Thoughts on Picture Industry
Thoughts on Picture industry
A Provisional History of the Technical Image 1844-2018
This is a remarkable anthology on the study of the technical image—a term offered by Flusser—to expand photography’s limited definition out towards the manifold modes of image making, their material conditions and the ecosystems by which images circulate, perform functions and establish relations. Walead Beshty, the editor of this 860 page tome, moves across these histories, thickening our understanding of these relationships.
The scope of this collection offers a broad horizon. In 1843, Isabella Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth and began selling cartes de visite with her image and the caption ‘I sell the shadow to support the substance.’ These early days of photo-making mostly consolidated the class and racial relations of their time. By the turn of the nineteenth century the precedents of Bertillon’s juridical systems of discipline and Leland Stanford’s ideologically and industrially driven visualized science suggested the superstructural modes that would largely determine subsequent image production. Around the same time Jacob Riis brought his camera into the tenements on the Lower East Side to show just how devastating the conditions were. Several decades later Florence Thompson resents Dorothea Lange for turning her into an icon of human suffering.
Zeno asks the oracle Delphi, in Kittler’s essay, how we should live our best lives? The oracle answers we should mate with the dead—that is, read the ancients and engage with history. We continue towards the poverty of Gutenbergiana and the loss of memory that accompanied the onset of the visual. ‘It was the passion of all reading to hallucinate meaning between lines and letters...and...the realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture.’
Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography could have been a founding document with its declaration of the implicit agreements accepted by the participants who constitute a universal photographic citizenry. An incongruous claim that unexpectedly opens up a space for alternative political imaginaries not predicated on identity and territory. The photograph, she tells us, fixes nothing and belongs to no one.
Aristotle has it that Hippodamus of Miletus was the urban planner to bring the grid into being with the more-than-spatial implications about how things would be organized. Although one could trace this tendency further back to the Etruscans. The grid predetermines the ontological possibility space for interchangeable objects and subjects. The colonization of the Americas happened on the grid. Bernhard Siegert’s (Not) in Place: The Grid, or, Cultural Techniques of Ruling Spaces, describes the third orthogonal axis, in the age of Google Earth, where a near total grid has been realized to define and surveil. It segues vertiginously into Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.
Certain lines of inquiry into the image world go further and further through the looking glass. Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography takes this kind of theoretical essay to its limits, claiming an entire photographic cosmology—or universe—we’re trapped in, that is beyond human control and the only revolution available to us is through a rehumanized and philosophically enlightened image making. An insular logic of image culture finds itself trapped in an insular logic of media theory.
Sarah Charlesworth’s Declaration of Dependence calls out the insularity of art and the need to bring its practice back into life. Pause to consider non perspectival methods of representing spatial dimensions. Challenge the empirical gaze and the sight-based epistemologies informing Western culture. Critical Art Ensemble’s Video and resistance: Against Documentaries. Enjoy Poverty with Renzo Martens.
Depth is computed as an absence, a non visible differential between two positions. The illusionistic space of perspective. Data gleaned from penetrating waves. The flood of images sweeps away the dams of memory, says Siegfried Krakauer, and perhaps the photographic archive assembled in effigy the last elements of a nature alienated from meaning.
The compounding volumes of anisotropic data collected through instrumental logics assembles in dangerous effigy the vestiges of ethics and ecology alienated from meaning.
Within this volume is a recursion to the representation of Emmett Till that complicates, implicating more and more into it’s pictorial ontology. A reader of Barthes unaware of Moten’s Black Mo’nin’ suffers the biases of history that this compendium begins to redress.
Social relations and scopic regimes. I think in some ways this volume is organized around the imperative for an ethical position in the citizenry of visual culture. The book stutters along toward the advanced uncertainty of the present. Tristan Garcia’s In Defense of Representation takes a post memetic or semiotic position towards representation as the absence inscribed in material made present, casting the artist as a transmuter of absence and presence.
At this period of visual historicizing we’ve got quite a bit of baggage to account for as we endeavor to parry or carry the unrelenting media onslaught. Perhaps it’s precisely this baggage we should be responsible for as we negotiate an ethical bearing in an age of anomie and participatory media. For every poor image quickly dashed off to space and back, exists an infrastructure John Durham Peters notes is largely determined without our consent and subjects us to the unknown effects of, say, living in irradiated baths of wireless fields or the psychological effects of prolonged surveillance-marketing. At this juncture a working understanding and literacy at the structural level is requisite to better participate in the discourse and practices that will shape our coevolution.
And so, we gradually turn towards immersive, phantasmagoric, augmented world building. Images appear to abandon their material supports. The emplaced image suggests a paradoxical presence, perhaps echoing the condition of memory. For Elcott it’s instructive to view the phantasmagoric dispositif or inclination on a longer technological continuum. From Bernini, to eighteenth century lantern shows, through biennial installations, holographic Tupac, and VR world building, there is an underlying drive contoured by manifold technologies. The common GIF inherits the wonder of the phenakistoscope, a miraculous resurrection.
This breadth of critical materialism that rightfully—provisionally—indicts the social and economic relations that govern the technical image, somehow sharpens my appreciation for the particular, when that rare and subjective experience is occasioned. It's within the excesses of the regimes of instrumentalized technical images that I locate my interests and personal pursuits. The search for and sharing of that meaningful, moving, unbounded and unnamed remainder.