3] with his remark makes me more of a visual activist, who understands herself as operating within this complex we call visual culture, rather than a critic who places herself outside the circle of risk. It’s this activistic component which I felt missing and have repeatedly sought to complement in response to your letters. If there were to be a substantial generation gap between us, I wondered, is this perhaps where it opens up the widest?

I wish you could have seen my eyes light up when you continued by bringing up a concern I feel we both share: education, creating agency, awareness, learning to ask well-aimed questions about the emergent visual culture that we have to navigate. While I agree that education in this field does not yet exist in schools, it certainly does in other contexts. The important questions that you feel need asking, are in the process of being unpacked by a range of photographers, thinkers, artists, and academics working among us^[4].

“Likewise, I often wonder why classwide conversations on what it means to perform different public roles (members of a community vs. citizens of a state vs. participants in a global economy), aren’t part of the standard curriculum. How can this not lead to widespread political amnesia and indifference towards the bonds that hold together our societies?”

For the moment, it is a matter of learning by doing. What is finally starting to sink in, in view of the massive changes that are happening under our feet right now, is what has to give way and what has to be taken up in order to act responsibly upon our world. In “How to See the World”, Mirzoeff rightly calls this activity a “learning how to learn” – for this is still ground we have to break. To learn about what? He continues: “how the visual imagination, visual thought, and visualizing combine to make worlds that we live in and seek to change^[5]”.

As a strong advocate for bringing the advances made in visual studies (in which especially applied photography features prominently) into everyday schools worldwide, you must have asked yourself, what could be the reason that it hasn’t filtered through yet. Likewise, I often wonder why classwide conversations on what it means to perform different public roles (members of a community vs. citizens of a state vs. participants in a global economy), aren’t part of the standard curriculum. How can this not lead to widespread political amnesia and indifference towards the bonds that hold together our societies^[6]?

Exceptions to this lack of civic education can perhaps be found – in a search both desparate and whishful for we still refuse to allow, as you say, “the dominance and omnipresence of economic factors […] to completely determine our existence” – in societies that place greater importance on communal aspects of living life, rather than on individualism and its concommitant focus on competition.

As an example, a viral video came to mind, in which are followed Japanese schoolchildren, who from a very young age are encouraged to perform communal tasks, such as cleaning the school room after class or helping with serving the school lunches for which they grow their own food in school gardens. Regardless of the question whether or not this amounts to cultural propaganda, it was remarkable how many viewers had ‘liked’, ‘hearted’ and commented positively on this video.

Our shared concerns over the essentially political education of future generations lead to more fundamental questions, such as what kind of subjects our respective governments expect us to be. As who are we allowed to perform in the public realm? How much power will we able to exercise as members of the body politic? How much importance is placed on educating children to recognize and respect the plurality of our human condition? For it is “men, not Man, who walk the earth and inhabit the world^[7]”. There is no one answer to these questions exactly because of this plurality. Instead, there are many answers, depending on the local commons that humans create when acting together.

Can I say there is a correspondence between your concern over the ease with which photographs are emptied out of their meaning, and the ease with which political space is emptied out by erasing all distinctions between the ways in which we come together? I am truly worried to see how schools and universities are consistently being underfunded, neglected and broken down, while state budgets for defense increase, or where making profits for the few takes primacy over the well-being of the many. Making this a matter of mere money being distributed wisely or unwisely is ignoring the more important matter of the redrawing of political space and the public realm that we are seeing now.

For me those two things are connected: the absence of visual literacy as a subject in schools and the impoverisation and ruination of public school systems. Educating people to become visual activists in the manner proposed by a Nicholas Mirzoeff or an Ariella Azoulay does not seem to have the interest of governments trying to control their populations through surveillance and repressive measures. Behind this drive to consolidate power literally at all costs, can be sensed an enourmous fear for uprisings, coupled with an encroaching panic about the probably quite violent changes and upheavals that climate change will bring. The future for which our children are being educated, is an unequal, hostile version of what the world can be. Is this really the best we can offer?

“It takes immense force to not just open up a space in times so tightly compressed as ours, but to hold open this space for longer, and to make room for others in that space, which sometimes means taking a step back ourselves”

3.

Dear Urs, our correspondence draws to an end, but I don’t wish to leave on such a gloomy note. Because we still have this stubborness to “not act accordingly”, as you said. As usual the notes I made in preparation for this last letter vastly exceed the limits placed on my text, and too many things had to remain unsaid – such as the poetic potential in the photography of Paul Graham, of what remains to be seen perhaps not outside the system, which rules the normality of our daily lives, but in moments when a space of uncertainty opens up. It takes immense force to not just open up a space in times so tightly compressed as ours, but to hold open this space for longer, and to make room for others in that space, which sometimes means taking a step back ourselves.

Of course this sounds pretty grand on paper. In reality this means unglamorous, hard work on levels that won’t make you automatically feel heroic in any sense – but that is where it has to happen, in what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the commons. So let me point to Ariella Azouly’s contribution to the Manifesta 11, in which she speaks of this hard work of the body politic^[8]:

“Since then, when sometimes against all chances / Opportunity appears on the horizon / Citizens have not given up / The possibility of imagining another life / Once in a while they re-emerge and declare: / Without us there is no body politic; only an idea on paper.

Here they are in the pictures / sweating, shouting, putting up tents / surrounding policemen, holding fishing rods as well as pots and pans / with ropes and in underwear, sharing the space and claiming a re-partitioning / Determined to be, and not to be evicted / They transform time and again / Turn civil language into a spoken one / A language learnt in the body / and written in pictures / spoken in the plural / together with others / Anyone who speaks it is present as a living reminder / of the fact that she is not a resource / neither she nor the world in which she lives / That rule is merely a temporary deposit / and when it does not enable being-together / it must be re-constituted.”

And with this ‘shimmer of possibility^[9]’ as a parting present I want to thank you for your engagement and your friendship in letters. It has been brilliant and intense. Let us meet soon!

Paul Graham – “A Shimmer of Possibility” 2004-2006

^[1] It was extraordinary because usually in cases where the state feel in peril, all public communication channels are shut down or reduced to a small number that can easily be monitored by those in power.

^[2] How to See the World, Nicholas Mirzoeff (quote taken from “Afterword, Visual Activism”), Penguin, June 2015, unpaginated.

^[3] While siding with Mirzoeff, I do not close my eyes to the danger of censorship that lies sleeping in his words. Iconoclasm is also an ingredient of his proposition, and clearing away the past with an eye on an imagined future always comes with a degree of violence, especially when such clearage is not agreed upon by the whole of society, but undertaken by a small group that wishes to obtain or maintain a certain position of power. I only have to point to the spectacular destructions of important architectural and historical heritage undertaken by IS, but let us not forget Europe also has also known similar episodes of iconoclastic fury.

^[4] I’ve listed a few photography-related blogs / authors on photography dealing with visual culture. They are examples of places where learning to learn how to rethink the world takes shape.

Marco Bohr’s Visual Culture Blog

Jim Johnson’s Politics, Theory, Photography

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites’s No Caption Needed

Gillian Rose’s Visual Method Culture

David Campbell’s personal blog

Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLG

e-flux : although not specifically centered around photography, it frequently makes use of / references photographic images of any kind, and is an important source for contemporary critical writing.

^[5] How to See the World, Nicholas Mirzoeff (quote taken from “Ch.7, Changing the World”), Penguin, June 2015, unpaginated.

^[6] Democracies and other forms of government are not like a house we live in as if we are a family, nor should we confuse our governments with the buildings that they occupy. But if we don’t learn about the bonds and the social contracts that allow our communities some form of permanence, then the family will become the only reference point for interpersonal relations that new generations bring to the public realm. Public schools would be the ideal place to counter such withering away of distinctions between different forms of communal living in private and in public, but the curriculums are set up with the interest of the state at heart, and that is all too often not to raise its citizens to the greatest amount of freedom and independence of thinking – which is something else than individualism. It would be a rewarding curatorial research project to trace how this fault line, with its many jagged edges between family life and public life, has been reflected in photograpy over the past decades.

^[7] The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt, p. 7, Chicago University Press, 1958

^[8] When the Body Politic Ceases To Be an Idea, by Ariella Azoulay, Retrieved July 20th from

http://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/regret-and-other-back-pages/when-body-politic-ceases-be-idea#

^[9] A Shimmer of Possibility is the title of Paul Graham’s influental and experimental photo book. http://paulgrahamarchive.com/possibility.html