“When the creative act consists in awakening ‘dormant’ images, the status of photographer (or author) is not attained simply by producing more photographs but by striving to make the photographs reveal what they are”

 

Hi Geoff,

If Foto Colectania have asked me to ‘correspond’ with you about the role of the photographer today and the general question of the status of copyright and of the author, it’s because they are aware that these are crucial issues for me. So crucial, in fact, that I’ve been harping on the subject for some time now, not least in my interventions as a guest at Foto Colectania and, more recently, and in a more focused manner [NPI], with the publication of a book, La furia de las imágenes. Notas sobre la postfotografía [The Fury of the Images. Notes on Postphotography] – in which, by the way, I quote you profusely. There are very good reasons why you are one of the maîtres-à-penser of photography that have most guided my own thoughts and reflections.

So I could start here by turning the pages of that book and recovering some of the ideas I set out there, but I much prefer to take the opportunity of having you as an interlocutor to adopt a riskier course, a leap into the unknown which promises to take us farther. My starting point is twofold: on the one hand, one or two things I have read recently and, on the other, my own current artistic practice, namely, the creative project I’m working on at the moment. I’m preparing new material for an exhibition in my gallery in Barcelona at the end of November, the provisional title of which is Trauma. In fact I have already published a photo book with pictures from this series which are a foretaste of the kind of work I’ll be presenting in the gallery.

In line with previous projects of mine based on a more or less semiotic approach to elucidating the degree 0 of photographic writing (I’m thinking, for example, of Blow Up Blow Up and Gastropoda), the Trauma series adopts the hypothesis that images have an organic metabolism: they are born, they grow, reproduce and die, to restart the cycle of life. In 1928 Paul Valéry wrote that images ‘will be created and melt away at the slightest gesture’. In Trauma I put forward the idea of ​​sick images, images that suffer: photographs with some kind of pathological condition or impairment that interferes with their documentary function and renders them unable to ‘live’ in an archive. The paradox is that this disease, though it can eliminate the identifiable information content of a picture, acts like the cancer which gives an orchid its dazzling beauty, endowing it with an extraordinary graphic uniqueness. In the photo book, the only clue to guide the reader is on the cover, which plays with the title of Freud’s 1899/1900 Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams): with a slight conceptual manipulation, the German Traum (dream) has been replaced by Trauma. My working process, then, consists in prowling around photo libraries and archives in search of patients in a state of trauma. Like the great foundational work of psychoanalysis, the cover of my book includes a quote from the Aeneid, ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo’, in which Virgil invites us to turn to the gods of the underworld if the gods of heaven pay us no heed. So we are speaking of a heaven and a hell of images, and speaking, too, as Andrés Hispano has noted, of a limbo and a purgatory.

“Trauma is an ode to the materiality that subsists in the chemical photograph, its residues and its excrescences”

The archaeological operation carried out in Trauma has yielded a rich harvest of insights. The first is that on crossing the threshold of recognition or intelligibility, the image does not become hyper-realistic in the sense that it continues to provide data at increasingly precise scales; instead, it becomes abstract and ambiguous. The paradox is that in going so far beyond a discernible scale of representation, the visual information of the initial scene disappears, to make way for the information intrinsic to the actual substance of the photograph itself (grain, oxidation, scratches, mildew …). Trauma is an ode to the materiality that subsists in the chemical photograph, its residues and its excrescences – an ode intoned in melancholic recognition of the irremediable and overwhelming dematerialization of the digital image. But it also – and hence the relevance of this project in prompting a debate about the authorship, its residues and its excrescences – makes clear the extent of these images’ debt to earlier images. Recycling as an act of creation relies on the prior existence of a wealth of materials that can be recovered, selected and ‘metabolised’ – to continue my simile of the biology of the images. This would entail acknowledging the notion of an iconic habitat: our life unfolds in images.

Ingrid Guardiola expressed this idea very well in her inaugural lecture at EINA art and design school.¹ She cited a parable by the late David Foster Wallace: ‘There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”‘ Guardiola went on to unpack this for us: ‘Foster Wallace was alluding here to the fact that the most obvious and important realities are the hardest to see and the most difficult to speak about. At a time like the present in which we are swimming in images, it is normal to ask ourselves: what are images? And this is not a case of naive “not knowing” but a question that goes to the heart of the matter. If, as Rancière says, “everything is image”, we had better learn to swim among the images.’²

Indeed: we have to ask ourselves what images are – or rather, what they have become. In attempting to trace this seam, which runs through philosophy from Plato to the Visual Studies of Gottfried Boehm and W.J.T. Mitchell, I would suggest that when creation – as in Trauma – consists not in extracting an image from reality but in revealing how the image forms part of reality, and when the creative act consists in awakening ‘dormant’ images, the status of photographer (or author) is not attained simply by producing more photographs but by striving to make the photographs reveal what they are.

Penelope cannot offer her shroud to Odysseus ‘because, continually interrupted, continually unwoven, it represents nothing … Penelope is the expectation of representation. She is the making and unmaking engaged in by every artist’s mind and hands’

In conclusion, let me jump from Virgil to Homer. The exhibition in the Àngels Barcelona gallery that mine will follow is entitled Penelope and is a new work by Pep Agut, an artist who uses both painting and photography. According to the Homeric account, Odysseus sailed from Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War. For more than twenty years his wife Penelope awaited his return, resisting the proposals of the many suitors who courted her in the belief that her husband will not return. When the impatient suitors urge her to accept one of them, Penelope agrees to give her decision when she has completed the burial shroud she is weaving. This is evidently a ploy to gain time, because each night she unpicks what she has woven during the day. Agut takes the story of Penelope as a metaphor for representation and the meaning this may have. Penelope cannot offer her shroud to Odysseus ‘because, continually interrupted, continually unwoven, it represents nothing … Penelope is the expectation of representation. She is the making and unmaking engaged in by every artist’s mind and hands’.³ Agut seems to be giving us a poetic message: it is only by making and unmaking the photograph that we become photographers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translation by Graham Thomson.

Next “Correspondence” by Geoffrey Batchen will be published in October the 17th.

---

 

1. Her doctoral thesis, which deals with found footage, is available at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5OGT11ZNVQTTTBUTWxGdFRYQVE/view?usp=sharing

2. Inaugural lecture of the 2016-2017 course at EINA. Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona, given on 19/09/2016:

http://blog.eina.cat/ca/audio-conferencia-inaugural-del-curs-20162017—ingrid-guardiola/57d923a1c01af1060ec4b0b3

3. The artist’s statement:

http://angelsbarcelona.com/files/160_NP_PEP%20AGUT_Penelope_CAST_LAST.pdf?mc_cid=274bd25caf&mc_eid=23aa6759a1

Dear Joan,

Your letter was a welcome one, opening onto all sorts of issues that appear to concern us both. And this is the case even with the one you chose to put to one side at the outset, the question of copyright. For this too bears on the question of what an image is. Indeed, it might even be argued that this question is the incubator within which photography came into being.

In January 1839, for example, when photography was announced by both Louis Daguerre in France and Henry Talbot in England, there were already 72 print sellers working in London, servicing a growing middle-class market that was anxious to buy engraved reproductions of contemporary paintings. So lucrative was this market in reproductions that the copyright for a painting was sometimes worth twice the cost of the painting itself. In June 1846, for example, the Art-Union reported that, “for the four pictures painted by Mr Edwin Landseer this year, he received nearly seven thousand pounds—ie. £2,400 for the paintings and £4,450 for the ‘Copyrights’.”¹ Print publishers were even known to commission paintings so that engravings could then be made after them; in effect, the prospect of a copy came before the creation of an original, confusing that very distinction. A similar situation existed in France. In 1841 the painter Horace Vernet published a pamphlet in which he pointed out that “the painter has two means of drawing pecuniary gain from his picture, namely: the sale of the picture itself, and the assignment of engraving rights.”² As if to prove his point, in the following year he received 2000 francs from Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet for the right to engrave his Napoleon reviewing the Guard in the Place du Carrousel, painted in 1838. Importantly, Vernet’s text argues that a painter produces both a “material object” and an “intellectual object”—that is, both a painting and an image–and that these are separate commodities that can, if necessary, be sold to different parties.

“What happens to a photograph when it gives up its image, when it “gives up the ghost””

Although English photographers were not granted legal copyright protection until 1861, commercial studios immediately recognised the pecuinary advantages of separating an image from a photograph and selling both. The first studios to be established in London frequently organised for their photographic images to be reproduced in the form of wood engravings or lithographs, and thereby to be distributed in vast quantities all around the globe. As the original daguerreotype was usually destroyed or discarded during the process of transmutation, these reproduced images are like ghosts, haunting the history of photography with their ephemeral, ink on paper presence.³ They are photographic images but not photographs (and therefore have been largely absented from that history). This raises the question of what kind of history must be forged to properly represent photography’s complex identity (a history, I’d suggest, that has to be more like a cobweb than a chronicle). But it also raises the question of what happens to a photograph when it gives up its image, when it “gives up the ghost,” as we say in English. What is left when a photograph no longer indexically points outside of itself, when there is nothing left but the substrate, the residue, just a smear of light-sensitive chemicals? What happens when a photograph’s only remaining referent is “photography” itself?

Your own investigation of this condition, gathered under the title Trauma, chooses to riff off the legacy of Freud and present your found photographs as signs to photography’s unconscious. The archive becomes a kind of hospital from which you have extracted its sickest patients, perhaps even the ones beyond help (congratulations, by the way, on your doctorate). Under this rubric, these ruined photographs, a ruination made all the more poignant by occasional glimpses of image, by momentary flashes of sanity, are turned into so many Rorschach tests, as if their study could reveal otherwise hidden thought disorders. You describe them as “crossing the threshold of recognition or intelligibility,” but perhaps some of them (as with the abstractions used in a Rorschach test) could be said to hover on the border between intelligibility and its other? I’m interested in this possibility, as it might help me move away from your biological/psychological metaphor, with its inferences of a photographic pathology perhaps beyond our control, to a discourse I’m a little more comfortable with: politics.

You’ll be pleased to know, however, in your temporary guise as a psychoanalyst, that this move has an Oedipal lineage. My own mentor, an Australian artist named Ian Burn, proposed a work in 1966 (in collaboration with Mel Ramsden) titled Soft-Tape that sought to immerse us in that threshold. Conceived in London for an exhibition in Australia, the work consisted of a cassette tape emitting a spoken text “at a monotonous and uniform level…the zero point between understanding the spoken words and indecipherable noise.”⁴ The installation invited its audience to bend over the cassette player to try and make sense of its sound, thereby making listeners complicit in that effort. The work confronted the tyranny of distance, a key issue for all artists from the provinces, while also contesting the presumed identity of art work of any kind.

This leads me to reflect on the political identity of these eviscerated photographs of yours, a reflection made possible by your displacement of them from archive to art world. This shifting of context implies that a photograph reduced to a palimpsest of its former self enacts “an erasure which allows what it obliterates to be read,”⁵ or, as you put it, “make[s] way for the information intrinsic to the actual substance of the photograph itself.” But how can one articulate a politics for this information, for this substance that comes both before and after the photograph?

I wonder, for example, how you would locate Trauma, as an “ode to the materiality that subsists in the chemical photography,” in relation to the so-called New Materialism that currently preoccupies certain philosophers? The adherents of New Materialism claim to be offering a counter to what they regard as the orthodox view propagated by both deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the view that there is nothing outside of discourse.⁶ “Everything is image,” you say, quoting Rancière. But in those instances where image and substance are presented as inseparable states of being, where an image is celebrated for being only itself and nothing more, are we in fact yearning for an a priori reality, for a world that exists before and outside of its interpretation by either a camera or a sovereign viewing subject (and therefore outside the mediations of politics or critical thought)?

 

“In short, to excavate photography—to extract from it a something that is neither photograph nor non-photograph, and yet belongs to both categories—is to disembowel modernity itself, to turn what seems so certain and incontestable inside out and available for further inspection. It is, in other words, a political act.”

I’m skeptical about these kinds of arguments myself, if only because I regard the materiality of the photograph as always already of political substance. For me, photography and modernity are synonyms, so closely enmeshed is one with the other. The conception of photography reproduced a representational schema derived from peculiarly modern notions of power, knowledge and subjectivity. The photographic apparatus emerged with the industrial revolution and has always been dependent on a certain combination of chemicals, plates, papers, and machined parts made possible by it. The circulation of photographs and photographic images has similarly depended on the exchange systems established by consumer capitalism. If anything, this symbiotic relationship has become even closer in the digital age, with most photographs being generated by devices designed in the United States and manufactured in China using rare earths extracted from the third world. The cell-phone camera is, in other words, the very embodiment of globalism, as are its photographic outputs, whether their manifestations be organic or electronic. In short, to excavate photography—to extract from it a something that is neither photograph nor non-photograph, and yet belongs to both categories—is to disembowel modernity itself, to turn what seems so certain and incontestable inside out and available for further inspection. It is, in other words, a political act.

In this context, let me offer a supplement to the once-were-images you have gathered in Trauma. I’m thinking of the 750,000 scoured and weathered snapshots found after the earthquake and tsunami that swept over eastern Japan in March 2011.⁷ Over 19,000 people were killed during this event and millions continue to struggle to recover from a natural disaster that was demonstrably exacerbated by our modern society’s voracious appetite for housing and electricity. The disaster is by no means over. Three nuclear power plants went into meltdown after the tsunami breached their defenses, with as yet unknown consequences. Even now highly radioactive water continues to leak into the sea from these damaged plants.

This catastrophe is conjured by the look of the photographs that survived, with the image on each piece of paper seemingly eaten away, as if by a fungus or disease. The spectral surfaces of these snapshots evoke the erasure of both the people depicted and, shortly thereafter, the means of their depiction (I am referring, of course, to Kodak’s bankruptcy in January 2012).

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you say, a making that is also an unmaking seems like a potent means of engaging with photography at the moment. And indeed, perhaps at any moment. After all, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who called himself “an Eye-servant of the Goddess Nature” and was close to three of the inventors of photography, also conjured Homer (a Homer channeled through Herder and German idealist philosophy) when moved to speak of this same divinity as “an ever industrious Penelope for ever unravelling what she had woven, for ever weaving what she had unravelled.”⁸ But I wonder if, for our purposes, the critical capacity of this gesture is enhanced in significant ways when it is freighted with a specific history of the sort I have just described? Surely our challenge is to make (or make over) photographs such that they refer inwards to the political economy of photography but also outwards to a situation grounded in the complex agency of social life.

 

Next “Correspondence” by Joan Fontcuberta will be published in October the 27th.

---

 

1. See Jeremy Maas, Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975), 20.
2. Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 36.
3. Made on silvered sheets of copper exposed to fumigated iodine and mercury, daguerreotypes resulted in images so delicate that, according to one experienced practitioner, they could be damaged by “the rubbing of a fly’s wing.” Charles Chevalier, Nouvelles instructions sur l’usage du daguerréotype (Paris, 1841), as quoted in Françoise Reynaud, ‘Le daguerreotype comme objet,’ in Quentin Bajac and Dominique Planchon-de Font-Réaulx eds., Le daguerréotype français: Un objet photographique (Paris: musée d’Orsay, 2003), 98. As Reynaud also reports, in his Report to the Chamber of Deputies of July 3, 1839, François Arago had similarly warned that touching the surface of a daguerreotype was like “brushing the wings of a butterfly.”
4. I was reminded of this work by Ann Stephen’s review, ‘An antipodean view of “Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979”,’ Art Monthly Australasia, 293 (October 2016), 60-63, but see also Ann Stephen, On Looking at Looking: The art and politics of Ian Burn (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2006).
5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse’ (1967), Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 6.
6. See Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik, ‘Introduction,’ Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg Press, 2015), 15-31.
7. 7. See Munemasa Takahashi ed., 津波、写真, それから Tsunami, Photographs, and Then: Lost & Found Project; Family Photographs swept away by 3.11 East Japan Tsunami (Kyoto: Akaaka Art Publishing, 2014).
8. See my Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 60.

“I like to think of ghost-photographs as lingering on here in limbo because of their unfulfilled task: the search for the author, the realisation of their nature”

 

Dear Geoff,

A few days ago the IVAM in Valencia inaugurated an exhibition curated by Jorge Luis Marzo, Fake. It Is Not True, It Is Not A Lie,¹ which offers a comprehensive and well-documented overview of counter-information strategies in contemporary art and political activism. In one of the actions presented in the show, The Ballad of Use Value (2011-2012), the artist Octavi Comeron engaged with a question which touches on our concerns here, by exhibiting a perfectly ordinary mass-produced car – a SEAT León – in a gallery and describing it as a work of art. One of the artist’s associates then bought the car-cum-artwork from him and, as the sales invoice shows, paid VAT at the rate applied to works of art, 8%, instead of the standard rate for motor vehicles of 18%. In fact the whole thing was a ruse, a stratagem to provoke a response from the Spanish tax authorities, which duly sent Comeron a letter demanding that the sale be rectified and the outstanding tax paid. This gave Comeron the opportunity he was looking for – an exchange of correspondence with the Spanish Finance Ministry that lured the bureaucrats into debating what was or wasn’t art. Of course the officials didn’t want to know about Duchamp or theories of appropriation, refused to accept that a utilitarian object could be a work of art, and stuck to the bureaucratic and administrative formulas with which the law in force – essentially framed in the nineteenth century – classifies artworks: paintings, prints, sculptures, tapestries, enamels … and ‘photographs taken by the artist, printed by him or under his supervision, signed and numbered and limited to thirty copies in total, whatever the formats and media’ (Law 37/1992 of Value Added Tax). Unfortunately, the artist’s untimely death in 2013 left the case unresolved, but the seed of subversion had been planted.

I mention this project because it illustrates the contradictions between a hegemonic value system established from power – a doxa – and an alternative counter-system of paradoxes – para-doxas – which is the prerogative of critical thinking. And as I see it, Geoff, our duty is to behave, intellectually, like hooligans: as hooligans defying not only the doxa of the arms and branches of the State, but also every kind of doxa that is imposed by any structure of cultural, social or political authority – art, science, history, academia or whatever.

So I really appreciate your comments in response, which open new windows from which to scan the landscape. And though it seems to me that we don’t have the time or the space to deal with everything out there, we can engage with a number of significant points. You note, for example, that I ignored the issue of copyright, and it’s true. The right to reproduce an image is part of a more general idea of author’s rights and copyright in extenso, and this being so I find it problematic to refer to the rights assigned to a faculty – that of authorship – which we question and have not managed to define. In other words, any discussion of author’s rights and copyright today must be subordinated to a previous discussion on the very notion of the author, which is precisely where we get bogged down in the sand.

“The photographer may be whoever presses the shutter release on the camera, but the author is the person who manages the meaning and the use value of the image”

For example, the law here recognises a duality in the artistic sphere between a corpus misticum (the creative essence of the work) and a corpus mechanicum (the material result of that essence work as a physical object). The existence of this corpus misticum is what enabled the 19^th-century artists you mentioned to claim and receive remuneration when derivative works and reproductions exploited their original creative work – reproductions that, as you very well say, would go on to become ghost images, remaining in circulation long after the original matrix, plate or mould had been destroyed.

And here you make a very interesting ontological distinction between ‘photographs’ and ‘photographic images’, which would correspond to the distinction between an original photograph and derived photographs. But I want to return to your metaphor, which fired my imagination because it can also be taken as a distinction between body (flesh) and ghost: that is, between body-image and ghost-image. And given that Foto Colectania invited us to discuss the status of the photographer today, at this point I suggest that we set two things aside. The first thing we need to avoid has to do with the specificity of the different photographic processes, or with how certain images lead to others: we are well aware that making prints from a daguerreotype is quite a different thing from making positives from a negative, and the genealogy by way of which an image is derived from another previous image counts for more here than the technical dependence of the one on the other. The second thing has to do with the whole Benjaminian theory of the aura and the dialectic between original and reproduction. If these two premises are accepted as hypotheses for reflection – and I realise that this is a lot to ask – then assigning the condition of body (work, original) or of ghost (copy, reproduction) is entirely the decision of the author (the photographer), who has complete authority when it comes to categorising – for example, between intermediate materials or final results. The problem, once again, is the difficulty in legitimising the figure of the author when that figure is dissociated from the actual photographer. The photographer may be whoever presses the shutter release on the camera, but the author is the person who manages the meaning and the use value of the image. In the case of the example you mention of the daguerreotype and the prints made from it, for, authorship is diluted in the different stages of industrial production: authorship (intellectual and economic: the copyright) is owned by the company, and the individual who took the shot is just another cog in the machinery of production.

In Buddhism, ghosts are souls who refuse to be reinserted in the cycle of reincarnation because they have left some important task undone. I like to think of ghost-photographs as lingering on here in limbo because of their unfulfilled task: the search for the author, the realisation of their nature.

At the same time I agree with your elegantly expressed perception that ‘to excavate photography […] is to disembowel modernity itself’, and this being so is a political act. I am convinced that images are the very substance of politics, so that generating and managing images is a political activity. My perspective is not an attempt to deny or evade this political condition of photography; it’s just that I feel more inclined to privilege a line of semiotic inquiry and poetic speculation – I have never tried to pass myself off as a theoretician.

“It is beyond doubt now that photography has become much more than a ‘writing with light’ practised by a few privileged scribes: it is a universal language, one that we all use naturally in most of the many areas of our lives”

In a recent article entitled ‘Buried by images’,² the philosopher Xavier Antich points out that an estimated 800 million images are uploaded to Snapchat every day, together with 350 million to Facebook and 80 million to Instagram. If you were to devote one second to each of these images, it would take you more than 39 years to look at them all. And we’re talking about just three platforms, not all of them. We shouldn’t play down the brutality of these data: a level of photographic inflation far beyond all precedent, an asphyxiating visual pollution and a hypercapitalism of images. This rampant excess radically transforms our relationship with images, which are our primary means of engaging with the world, and therefore also changes our relationship with the world. Hence its inescapable political repercussions.

It is beyond doubt now that photography has become much more than a ‘writing with light’ practised by a few privileged scribes: it is a universal language, one that we all use naturally in most of the many areas of our lives. This is the phenomenon I propose to call the advent of Homo photographicus. At the same time it is also true that this excess images is a symptom of a hypermodernity that manifests itself in cutthroat globalisation and cataleptic consumerism.

That said, the thing that troubles me now is: this being the situation, what is my responsibility as a photographer? Having arrived at a more or less plausible diagnosis, what do we do? The Foto Colectania Foundation is currently hosting the exhibition I Wanted to Be a Photographer,³ whose curators, Fannie Escoulen and Anna Planas, provide us with some clues. I would like to remark the work presented here by Antoine d’Agata, a hard-line documentary photographer who treads a ‘physical and psychic path overshadowed by risk, danger, desire and the unconscious, in a frenetic pursuit of the sensation of being alive’.⁴ His images bear witness to a particular descent into hell: darkness, rootlessness, a vagabond existence, fear, squalor, prostitution, sex, bodies, alternative experiences … D’Agata takes pictures to settle a score with his extreme emotional states. But now, at Foto Colectania, he says: ‘I couldn’t take any more pictures.’⁵ Has photography exhausted its potential? Have photographers burned out, got tired? D’Agata then turned to the Internet repertoire and pulled down thousands of anonymous police mug shots of prostitutes arrested in the United States, with which he has assembled an impressive mosaic. In another piece in a similar vein he collected surveillance-camera portraits of migrants held in Melilla, which he also found online. And this is what a Magnum photographer is doing.

 

For my part, and pending whatever suggestions you have, I can think of a dual response to the question of what we are to do. In the first instance, the strategy of containment that I pointed to in my previous missive: a refusal to contribute to this enormous proliferation by replacing accumulation with recycling. The second response would be to search for those images that – despite the fatigue and the superabundance – are still wanting: images that are in short supply, missing images, images that have been hidden, images of what is secret, images that do not yet exist … the void that these non-images evoke presents us with the great challenge.

 

Next “Correspondence” by Geoffrey Batchen will be published in November the 7th.

---

 

1. http://www.ivam.es/exposiciones/fake-no-es-verdad-no-es-mentira/
2. http://www.ara.cat/suplements/diumenge/Sepultats-imatges_0_1661233868.html
3. http://www.colectania.es/index.php?i=1&p=2
4. From a caption card in the exhibition.
5. Idem.

Can photographs still offer some critical purchase on the world, including on the world of photography itself?

 

Dear Joan,

Thank you for your latest missive and its call for a little more intellectual hooliganism. Your opening story about the agitational work of Octavi Comeron reminded me of an action undertaken by Igor Vamos, an American MFA student I once taught. He also tangled with the agents of the state, only his story reverses the arc of the one you have told. In Igor’s case, he parked his motorcycle outside his studio at the university and soon was issued with a parking fine. He then wrote to the campus police and claimed that his vehicle was in fact an art work and therefore should be exempt from the fine. Much correspondence ensued. As if to prove his point, he exhibited the end results, presenting his motorcycle as a readymade sculpture in the middle of a gallery, with the surrounding walls covered in the letters back and forth between himself and the long-suffering parking officers. This included the final letter from those officers that withdrew the fine.

Igor’s success encourages me to take you at your word and become the hooligan you most fear, the one who ignores your prohibition on talk about process and aura and insists on speaking about nothing else. I am further prompted to do so when you (a man who claims not to be a theoretician, but who, in your very next sentence, refers to a recent article by a philosopher) ask me about the radical transformation of our relationship with images that occurs when we are faced with today’s extraordinary photographic inflation. You pose two questions in the midst of that gesture: what is the nature of that transformation and what is our responsibility in the face of it?

I am not entirely persuaded that the quantity of photographs now being produced utterly transforms the nature of our relationship with images. After all, photography’s numbers have always been overwhelming. One could argue that billions of digital images are no more debilitating to one’s critical faculties than the millions of analog photographs that used to be churned out each year during the second half of the twentieth century, or, for that matter, than the forty daguerreotypes per day produced by Richard Beard’s London studio in 1841. In each case, an individual observer only encounters a tiny fraction of these photographs, usually just enough to recognise that both personal and commercial photography has always been driven by an economy of repetition and sameness. Seen a handful and you’ve seen them all, more or less. This allows the possibility of some critical purchase on particular genres of photograph. After all, Roland Barthes attempted to deduce the essence of photography from his examination of just one (unreproduced) personal photograph in Camera Lucida. A number of artists have produced interesting work that allows a similar reflection on our contemporary imagescape, including yourself, Joachim Schmid, Erik Kessels, and Penelope Umbrico. Such artists, all of them dedicated to an intelligent recycling of digital photographs, give me hope that critical thinking is still possible within and about this excessive image environment you describe.

“What overwhelms about the digital environment is not just the sheer number of images but the banal repetition of their form, their sameness, their abject surrender to the forces of reproduction”

I wonder also if the very theorist you want to put to one side, Walter Benjamin, still might have something useful to say about our current situation. Like you, I am no theoretician. So my interest is not in what Benjamin himself might have intended by his essay (if that could ever be deduced from what remains a strangely incoherent piece of writing) or even in trying to work out what the essay might mean in its own terms. No, my interest is in what can still be made of it for our own times. I want to rewrite this text in terms that make sense to me. I suggest that its bottom line is that the reproduction of images does something, to the images and to us. And as you imply, what overwhelms about the digital environment is not just the sheer number of images but the banal repetition of their form, their sameness, their abject surrender to the forces of reproduction. Such a repetition does indeed represent a “hypercapitalism of images.” But again, this state of being merely reproduces to infinity what has always been that most basic condition of the photograph: its capacity to endlessly reproduce itself, to be one of many copies, to be a copy for which there is no original.

When Benjamin reflected on these issues in the 1930s, he chose to equate the reproductive capacities of photography with the processes of mass production, and thus with the most basic operations of capitalism itself. For Benjamin, these processes are fraught with an inherent contradiction, an alienating inversion of social and commodity relations, such that reproduction is simultaneously capitalism’s lifeblood and its poison.¹ Photography, he suggested, contained within it this same contradiction, being equally capable of sustaining capitalism and of destroying it. For him, reproducibility is a politically charged capacity that can be either exploited or suppressed but should definitely not be ignored.

It is easy to be distracted from this bigger political argument by debates about the meaning of ‘aura.’ Benjamin describes aura as “a strange tissue of time and space: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”² I take this to be his attempt to account for the hallucinatory effects of commodity fetishism, such that unequal relations of power are experienced by individuals in very real, if often invisible, phenomenological and psychological terms. According to Karl Marx, commodity fetishism enables the subjugation of all social conditions and relationships to the needs of capital: “a definite social relation between men…assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”³ This form is “fantastic” because the commodity comes to be invested with unearthly powers beyond its capacity to deliver. As Paul Wood explains the process: “the commodity becomes a power in society. Rather than a use value for people it assumes a power over people, becoming a kind of god to be worshipped, sought after, and possessed. And in a reverse movement, as the commodity, the thing, becomes personified, so relations between people become objectified and thinglike.”⁴

Accordingly, the endless reproduction of an artwork like the Mona Lisa brings this painting close to us, but at the considerable cost of the commodification of our relationship to it. In reproduction form the artwork is near, physically and temporally, but its cult value has been exponentially enhanced by this same reproduction and thus we are simultaneously distanced from it. We might flock with enthusiasm to see the original, to see (and photographically copy for ourselves) the source of this torrent of copies, but this copying has transformed the nature of our experience even before we get there. Its celebrity status, a consequence of its constant reiteration in reproduced form, denies us access to the painting in its own terms. We see a star, rather than an actor; a masterpiece to be worshipped rather than a piece of painting to be analysed. Alienated by processes inherent to capitalism, we are thus prevented from having anything like an authentic relationship to the products of our own culture.

This gets me back to the “radical transformation” of our relationship to images that you worry about in your letter. Yes, photographs are being made and posted in ever greater numbers. Yes, most of those photographs are banal and unthinking, mere copies of what everyone else is doing. But still, I would suggest that people respond to photographs much as they always have, with heightened sentiment or dutiful boredom according to their connection to the subjects being depicted. Mostly, I suspect, people look at these photographs for confirmation of their own place in space and time, and to reiterate their stake within a comforting network of familial and emotional bonds. Photographs are posted as elements of a system of exchange, a system devoted to the mutual affirmation of shared values. The automatic reiteration of those values, their naturalisation by photography’s continued association with what is real, is where the alienation effect comes into play. We feel like we are closer to those with whom we exchange photographs even as that friendship is made dependent on distance and estrangement, but also on a relatively invisible, seemingly innocent version of digital capitalism. To intervene within that system of exchange is once again to engage with this larger political economy.

But your anxiety seems to be directed at the fate of the professional photographer, rather than at the enui of the on-line amateur. “Has photography exhausted its potential? Have photographers burned out, got tired?” I’d put it another way: can photographs still offer some critical purchase on the world, including on the world of photography itself? I think your own work, as a photographer and as a writer, shows that it still can. And not just because you have often adopted the admirably sustainable practice of recycling existing images, although this is certainly an interesting strategy. As our colleague Joachim Schmid has declared: “No new photos until the old ones are used up.”⁵ This strategy is itself a form of hooliganism, if only because it contests the value judgements of the photography world’s power brokers by making use of photographs that institutions like museums and dealers don’t care about (this, incidentally, is Schmid’s declared field of study). But a recycling of vernacular photographs also contests the usual investments of that world in the author function, another of your stated concerns. Schmid turns reproduction against itself by the deadpan manner with which he presents his plundered but otherwise nondescript images, refusing to provide them with meaning or embellishment. He simply implies that their re-presentation is itself meaningful. This orchestrates a shift in authorial responsibility from the maker to the viewer, from the singular act of production to the multiplicity of readings made available during the activity of looking. According to Roland Barthes, this kind of shift “liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.”⁶

“Our job, as intellectual hooligans, is to make the viewing of photographs more pensive, more thoughtful, than it might otherwise be”

Magnum photographers tend to prefer a fixed meaning, and to favour the politics of revelation. They imagine that if they could but show us the truth of a situation, then we would do something about it. But, as your own work has shown, truth is a weak political weapon, for all sorts of reasons. For a start, it grants its recipients a passive role; photographs dedicated to the revelation of truth again distance their viewers from the situation at issue, they grant us a freedom from any complicity in that situation. As I’ve already implied, I prefer an approach, to photography but also to any other kind of critical activity, that makes complicity a central plank. As Barthes once proposed, “ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”⁷ Our job, as intellectual hooligans, is to make the viewing of photographs more pensive, more thoughtful, than it might otherwise be.

Hooliganism of the sort you describe might be one way to induce that thoughtfulness, especially as it often involves a contestation of language and form, and thus a challenge to the system through which power is exercised (rather than a challenge to just one or more of its isolated consequences). But I’d like to think it’s not the only effective mode, if only because such actions are too easily dismissed as harmless pranks (and therefore are too easily corralled). As a historian of photographs (as someone who sometimes gets to “manage their meaning”), I still see value in certain kinds of invasive representational practices. Some of these practices, as you suggest, involve drawing attention to “images that have been hidden, images of what is secret.” But more often I find myself writing about images that are in fact hidden in plain sight, images that are invisible to critical thinking precisely because they endlessly reproduce the same tropes and are therefore ubiquitous and seemingly without social value. Among these genres are so-called ‘hidden mother’ portraits, memorial cabinet cards and snapshots that feature the shadow of the photographer; in each case, I have sought to bring out the extraordinary embedded in the ordinary and to thereby explain their fascination.⁸

But it is not just the subjects of historical writing that need constant revision but also the mode of writing itself. How one writes a history for photography is as potent a political challenge as one’s choice of content. But to make that challenge substantive it has to have subtlety. It has to look like ‘real’ history even while undermining that same reality. It has to inhabit the discourse of history like a virus, repeating aspects of the formal apparatus of that discourse but in such a way as to deal that apparatus a potentially fatal blow. I can’t pretend to have achieved any of this (yet), but I’d like to think that this kind of excavation of photography is capable of making some small contribution, supplementing the hooliganism already being engineered by your own “poetic speculations.”

 

Next “Correspondence” by Joan Fontcuberta will be published on November the 17th.

---

 

1. Benjamin establishes the contradictory logic of his argument in his first paragraph: “Going back to the basic conditions of capitalist production, …what could be expected, it emerged, was not only an increasingly harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of conditions which would make it possible for capitalism to abolish itself.” See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935-36), in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin eds., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2008), 19-55.

2. ibid, 23. Anne McCauley concludes that “Benjamin failed to see that the aura, as he defined it, was untouched by mechanical replication.” Pointing out that visitors still flocked to see original paintings, despite their reproduction in other media, she asserts that “their aura certainly remains intact.” Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848-1871 (Yale University Press, 1994), 300. I am trying to complicate this understanding of ‘aura,’ shifting it from a quality embedded in a work of art to a social dynamic enacted in the relationship between a work and its audience.

3. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 165.

4. See Paul Wood, ‘Commodity,’ in Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff eds., Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996), 263-264.

5. See Rolf Sachsse, ‘Joachim Schmid’s Archiv,’ History of Photography, 24: 3 (Autumn 2000), 255-261; Gordon MacDonald and John S. Weber eds., Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982-2007 (Steidl, 2007); Joachim Schmid, ‘Reload Currywurst,’ in Joan Fontcuberta ed., Soñarán los androides con cámaras fotográficas? [Do Androids Dream of Cameras?] (Madrid: Secretaría General Técnica, 2008), 286-299; and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Observing by Watching: Joachim Schmid and the Art of Exchange,’ Aperture , No. 210 (Spring 2013), 46-49.

6. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 147. Barthes’s comment follows his earlier proposition: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (146).

7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 38.

8. See, for example, my essays ‘Life and Death,’ in Geoffrey Batchen ed., Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (Japan: Izu Photo Museum, 2010), 28-129 and ‘Hiding in Plain Sight,’ in Linda Fregni Nagler, The Hidden Mother (Mack/Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2013), 4-8.

Dear Geoff,

Your response gives us a great deal of lucidity and encouragement to go on turning over and mulling over the issues that concern us. Equally welcome is the fact that you raise doubts about some of my statements, which I perhaps threw out, if not frivolously, then in an excess of high spirits. It’s true that I base my observations not on scientific studies grounded in hard data and statistics but simply on impressions which are derived from intuition and as such entirely refutable. But trusting that the antennas that guide me are usually well oriented, I would like to consider two points on which I think we disagree: 1) I do believe that what has triggered the transformations that photography is undergoing is its massification (to a great extent, at least); and 2) I also believe that this massification substantially alters our relationship with the image.

In the past there have been instances of photographs being produced in the huge quantities you mention, but it seems plain common sense to say that this was never on anything like the same scale as we are seeing now. In a text for the catalogue of the exhibition From Now On. Post-photography in the age of the Internet and the mobile phone I related the circumstances of our understanding of images with the circumstances of physics.¹ The story goes that Mr Newton was taking a nap under an apple tree when a ripe fruit chanced to fall on his head and he cried out ‘Eureka! Gravity!’. The bit about the siesta would have been far more credible if Newton had been Spanish, but what holds good about the fable is the principle that bodies are attracted with a force proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to their separation. For centuries the Newtonian laws based on gravitational forces plausibly governed the observable phenomena of nature, but when we began to study subatomic particles and reach out into deep space – that is, when we radically shifted scale to the infinitely large or the infinitely small – those laws ceased to apply and we needed more sophisticated explanations. Along came quantum physics and the theory of relativity, not as a negation of Newtonian physics but as an adjustment in the application of its precepts. This simile invites us to think that a photograph that borders on infinity also requires its own particular quantum revolution to adapt it from phenomena that are measurable in kilometres to those measurable in light years. The disciplines that have allowed us to approach the analysis of the image from different perspectives (aesthetics, semiotics, epistemology, anthropology, sociology and so on) therefore need to be revised in accordance with a new superlative scale. To put it another way: the rules have changed.

“Saturation de-sacralises and deprives the image of its magical dimension”

This revision affects fundamental aspects of the theory of the image. For example, it discredits the sacrosanct myth of aura – hence my reluctance to set foot in this particular quagmire. The aura emanates from the dialectic between original and reproduction, but the old binomial opposition there has lost much of its meaning in the post-photographic era. The proliferation of images is not so much a result of the serial copying or reproduction of a primordial matrix which acts as guarantor of the aura as of the multiplication of originals. The fact that there are so many photos today is not because they are being cloned but because a given scene generates an overabundance of ‘original’ versions. The aura then vanishes by exhaustion, from the sheer excess of originals, and this effect can also be expressed in terms of saturation.

Visual saturation is in my opinion one of the main consequences of the capitalism of images you referred to. Saturation de-sacralises and deprives the image of its magical dimension. It also pushes us towards insensibility and a new mode of censorship: concealment by smothering and fatigue. ‘Art has become iconoclastic,’ Baudrillard tells us. ‘Modern iconoclasm no longer consists in destroying images, but in manufacturing a profusion of images where there is nothing to see.’² Saturation actually causes blindness.³ Just as an excess of information amounts to an absence of information, so the superabundance and omnipresence of images is tantamount to their suppression. In fact, the idea is merely an exaggeration of notes that were already being formulated in the avant-gardes. For example Magritte and Man Ray both produced pieces that anticipated the collapse of the image. In 1928 Magritte painted L’image parfaite (The Perfect Image) and in 1929 Man Ray dedicated to his friend Louis Aragon ‘Ma dernière photographie’ (My last photograph). In the first we see, from behind and to one side, a young woman looking at a picture frame containing a completely black canvas, while the second is nothing other than a veiled photograph. In both cases the blackness evokes the superimposed accumulation of all possible images – hence their perfection – and the assumption that a final image has been reached – hence it’s being the last one possible. That darkness, in which nothing can be discerned any more, gives the measure of the exhaustion of any further capacity for representation. More than works of art, these are semiotic proclamations, gestures that bring to an end the long journey of the image and explain its saturation or satiation.

We are now suffering the consequences of Magritte’s and Man Ray’s clairvoyance and it is natural that we should worry about finding the right political and economic solutions with which to alleviate a crisis of which that saturation is no more than a symptom. For example, Serge Latouche proposes the notion of degrowth. ‘There are two objections to the culture of excess. The first, and loudest, is the one that advocates containment and recycling through the radical downsizing of all markets as the only way of ensuring the continuity of consumption. It’s the new ecological morality of Capital. The other, unduly neglected, is the one which grows in the conviction that, having got to where we are, it is now imperative to jam the circuits that still have faith in the internal recovery of the economic system. It is not a matter of redefining the protocols of consumption in order to maintain the logic of growth but the very opposite: commencing without further ado a course of degrowth.’⁴

Serge Latouche emerged as a leading apostle of this commitment to rethinking accumulation with the publication of his Petit traité de la décroissance sereine in 2007.⁵ Latouche likes to refer to himself as a ‘growth objector’ and proposes eight interdependent actions that will contribute to the ‘virtuous circle of serene, convivial and sustainable degrowth: revalue, reconceptualise, restructure, redistribute, relocate, reduce, reuse and recycle’ – eight Rs we must constantly bear in mind. But there is another R, and this is the one that invigorates and gives meaning to all of the previous eight: resist. Against excess and saturation, resistance.

“Many photos are now being taken nor to last but to interact and connect”

The other question was whether we react in the same way or in a different way to images when they are scarce or abundant. We can think of photographs as symbolic substitutes for the real, but the strength of that substitution value has been weakened. Value, in terms of appreciation, is dependent on scarcity, on singularity. A century or two ago, images were luxury goods that adorned privileged spaces such as churches and palaces; these days almost all of us carry around a smartphone storing hundreds, even thousands of photos – photos that, precisely because they are obtained at no cost at all, are reiterative and banal, the balance of an excessive, compulsive and unrestrained production. Indeed, the photographic act itself often prevails over the content of the photograph. Inserted into processes that are more conversational than descriptive or documentary, the life of the image becomes ephemeral. Many photos are now being taken nor to last but to interact and connect. The phenomenon of Snapchat is eloquent: an electronic messaging system in which the photos or videos you send are automatically deleted ten seconds after they are received. Having fulfilled its function, the image disappears.

Our appreciation of and regard for a photograph will depend on that simple economic equation. A few years ago I experienced this in a very graphic way and, with your permission, I’d like to recount it briefly. In 2010 I was invited to create a public artwork in Sajazarra, a little place in La Rioja famous for its wineries and its mediaeval castle-palace. I had carte blanche for my project, I was limited only to one condition: all of the local people who wanted to take part in it were to be allowed to. I proposed to make a mural mosaic composed of photoceramic tiles, which would be installed on the portico of the church. The mosaic would depict a bell that, according to legend, a Moorish princess called Zuleya, who converted to Christianity at the time of the Reconquest, gave to the village of Sajazarra because it was the only parish that allowed her to be baptized. With a view to involving the locals I decided to use photomosaic software to compose the figure of the bell with photos from their family albums, in such a way that the final result would function as an outdoor Facebook wall. We would sow thousands of private photos to germinate a work in common that avoids the saturation of memory and the negation of the narrative to compose a repository of solidarity, in such a way that the shared stories and the synergy that the participants engendered are more important than the document itself.

“Those photos were relics of past happiness, instants of eternity, the means of anchoring time and memory”

The tiles, then, would be photos provided by local families. To obtain them it was necessary to hold a number of explanatory sessions, outlining and justifying the thinking behind the project and what it would entail. In the run-up to the week of the annual Fiesta Mayor, the mayor issued an official announcement inviting families who were interested in taking part to bring their photos to the Town Hall, where we had set up digital reproduction equipment with which our teams of volunteers digitized the contents of the albums people brought along, without excluding anything. All in all we collected some twelve thousand photos reflecting a whole range of times and themes: grape harvests, popular festivities, processions and religious festivals, portraits of children and ancestors, the Civil War, the changing landscape of the region, etc. This archive constituted the manifesto of a collective will to share experiences and memory, a will to get rid of the barriers cordoning off the private core of the family to open up a wider sphere of congregation. Gathering and connecting all these pictures established a kind of social synapse. That photomosaic is now the site of secular pilgrimages by the local people, who go there to discover slices of their lives and enhance them with the interest and the comments of others. In much the same way as what happens on social media, private memories are now public and the wall acts as a forum for community interaction.

What was interesting for our casewere the different attitudes to the images people provided. And there was a variety of relationships: from an old woman who came with six tattered sepia photos, which were the only ones she had, and were her most precious treasure, to a proud new dad with a memory card loaded with almost two thousand shots of the same baby viewed from every possible angle and making every imaginable face. The old lady couldn’t bear to be separated from the photographs that were her vital heritage, they were too valuable to her: all that was left of her marriage, her family, her youth – the last remaining vestiges of a life that was nearing its end. Those photos were relics of past happiness, instants of eternity, the means of anchoring time and memory. On the other hand, the machine-clicked snapshots of the baby, all taken within a period of two weeks, were totally interchangeable. That baby probably filled a whole album – physical or virtual – devoted to his latest cute moves every month. They meant so little to the father that he didn’t even bother to come back for the memory card.

I apologise for letting these disquisitions distract me from the brief I was given, which was to focus on the ‘who’ of photography. In order to make amends, I would like to dedicate my fourth and final missive, if you’re happy to continue shooting from the trench of our intellectual hooliganism, to one of the most successful fakes in the recent history of photography, the one and only Vivian Maier, that delicious invention of a Mary Poppins photographer. What authorships are at the back of that magnificent mise en scène?

And what else am I to say in these moments of consternation? A bellicose clown will preside over the United States and the death of Leonard Cohen has left poetry orphaned. The most savage neoliberal governance will ramp up its tactic of making whatever it doesn’t like invisible while the most melancholy voice of the losers has fallen silent. Bad times for lyric poetry, as Brecht said in 1940…

 

 

Next “Correspondence” by Geoffrey Batchen will be published in November the 28th.

---

 

[1] An exhibition curated by Erik Kessels, Joachim Schmid, Martin Parr, Clément Chéroux and Joan Fontcuberta at Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, in 2013. The show had previously been presented at the Rencontres Inernationales de la Photographie in Arles in 2011. The catalogue was published jointly with R.M., Barcelona/Mexico City.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2005.

[3] Saturation also anaesthetises us and neutralises the document’s power to shock, especially in the case of the depiction of violence and horror. This is a subject you will e familiar with as co-editor of Picturing Atrocity. Photography in Crisis, Reaktion Books, London, 2012.

[4] Martí Peran, Tractat sobre les formes de recular i trobar el lloc (catalogue of the exhibition Ai Perejaume, si veiés la munió d’obres que t’envolten, no en faries cap de nova), Fundació La Pedrera, Barcelona, 2011.

[5] Icaria Editorial, Barcelona, 2009.

“Photographers take snapshots to allay their own fears about forgetting and being forgotten. It’s the act that matters, not the photograph”

Dear Joan,

Your latest letter, at once eloquent and provocative, gives me a much better understanding of, among other things, the motivations behind your own work as an artist. Our discussion could perhaps be reduced to a single question: does size matter? Or, to put it another way, does the overwhelming quantity of photographs being produced today mediate the quality of our relationship to the photograph in general? I tried to persuade you that any individual observer sees only a small fraction of the available photographic universe and that each individual’s reaction to those photographs is much as it has always been. To use your own analogy, the rules may have changed (from Newtonian physics to quantum theory) but any apples that fall on our heads continue to hurt or not hurt according to the height of the fall and the hardness of our heads, regardless of those rules or our understanding of them. You stress the effect of visual saturation and the insensibility and even blindness it generates, but then quote the words of Jean Baudrillard to support your case; words spoken during a lecture presented in 1987, before the advent of the internet or digital cameras or social media.¹ Baudrillard, it seems, identifies these effects with postmodernity (or even with the media explosion of the 1960s, when he first started writing about the culture of simulacra) rather than with a “post-photographic era.” Similarly, the scholars who worried about the desensitization that might result from exposure to an excess of atrocity pictures (Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and John Berger) were writing in the 1960s and ‘70s, in the age of illustrated magazines and television.²

So I suggest we need to be cautious as we explore the issue of ‘massification.’ But let me be clear: I wouldn’t want to pretend that nothing has changed in recent years. That would be as unwise as saying that everything has changed. What we are debating is the nature of those changes and the best way to respond to them. We have reached, you say, a darkness in which nothing can be discerned any more, a darkness already declared in the late 1920s by the Surrealists but now fully descended upon us as a consequence of the “culture of excess” you describe. The excessive amount of photographs in the world is joined by their devaluation: people don’t value what they don’t have to pay for, or what they can produce in seemingly infinite numbers. You cite the phenomenon of Snapchat (where photographs have replaced language) and offer an anecdote that compares the emotional investment of one woman in her few precious snapshots with the apparent indifference of a man who never returned for his memory stick and its two thousand digital baby pictures. Of course, this man may well have already loaded these pictures onto his desktop and therefore didn’t need his stick back. In any case, I own an album from the 1930s (which was featured in my 2004 exhibition catalogue Forget Me Not) in which each page is obsessively covered from edge to edge with baby pictures: on its cover, the photographer had pasted an advertisement declaring that “the historic value of things fixed in the form of a picture is beyond price.”³ I suspect your man with the memory stick felt similarly. Why else would he have taken thousands of such pictures in the first place?

“The death of photography has been declared so many times that I regard such declarations as signs of life, as an inevitable marker of the rise of yet another photographic phoenix from the ashes of its predecessor”

 

So where is the crisis here? For you, this crisis might be summed up thus: “the photographic act itself often prevails over the content of the photograph…many photos are now being taken, not to last but to interact and connect…having fulfilled its function, the image disappears.” For a professional photographer, who makes images for a living and as a necessity, this is a crisis indeed. As a historian of photography, however, I can’t help but be more dispassionate about it. The death of photography has been declared so many times that I regard such declarations as signs of life, as an inevitable marker of the rise of yet another photographic phoenix from the ashes of its predecessor. Indeed, your remarks made me recall an essay I wrote for another of my exhibition catalogues, this time for Suspending Time in 2010. I refer to a statistic claiming that Americans alone take about 550 snapshots per second, “a statistic that, however it has been concocted, suggests that the taking of such photographs might best be regarded as a neurosis rather than a pleasure.” I go on to suggest that this neurosis could be taken “as a declaration of faith in the midst of an increasingly secular world.” “Photographers,” I argue, “take snapshots to allay their own fears about forgetting and being forgotten. It’s the act that matters, not the photograph. This is why this act is endlessly repeated, even when we never intend to print the results.”⁴ Photography, it seems, continues to have meaning (and a profound meaning at that) even in the absence of photographs.

“Many artists, it seems, want to present us with photographs that are not just of something: they are something”

However, the fact is that we have never had more photographs than now. Not only is social media inundated with a surfeit of bad ones, but our museums, galleries and auction houses have never before presented us with so many good ones, have never, in fact, valued photographs more highly. This may well be a necessary corollary to the neoliberal economy in which we find ourselves; the rich get ever richer and the poor are left behind to fend for themselves. You propose that artists should respond to this excessive embrace by the art world (another example of photo-saturation) with a course of ‘degrowth’ and point us to Serge Latouche’s eight actions (revalue, reconceptualise, restructure, redistribute, relocate, reduce, reuse and recycle), even while adding another: resistance. I’ve already indicated my strong support for all nine of these actions and have written approvingly about the work of a number of artists who have sought to enact them, yours included.

But, as a historian, I also note another response witnessed in the work of many contemporary artists working with photography, a response we might call retromodernism. As you have yourself, in your letter to me, a lot of artists are looking back to the utopian experiments of the mid-century avant-garde, to a period before the somewhat mournful, cynical and theory-laden moment we call postmodernism, and are seeking to re-explore and reinvigorate (two more ‘Rs’ for you) the critical capacities of modernism itself. This is a tendency that has been widely recognised, with exhibitions devoted to it, or to some aspect of it, having already taken place at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the V&A in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand—in this last case, one of my own exhibitions, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph.⁵ Making photographs without a camera, and thus returning to a mode of working associated with Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy in particular (the patron saints for many contemporary photo-artists), is one aspect of this response. But more generally, one might identify it with work that is self-conscious about the materiality of both the photograph and the act of producing it. These are photographs one is asked to look at, rather than through. Many artists, it seems, want to present us with photographs that are not just of something: they are something.

Whether consciously or not, photographers have often felt the need to take their medium back to first principles as a way of setting recent history aside and starting again. I might go even further and say that they have periodically sought to put the meaning of photography into crisis precisely in order to signal and respond to a greater crisis that is always already happening around them. In the case of the artists I am thinking about, the image has been erased from the photographic experience precisely so that the photograph can be brought back into our consciousness.

Australian artist Justine Varga, for example, creates photographic works from an intimate and often prolonged exchange between a large-format strip of film and the world that comes to be inscribed on it. Desklamp, produced during 2011-12, involved the year-long exposure of a colour negative placed on top of the artist’s desk. Common sense and the laws of physics would suggest that this piece of film would be completely fogged by this extended duration. It should, in other words, be the embodiment of that complete darkness you have already described as a metaphor of our moment. But something strange has happened to Varga’s film, as though it reached its representational limits, died, and then passed to the other side of those limits and came back to life, registering its hundreds of exposures to light and dark, and to whatever else may have touched it over this year, as luscious swathes of colour and accumulated incidental marks. As an act of photography, it promises the possibility, not of death, but of resurrection.

All this is made visible when the film is developed and printed from and enlarged. Immersing us in its chromatic atmosphere, the final work dispassionately documents the artist’s presence in a particular place while also offering a sublime manifestation of her physical interaction with the activity of photographing. Varga’s work has an autobiographical cast, but some of these ‘retromodern’ photographs ground their material form in a specific set of historical circumstances. It is this grounding that should displace the word ‘abstraction’ from our vocabulary and send us back to the dictionary for a better term. In my first exchange with you, I mentioned the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, with its devastating consequences, including nuclear contamination. Seeking to make visible this otherwise invisible threat to his country’s inhabitants, the Japanese artist Shimpei Takeda collected contaminated soil samples from twelve locations throughout Japan, each of them of historical and symbolic significance (“with a strong memory of life and death,” as the artist put it), and then placed the samples on sheets of photo-sensitive film, leaving them like that for a month.⁶ About half the resulting images remained almost black, but some were soon speckled with a blizzard of radioactive emissions, abstractions that nevertheless indelibly recorded the fragile state of the Japanese ecology. Here we see an automatic recording of a radiation that threatens the ecology and well being of a specific place at a specific time. This specificity matters, to the form and meaning of the work, and perhaps also to our own survival as a species.

Although resembling abstract paintings, photographs of this kind enjoy, even exploit, photography’s indexical grounding in a world of chemical and physical reactions to physical phenomena. They all are documents of their own coming into being, rather than just of a world outside the photograph. Despite appearances, they are, in other words, as realist as photographs can get. Exercising long durations rather than instantaneous exposures, these artists return photography to a handmade craft and away from an automatic subservience to global capitalism and its vast economies of mass production and exploitation. In short, this kind of work puts “photography” into inverted commas and, by exacerbating it into visibility, asks us to ponder what something’s photographicness might mean and why it might matter. Having abandoned the perspectival focus provided by both the camera and a centralised referent, such photographs also actively decenter the observer. They force us to cast our eyes back and forth over their opaque surfaces because these offer no singular resting point, and thus no visual confirmation of a stable position in space and time. They insist on their identity as photographs but keep us, and the world we inhabit, in flux and on the move.

You’ll note, too, how a picture of this kind collapses any distinction between figure and ground (as well as between up and down), and how its edge is allowed to become an arbitrary cut within a field of potentially infinite elements, rather than a rational frame surrounding a discrete object. These are pictures, in short, that decisively break with all received conventions for camera-derived picture making, and thus with the camera’s comforting humanism too. In front of such photographs, we are freed from the passifying grip of this humanism and forced to seek another kind of viewing position, even another kind of subjectivity; indeed, another kind of position in the world at large.

I am suggesting, therefore, that there are varieties of resistance to the current situation, and even that ‘degrowth’ and ‘retromodernism’ are two sides of the same coin. Both seek to provide a counter to the photo-saturated environment of the present, to slow down our perception of that environment, and to encourage a more thoughtful consideration of its consequences. Both, too, complicate the usual investments we have in photographic authorship. I’ll look forward to your next correspondence and what I suspect will be an interesting commentary on the distortions of authorship currently being engineered by the art market and its museum acolytes.

 

Next “Correspondence” by Joan Fontcuberta will be published on December 9th.

---

1. Your quotation was taken from Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art,’ the script of a lecture Baudrillard gave at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1987.
2. See Roland Barthes, ‘Photos-Chocs,’ in Mythologies (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1957), 119–121. An English translation (originally published in Creative Camera in the United Kingdom in July 1969) can be found reproduced as ‘The Scandal of Horror Photography,’ in David Brittain, ed., Creative Camera: Thirty Years of Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 32–34. The essay is translated as ‘Shock-Photos’ in Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 71–73. See also Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 1977), but incorporating earlier essays, and John Berger, ‘Photographs of Agony’ (1972), About Looking (New York, Vintage, 1980), 41-44.
3. See Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton Architectural Press and Van Gogh Museum, 2004), 53-55.
4. Geoffrey Batchen, Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (Shizuoko: Izu Photo Museum, 2010), 122-123, 126.
5. These exhibitions include Martin Barnes, Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010); Carol Squiers, What is a Photograph? (New York: Prestel/International Center of Photography, 2014); Virginia Heckert, Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2015); Clément Chéroux and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Qu’est-ce que la photographie? (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2015); Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (New Plymouth, NZ: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2016). Justine Varga’s Desklamp (2011-12) was featured in this last exhibition, but also in New Matter: Recent Forms of Photography, curated by Isobel Parker Philip for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney in late 2016.
6. Shimpei Takeda, 2013, as quoted in Claude Baillargeon, Shadows of the Invisible (Rochester, Mich: Oakland University Art Gallery, 2014), n.p.

Dear Geoff,

As we dialogue, history continues on its course. Fidel Castro is dead and I’m flying to Cuba. The simultaneity of the two facts (death, travel) is purely coincidental. According to generally well-informed sources, Fidel didn’t have a seizure when he learned that I was going to exhibit in Havana, nor was my show organised with the intention of sapping the vital spirits of the old revolutionary: the two things simply coincided in fate and geography.

Only once in my life did I chance to meet Fidel in the flesh, and he was pretty impressive. In 1984 I was invited to take part in the third Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía in Havana, from 19 to 23 November. The get-together allowed me to rub shoulders with the crème de la crème of Latin American photography among a whole host of international celebrities: Erika Billeter, Petr Tausk, Max Kozloff, James Enyeart, Keith McElroy, Walter and Naomi Rosenblum, Martha Rosler and Olga Suslova, to name but a few.

The photography symposium was held in the Palacio de Convenciones, and during one of our sessions the Cuban president was closing an international oncology conference in an adjoining hall. At the end of his address, he saw the crowds in and just outside our auditorium and wondered what the big attraction could be: ‘And these people, what are they talking about?’ ‘Photography,’ his aides replied. ‘Well, I’m going to say a few words to them.’ He interrupted the paper in progress, settled himself behind the lectern and improvised a three-hour speech on photography. If we had been landscape architects or aeronautical engineers he would no doubt have addressed to us, with equal savoir-faire and vehemence, a complete treatise on landscape architecture or aeronautical engineering. Fidel spoke of Capa‘s falling militiaman and Korda‘s heroic guerrilla, and affirmed the photographer’s ‘educative’ (let’s be clear about this: propagandistic) responsibility. Coming closer to home, he regretted that there was no photographic record of the early days of his still clandestine struggle, before the assault on the Moncada Barracks, which would have completed the epic testimony of the revolutionary process provided by Alberto Korda, Oswaldo Salas, Raúl Corrales, Liborio Noval and others. Fidel had no qualms about the instrumentalisation of photography as an effective means of ideological indoctrination and the dissemination of a particular historical narrative.

That we are witnessing the consecration of post-truth is attested by the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen it as the word of 2016 – three years ago the winning word was ‘selfie’

As I think back to that episode now, what buzzes in my head is the word that has emerged triumphant from the shenanigans of the US presidential election campaign. Wikipedia glosses the neologism ‘post-truth’ as a ‘situation in which facts have become less important than emotional persuasion’ in the shaping of public opinion, with objective facts having less influence than appeals to emotion or personal belief. That we are witnessing the consecration of post-truth is attested by the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen it as the word of 2016 – three years ago the winning word was ‘selfie’. It seems we have to keep an eye on the OED it we are to follow the theoretical trajectory of post-photography.

So, in this final contribution I want to start by saying that I feel frustrated at not having more time and space to discuss in sufficient detail the many ramifications and nuances into which the course of our arguments has led. The agreed limit to the number of words means I am unable to delve into issues that, though relevant, I must skate over. However, a couple of comments on your last contribution before getting to the nitty-gritty.

You say that the question of massification can be reduced to wondering if size matters. The politically correct response is to say no, but tangible reality often contradicts the perfectly modulated niceties of PC etiquette. I am convinced that size matters a lot. And I’m not thinking of those hugely successful little blue pills today but – and especially – of the importance of scale in the laws of evolution. My favourite example is Bonellia viridis, a marine worm presumptively identified by the famous naturalist Peter Ameisenhaufen, and nature’s most exceptional instance of sexual dimorphism: the female can measure up to two metres, while the male is just three millimetres long (and lives on or inside the female). Odd couples, indeed. Bonellia viridis illustrates the extent to which the ecosystem rests on things being the right sizes: transgressing the limits disrupts the stability of the entire system – whether we’re talking about marine fauna or visual culture.

“Production of images is increasing at a vertiginous pace, far more intense than the growth rate of the human population – in other words, of potential observers”

As for apples, yes, you’re right: when one falls on your head, it leaves a bruise, regardless of whether your photos are analogue or digital. But the problem is that now you have thousands of apples falling on your head. In that situation Newton wouldn’t have exclaimed ‘Eureka!’ If he survived, he would probably have been more bluntly Anglo-Saxon. You object that not all of the extraordinarily abundant current crop of apples will fall on a single head. That’s true. Not all of the billions of photos that are produced today are intended for a single viewer. What I maintain is that the production of images is increasing at a vertiginous pace, far more intense than the growth rate of the human population – in other words, of potential observers. So the gap is getting bigger all the time. I heard Erik Kessels say in a talk that every day, between the moment his alarm clock rings and his first cup of coffee, he is exposed to more images than his grandfather would have seen in the whole of his life.

In a different register, the example you give of the artist Justine Varga, in relation to darkness as saturation, got me thinking about the conceptual experiments of the Kassel School photographers in the 1970s. In terms of the market, the Düsseldorf School hit the jackpot, and former students of the Bechers are the big names on the international scene today, but as far as ideas are concerned, Floris Neüssus’s students at Kassel have ten times more radicalism and depth. In 1981, my colleagues and I put together a special issue of the magazine PhotoVision on the use of the pinhole camera in the context of those conceptual practices.¹ Among the case studies we cited the project by Thomas Bechler, who sent packages to his home in Kassel from twelve other German cities: each package was essentially a pinhole camera with the hole uncovered and photosensitive paper inside, ready to be exposed. Depending on whether the package-cum-camera was in the light or in the dark, covered with other parcels or not, had been left stationary for a while or not, and so on, the twelve different exposures produced twelve ‘graphics’ which spoke of the itineraries they had travelled in an abstract language that combined light, space and time. Through no fault of the hard-working post office staff, almost all the results were disappointingly black: the paper had absorbed ‘too much’ life. But no matter: I understand that, as in the Varga case, the performative dimension of the project takes precedence over what ended up on the light-sensitive paper. This leads us to ask ourselves about the necessity or otherwise of a discourse. Would these experiences be intelligible in the absence of any narrative? But this question, which also concerns the Magritte painting and the Man Ray photograph, falls outside our debate here, and perhaps merits a future correspondence of its own.

So, can someone be an author if they don’t want to be?

Let’s return to the heart of the question, then: the ‘who’ of photography, authorship. I’d like to look again, as I said before, at the paradigmatic case of Vivian Maier in terms of the construction of new models of authorship. Many museums and institutions of the photographic Establishment – our present hosts included – took part, knowingly or not, in a great authorial conspiracy. Some of them simply swallowed the bait; others had a hand in perpetrating the deception. The idea of ​​an enigmatic nanny whose double life only comes to light after her death is one of those scripts we would all love to be part of: a sad caterpillar turns into a resplendent butterfly, a Cinderella becomes a princess. We wind up in a fairy-tale happy ending whose opening exactly conformed to the first rule in the unfolding of any fake: the finding of an archive – in other words, the appeal to a story by proxy. It must be admitted that John Maloof, the principal perpetrator of the operation, introduced an original element of contingency in having the archive turn up not in a fleamarket or a long neglected attic but in an auction of goods impounded for debt. From there on the plot is predictable and can be followed in the mockumentary Finding Vivian Maier, written and directed by Charlie Siskel and Maloof himself, who plays the part of the ‘lucky collector’ (another textbook fake character). All of the people who appear in the film are very convincing, and, as convention requires, it also calls star witnesses – here, Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark – to lend their weight to the endorsement of the personage. In one of the frankest sequences, Maloof says, ‘I can’t help feeling a bit frankest sequences, can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable or guilty, exposing the work of someone who didn’t want to be exposed’.² So, can someone be an author if they don’t want to be?

This kind of narrative structure, Geoff, will be no surprise to you – in fact, a fellow countryman of yours is one of its great practitioners. Before he wasted so much time making a load of money with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson made a delicious fake documentary, Forgotten Silver (1995). Released in Spain with a title that translates as The ‘True’ Story of the Cinema (we really should get round to learning what inverted commas are used for), Forgotten Silver recreates the life and work of pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie, an innovative genius to rival Méliès, who in the early years of the twentieth century invented the talkie and introduced colour to the cinema. In the second part of the film, Jackson mounts an expedition into the forests of New Zealand to discover the ruins of the so-called Lost City, a fabulous film set in which McKenzie shot his masterpiece, the spectacular epic Salome. What Jackson and his team find are the remains of a papier-mâché city whose monumentality makes the sets of Intolerance or King Kong look like the Christmas panto at an Antarctic weather station. In the catalogue of Fake. It Is Not True, It Is Not A Lie, Jorge Luis Marzo writes: ‘It is considered by many to be a cult film, both for its content and for the controversy generated by its premiere on New Zealand television. The audience believed that the footage and testimonies in the documentary were true, and that Colin McKenzie really was a pioneer of cinema and the inventor of sound and colour film. So great did the phenomenon become that the New Zealand press proposed the erecting of a statue of Colin McKenzie. A few days after the airing, the directors had to go on TV to make it clear that the content was totally fictitious and that they had not intentionally sought the scandal, not even as a form of promotion, but were playing with the genres.’³

With Vivian Maier we are still at the stage of innocent fascination that prompts us to call for tributes and monuments. Perhaps the problem is that we give more credence to the sellers of snake oil than to experts who usually tend to be spoilsports. In her devastating essay ‘Inventing Vivian Maier’,⁴ published after Maloof’s project was included in the Jeu de Paume hors les murs programme, Abigail Solomon-Godeau warned us of the artificiality of a history of photography that adopts the art history model, based on the parameters of authors, intentionality and oeuvre and the requirement of some degree of unity or coherence in the corpus as a whole. ‘We need authors,’ she affirmed, ‘to facilitate the writing of history.’ Solomon-Godeau suggests that this unhealthy obsession can disable our critical filters and reveals the vulnerability of veridiction systems. And the quote from Michael Williams that closes the text is quite explicit: ‘[In the Vivian Maier affair] perhaps the even larger project is her posthumous invention.’ The big project, in short, is a cheeky but legitimate exercise in post-truth.

Who can still be in any doubt about the authenticity of Vivian Maier’s work after reading this documented essay? The fact is that neither credulity nor candour is the problem here. Humans are the only animals capable of creating fictions and believing them. Let each of us believe, then, in the fairy tale we find most comforting. However, the underlying theme is the way this carnival of confusion paves the way for emergence of the author as ventriloquist. Maloof is projecting his voice not into a doll but into the ghost of Vivian Maier. And it is always Maloof who is speaking, for all that he wants us to believe in the illusion of a doll come to life, though when he speaks he does within a chorus of voices that he has orchestrated. And to heighten the verism, the ventriloquist even forgets that it’s he who speaks and discreetly places himself in the background.

This figure of the ventriloquist author brings us back to the spectacle and the game. The Copi exhibition The Time of Monsters, now at [La Virreina] Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona, ​​welcomes the visitor with a large panel bearing a quote from the theatre director Jorge Lavelli: ‘Here is an author who forgets his condition as author and throws himself into the game in the way that anyone does. With no second thoughts, no changes of mood and no regrets, no anxieties or frustrations: guided by this incomparable sensation we call pleasure.’⁵ I really like this idea of ​​the author as a player – though we may then ask ourselves if the author is the one who plays for pleasure or the one who wins the game. I believe that the author is precisely the one who distributes – deals out, shares – the play.

The shade of the Caribbean coco palms inclines me to think in terms of play and pleasure. The Cuban writer and critic Iván de la Nuez, who lives in Barcelona, ​​affirms in his essay El comunista manifiesto that if communism has been defeated politically, it is victorious aesthetically.⁶ For example, those today who say the Internet should be a platform that fosters the sharing of culture and knowledge are the heritors of the revolutionary sensibility that champions the commons. Amid the ruins of the Cuban revolution and its project of a just and egalitarian society I would like to put forward a final proposal that would replace ventriloquous authorship with noospheric authorship. The term noosphere, which implies a communion of thought, was launched by Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky and Pierre Teihard de Chardin as the possibility of the nodal connection of all human intelligence. As a porous mesh of universal communication, cyberspace brings the utopia of the noosphere within our reach. Perhaps, as contemporary artists, that should be our aspiration: to make our intellectual and social contributions in terms not of the individual self but of collective energy and collective effort, from a community of interactivity. In the final exchanges of the dialogue between Urs Stahel and Hester Keijser that preceded ours, they too were concerned with resisting the threat that the ‘dominance and omnipresence of economic factors [would] completely determine our existence’ and found an alternative ‘in societies that place greater importance on communal aspects of living life, rather than on individualism and its concomitant focus on competition.’ I celebrate this communion.

In conclusion, I apologize if my digressions on authorship have complicated things for you as a historian, as Solomon-Godeau warned. Now, Geoff, it’s over to you for the last word. We’re waiting for you to give the final apotheosis. Hasta siempre, Comandante Batchen!

Joan Fontcuberta

 

PS: The latest – incredible – news.⁷ Fidel Castro’s posthumous papers mention a love affair with a guerrilla whose name was Moira, though everyone referred to her affectionately as ‘La Gringa’. She was tall, passionate and taciturn. In the Sierra Moira kept her Rolleiflex with her at all times, and shot reel after reel of film she had no means of developing. She eventually got fed up with the sexism of her revolutionary comrades and sick of the dense smoke of their never-ending cigars, and returned to the United States. We know that she was in Chicago in 1956, and worked as a nanny as a cover for her true condition. The negatives of her campaign photos must still be somewhere in Havana, ‘mislaid’ in some office of the Ministry of the Interior. There can be no doubt, though, that someday they will resurface…

Next “Correspondence” by Geoffrey Batchen will be published in January 2nd.

---

 

1. ‘Fotografía estenopeica / Pinhole Photography’, PhotoVision No. 15, Madrid, 1981.
2. Charlie Siskel and John Maloof, Finding Vivian Maier, Ravine Pictures, 2013.
3. Jorge Luis Marzo, curator. Fake. It Is Not True, It Is Not A Lie. IVAM, Valencia, 2016
4. http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/09/vivian-maier-abigail-solomon-godeau/)
5. Copi. The Time of Monsters, exhibition curated by Valentín Roma, [La Virreina] Centre de la Imatge. Barcelona, 5 November 2016 – 5 February 2017.
6. Iván de la Nuez, El comunista manifiesto, Galaxia Gutemberg, Barcelona, 2013.
7. Floriberto Canales, ‘Luces y sombras del Comandante’, Granma, Havana, 8/12/16.

“Only from the rigor of this collective effort can a different kind of world be forged. We too have the power of invention!”

 

Dear Joan,

Once again you have sent me a challenging letter, not only to my intellect but also to my stamina. I’m afraid I can’t match either your brush with fame or Castro’s three-hour harangue. Sadly, it turns out I am more a foot soldier than a comandante. However your invitation to play with authorship, triggered by a skeptical commentary on the recent invention of Vivian Maier as an important artist, does prompt me to reflect on the history of such inventions. For they are in fact a constant motif within the discourse on photography, often prompted by an unholy alliance of museums and dealers and always accompanied by distortions of the historical record. A pantheon of such invented figures would include Karl Blossfeldt, E.J. Bellocq, Eugène Atget, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Seydou Këita, Charles Jones and Mike Disfarmer, to name only a few. Not being Castro, I don’t have the time or space to recount all their stories in detail, but it is instructive to be reminded of a certain pattern common to each. But even more important is to investigate what is at stake in these acts of invention, to ask whose interests are being served by them. In an age when lying is being ameliorated with the euphemism ‘post-truth,’ honesty becomes a political as much as a moral necessity. For those of us in a position to do so, speaking truth to power is surely the least we can do.

So let’s quickly examine the emergence into visibility of some of these figures. The first attribute they have in common is that the quality of the work attributed to each is recognized only in retrospect. Karl Blossfeldt, for example, was a kind of found artist, a vernacular historical readymade adopted with much fanfare by a younger avant-garde (much as was Eugéne Atget by the Surrealists at around the same time in France). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Blossfeldt photographed thousands of specially prepared plant specimens against a white or grey cardboard background. Chosen as demonstrations of an innate structure, and sometimes altered to enhance this impression, these plants were photographed on glass plates and then used in magnified form as slides for the teaching of industrial design.¹

In 1925, the same year that the term Neue Sachlichkeit was coined, a banker and gallerist named Karl Nierendorf encountered examples of Blossfeldt’s photographs and began to distribute them. Appealing to a newly fashionable industrial vision, they appeared in periodicals devoted to architectural and design theory; by 1928 they had been published to great acclaim under the title Urformen der Kunst [Art Forms in Nature] and from that point on were frequently exhibited (in, for example, Film und Foto in 1929). Walter Benjamin was among those who saw Blossfeldt’s work as demonstrating the unique capacities of the photographic medium, being able, through their enlargement, “to reveal a completely unexpected wealth of analogies and forms in the natural world.”² To the delighted bewilderment of Blossfeldt, who died in 1932, he had suddenly become a celebrated contemporary artist.

The case of the French photographer Jacques Henri Lartige is similar in that his work was brought out of relative obscurity to bolster the aspirations of a much younger generation of photographers, curators and dealers. Although he had been selling his photographs to magazines for some time, usually as nostalgic illustrations of a past era, Lartigue’s work was presented in terms of the child-like vision of a “true primitive” by John Szarkowski, when he exhibited a selection of images by Lartigue, shot between 1906 and 1922, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963. Kevin Moore ably recounts the story in his 2004 book Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist.³ While on vacation in the United States in 1962, Lartigue, then 69 years of age, showed some photographs (not all taken by him) to a New York photography agent and they soon came to the attention of Szarkowski at MoMA, who offered to exhibit them. However Szarkoswki also asked for higher-quality prints, eventually made by Pierre Gassmann in Paris, and had some of the images cropped. Still unhappy with the size and period toning of these Gassmann prints, Szarkoswki had another enlarged ‘exhibition’ set made in New York, printed in high-contrast gelatin silver, matted and placed in thin metal frames, making them look more contemporary in style. This, together with Szarkowski’s carefully calibrated hang, brought Lartigue’s work closer in look and spirit to that of Garry Winogrand and other street photographers then being championed by MoMA, giving the contemporary work a vernacular genealogy and implying that photography had certain innate formal qualities that could be found throughout the medium’s history.⁴ As Moore puts it, “[Szarkowski] refashioned a past to validate a present.”⁵

In the case of Lartigue, this refashioning (Moore elsewhere calls it a “transformation”) was both physical and rhetorical. And this is indeed often the case; favouring the moment of exposure over that of printing, and thus the private moment over the public, Szarkowski went on to exhibit photographic images from film exposed but never developed by Winogrand. This kind of interventionist curatorial practice is now disturbingly common. Revelations, the 2003 exhibition of the work of Diane Arbus, included several photographs never printed during Arbus’s own lifetime, as if the artist’s own choices are not to be trusted or adhered to.⁶ A recent exhibition at the national art museum of New Zealand, supposedly devoted to its photography collection, featured numerous enlarged inkjet prints scanned from negatives in that collection, along with gelatin silver photographs printed by the curator from artists’ negatives.⁷ Many would consider this sort of practice to be unethical; it is certainly ahistorical. It displaces attention from the specificity of the production of photographs within certain economies of distribution and instead presents them as mere images, as pictures that float free from any of the particular technologies, political contexts or aesthetic preferences evidenced in the photographer’s own working life. It also raises all sorts of difficult questions about the authorship of photographs and about the relationship between meaning and the photographic object. It brings us back, in other words, to our initial conversation about what a photograph is and what our responsibilities to it are.

These questions could equally be directed at the work of the Malian photographer Seydou Këita. As is well known, this work was “discovered” in Bamako in 1993 after its uncredited appearance in a 1991 exhibition curated by Susan Vogel in New York.⁸ Sought out in his retirement and persuaded to allow some of his negatives from the 1940s and ’50s to be printed at large scale in Europe, Keïta quickly became a fixture of the art world. In 1996, for example, his work was shown as part of the exhibition In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the present, presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.⁹ Viewers were immediately impressed by the stark Avedon-like play of black and white tones to be seen in Keïta’s impressively large photographs, and by the formal posing against patterned backdrops of their dignified African subjects, so reminiscent of a postmodern interest in the performative subject. But of course these sizes and tonal contrasts were imposed on Keïta’s work (with his approval, it must be said) by professional printers in Europe; vintage prints made by Keïta’s own studio are warm in tone, with much less dramatic contrasts, and were issued on sheets of shiny paper at about 10.0 x 13.0 cm in size (he never used an enlarger). That smaller size made these photographs suitable for sending through the post or for display in a domestic interior, but also insists on a close inspection and therefore on a physical intimacy between us and them. One’s relationship to the larger versions is quite different–more distant, less personal, more objective. They have become art objects rather than portraits or keepsakes.¹⁰ The transfer from the vintage to the European-style of print has also involved a transformation of meaning, a kind of colonization of Keïta’s photography that has allowed it to be more easily subsumed to a Western market and the values of its art museum satellites.

The posthumous career enjoyed by Mike Disfarmer follows a similarly complicated arc, as fastidiously outlined by Tanya Sheehan in a 2014 essay.¹¹ A commercial photographer working in Heber Springs, Arkansas, Disfarmer left behind several thousand glass negatives when he died in 1959. New prints were made from some of these negatives and reproduced in local newspapers and in a 1976 book. But in 2004 dealers and collectors from New York began to take an interest in acquiring vintage Disfarmer prints from members of the Heber Springs community, and some subsequently appeared in the art market with prices as high as $30,000. Promoted by their owners with books and exhibitions, photographs by Disfarmer are now in art museum collections. But how are they to be placed in a history of photography? It turns out that the owners of Disfarmer prints are also very concerned about that. Sheehan’s essay appears in the catalogue for an exhibition that sought to demythologize Disfarmer’s photographic portraits by presenting them in “all their extant variety: not only in the form of restored photographs, but also as unrestored photographs (what vintage collectors would consider damaged prints), enlargements made from existing glass negatives, and even images reproduced in newspapers, journals, and books.”¹²

However this plan was unable to be realized, as recounted by the exhibition’s curator Chelsea Spengemann in her Afterword:

At one point, very near completion of the catalogue and exhibition, we had indeed secured loans for significant examples of the varied forms that Disfarmer’s images have taken. All suddenly changed when two collectors with whom I had been working determined that my approach to the photographer’s work—that is, the view that varied types of images should be given equal importance—offered a disparaging take on the artwork…. Possibly wishing to ensure that viewers remained transfixed by the beauty of Disfarmer’s posthumously selected portraits, they met my efforts to refocus the discussion away from aesthetics—as represented by my selection of lesser-known photographs for publication in this catalogue—with anger and resistance…. [The] two collectors who had once given me access to their best-restored, most-beloved examples of Disfarmer’s photographs (along with the least refined examples of his work) revoked their loans to this show as well as permission to reproduce the images in the catalogue.¹³

So, as in all these cases, a manipulation of the market is also accompanied by efforts to redirect or even suppress the facts, a modification of history that begins with a transformation of the photograph itself. Of course, capable of shifting shape and identity in the blink of an eye, photography has always encompassed both material and immaterial manifestations, both physical objects grounded in specific configurations of time and space, and apparitional images floating free of any particular substrate and capable of endless reproduction in a variety of media and formats. As I outlined in my first letter to you, photographers have happily exploited this schizophrenia from photography’s beginnings. Given the nature of capitalism, one can hardly expect collectors and dealers not to do likewise. Their interest is in value rather than signification. One would like to think that museums have a greater concern for the history of the things that they contain, but in my experience this is often not the case. They too have an investment in maintaining myths and monetary values; they too would prefer to deflect their audiences from messy accounts of how things come to be in their care, or even how they come to be the way they are.

Just this past week, an exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Australia opened in a public gallery just south of Sydney.¹⁴ Devoted to the relationship between two pioneering photographers, Olive Cotton and Max Dupain, the exhibition features among its display items a photograph by Dupain that is perhaps the most iconic of all Australian photographic images. The accompanying label gives the title as Sunbaker and the date as 1937, before going on to claim that “the picture exemplifies modernist pictorial reduction and control.” What the label neglects to say is that this photograph was in fact printed in 1975, the year that Dupain was accorded his first retrospective exhibition. The curator of that earlier exhibition, no doubt anxious to establish a genealogy for contemporary Australian art photographers, encouraged Dupain to sift through his catalogue of negatives and to print from those that, in retrospect, looked most modernist. This included some, like the one that begat Sunbaker, that he had never printed from before. Further complicating this story is the inconvenient fact that Dupain had in 1948 published another, more documentary version of this image, printed from a different negative taken on the same day, in a monograph devoted to his best work. The front of this print is signed and dated 1940. All this has been discussed in prominent essays about Dupain’s career, including some of my own; none of it is alluded to in this label issued by what is meant to be the national arbiter of museum standards, the keeper of Australia’s national history, the guardian of truth.¹⁵

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the next President of the United States. He will do so after claiming what he has called a “landslide” victory in that country’s elections, a victory that in fact ranked 46^th out of 58 previous elections, a victory in which his primary opponent attracted at least two million more votes than he did.¹⁶ Truth, it seems, no longer has much purchase on the popular imagination. Hooray! Once again, the photography world got there first! So Joan, my final words to you can only be words of advice from a fellow sufferer. To avoid a sore head, stay away from those little blue pills, excessively large marine worms, and exposure to social media (indeed, perhaps to any media). Best to concentrate on your work and, as you suggest, on the fostering of an expanding community of like-minded workers. Only from the rigor of this collective effort can a different kind of world be forged. We too have the power of invention! Now we just have to learn how to exercise that power wisely and to best effect. Hasta la vista!

 

---

 

1. See Rolf Sachsse, Karl Blossfeldt: Photographs 1865-1932 (Taschen, 1996). What follows is taken from my ‘Ordering Things,’ in Brian Wallis ed., The Order of Things: Photography from the Walther Collection (Steidl, 2015), 332-339.
2. Walter Benjamin’s first essay about photography comprised a short review of Blossfeldt’s book. In it he argues that “the person who created this collection of plant photos…has done more than his share of that great stock-taking of the inventory of human perception that will alter our image of the world.” See his ‘News about Flowers’ (November 1928), as translated in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 271, 272.
3. Kevin Moore, Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
4. Indeed, an exhibition featuring Winogrand’s work overlapped with Lartigue’s by a month. See ibid 179.
5. ibid, 177.
6. See Elisabeth Sussman, Doon Arbus et. al., Diane Arbus: Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003).
7. See my ‘Reproducing History: New Zealand Photography Collected,’ Art Monthly Australia, No. 295 (Summer 2016/17), 70-73.
8. The story is recounted in Elizabeth Bigham, ‘Issues of Authorship in the Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta,’ African Arts (Spring 1999), 56-67, 94-95. A detail of a photograph by Keïta appears on the cover of Vogel’s catalogue: Africa Explores: 20^th Century African Art (New York: The Center for African Art, 1991). It is interesting to note that this catalogue also included reproductions of similarly uncredited photographs from Senegal, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire. However their photographers have remained anonymous.
9. Clare Bell, Okwui Enwezor, Danielle Tilkin and Octavio Zaya eds., In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the present (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996).
10. There are, of course, other ways to talk about Keïta’s photographs. Candace Keller, for example, has discussed the way Keïta’s portraits embody the local Malian concepts of fadenya and badenya. See Candace M. Keller, ‘Visual Griots: Identity, Aesthetics, and the Social Roles of Portrait Photographers in Mali,’ in John Peffer and Elisabeth L. Cameron eds., Portraiture and Photography in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 364-367.
11. Tanya Sheehan, ‘Ordinary Masters: Mike Disfarmer and the Reclamation of Vernacular Photography,’ in Chelsea Spengemann ed., Becoming Disfarmer (Purchase: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2014), 194-205.
12. Chelsea Spengemann, ‘Afterword,’ Becoming Disfarmer, 163.
13. ibid, 163-164.
14. Max and Olive: The Photographic Life of Max Dupain and Olive Cotton (A National Gallery of Australia Exhibition), Hazlehurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, Gymea, 17 Dec 2016 – 5 Feb 2017. Just for the record, although I currently live in New Zealand, I carry an Australian passport.
15. See, for example, my ‘Taking and Making,’ Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 82-106, 205-211.
16. Jugal Patel and Wilson Andrews, ‘Trump’s Electoral College Victory Ranks 46^th in 58 Elections, ‘ New York Times (December 18, 2016).