The next morning over breakfast my friends and I bought all the daily newspapers to read the coverage. My girlfriend at the time suddenly asked: “Did any of you see Prince Charles yesterday?!” None of us had. She held up one of the newspapers carrying a large photo of the scene on the steps. Yes, there was Prince Charles, the sheepishly grinning dauphin, just behind and to the right of Nelson Mandela. Why had we not seen him? A friend suggested it was because none of us wanted to see him and somehow we had all erased him from our experience and memories. Symbolically, British monarchy and Mandela were contradictions that just didn’t add up for us and would have ruined the day. So, we had taken from the event what we had really wanted to take from it. I don’t have that newspaper but you can see a very similar image here: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/prince-charles-and-nelson-mandela-in-brixton-news-photo/52098946

Clearly we don’t see or look the way cameras do. What we see is informed by experience, desire, ideology and expectation. Moreover what we see is governed by processes that are substantially unconscious. In fact my girlfriend suggested that our total blanking of Prince Charles was one of the few occasions on which we could be genuinely proud of our unconscious! The photo of course, could not blank Prince Charles but I’ve no doubt that, similarly, some people looking at it in the newspaper would have not noticed his presence if they had not wanted to.

That’s an extreme example of ‘motivated’ seeing but to a greater or lesser extent we are all doing this all the time. We can’t avoid doing it. If photographs offer more than we want from them, and they offer it in ways that strike us as mechanical and less prone to subjectivity than we are, then the whole dynamic of looking at photographs becomes somewhat fraught. Speedy consumption is a way of avoiding the anxious stand-off between how we look at the world and how the camera looks at the world.

Currently Jacques Rancière is read widely by the critically engaged parts of the photography and art worlds. His writings have proved to be highly stimulating, provocative, even ‘useful’ for their consideration of the relation of aesthetics to politics and agency. Most of the time Rancière remains quite unspecific, leaving us readers to move as we see fit from his general argument or point to a particular example that may come to mind. When Rancière does talk about particular images I often wonder if he’s really looking at the same things I am looking at, or in the same way. In a now notorious instance to be found in his recent book The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière discusses one of Martha Rosler’s Vietnam-era photomontages from her series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home (1967-72). You can see a reproduction of it here: (http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A6832&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1)

Rancière notes that “in the middle of a clear and spacious apartment, a Vietnamese man holding a dead child in his arms. The dead child was the intolerable reality concealed by comfortable American existence…”

Well, I see a woman carrying a living child, and Rosler was making the montages from reportage and advertising images found in the same magazines. Recently an artist friend of mine saw Rancière give a talk on a video by Woody Vasulka. One of the clips in Vasulka’s montage was of an Atom-bomb explosion. Cacti and Joshua trees were prominently silhouetted in the foreground but Rancière kept referring to the “image of Hiroshima”.

I certainly don’t want to single out Rancière as a unique offender and obviously his contributions far outweigh his slips. But our photographic discourse is full of such slips, and I’ve no doubt made many myself. Nevertheless we ought to face the awkward question of whether the contributions and the slips are related, even inseparable at a deeper level not just of competence in writing, but looking and thinking about a medium so vast in its generality, so open in its optics, and yet so specific in its details. When you ‘look for’ something in photography, the more determined you are to see it, the greater your chance of seeing it. Even if it’s not there. And if you don’t want to see something, you often won’t. Then there’s the lazy or hasty reading. Since most of the photographic images we see around us expect to be consumed rapidly we are often tempted to look and draw conclusions at speed. Slow looking becomes an anxious or perverse demand.  I have always been struck by this passage from Victor Burgin’s 1980 essay ‘Photography, Phantasy, Function’:

To look at a photograph beyond a certain period of time is to become frustrated: the image which on first looking gave pleasure by degrees becomes a veil behind which we now desire to see. To remain too long with a single photograph is to lose the imaginary command of the look, to relinquish it to that absent other to whom it belongs by right: the camera. The image now no longer receives our look, reassuring us of our founding centrality, it rather, as it were, avoids our gaze.  In photography one image does not succeed another in the manner of cinema. As alienation intrudes into our captation by the still image, we can only regain the imaginary, and reinvest our looking with authority, by averting our gaze, redirecting it to another image elsewhere. It is therefore not an arbitrary fact that photographs are deployed so that, almost invariably, another photograph is always already in position to receive the displaced look.

The psychoanalytic terms (the gaze, the imaginary, captation) were relatively new to the discussion of looking at photographs but Burgin describes the familiar experience of a visual culture dominated by the photographic image as distractive spectacle. Photographs are exhausted and discarded well before we have the chance to come into a reflective relationship with them. That is the condition and purpose of the vast majority of photographs presented to us: their meanings are meant to be obvious and formulaic and if there is sustained interest in any particular one it is unpredictable.

But is this distractive gaze simply a matter of cultural habit? That for generations the ubiquitous visual culture to which photography gave rise has been a continuous stream of largely dispensable images? Do we not look at photographs for very long because we do not expect to, because we are not encouraged to? Did the popular press, advertising, cinema, television, the internet or even art’s compulsively serial use of photographs negate the long look? Or were deficiencies there from the start, built into the photograph’s very structure? Is it the coldness of its optics, perhaps? Does its surface fail to hold the gaze? Do its perceived limitations of time and place frustrate extended reflection? For Burgin at least, the position was clear enough: there is something about photographic images that precludes the long look, “therefore” (his word) they are deployed in number and the look is displaced.

There will always be a mismatch between the unconscious and the industrial mechanism of camera vision.

Don McCullin, ‘This is how it is’, Sunday Times Magazine, March 28, 1968

Don McCullin, ‘This is how it is’, Sunday Times Magazine, March 28, 1968

Don McCullin, ‘This is how it is’, Sunday Times Magazine, March 28, 1968

It’s a stark if fairly conventional photo essay, although it’s always revelatory to see photojournalism in its original context rather than in coffee table books, hagiographic exhibitions and bad histories. It’s also interesting to see that McCullin wrote the accompanying text and that several of the images were shot and reproduced in colour.

However, a few pages further on in the same issue of the magazine there is a second, very different photo essay. Eve Arnold travelled to North Carolina to document a fake North Vietnamese village, constructed by the American military for training purposes.  New recruits were sent here before being shipped out to the war zone.  Arnold’s opening spread shows two young men who have been asked to attempt to camouflage themselves. In the fake hospital one smears his face with white cream and ties a pillowcase around his head. In the bushes outside another puts leaves in his hair and rubs grass into his cheeks. Two innocents, encouraged to enter a fantasy of Vietnam before they enter the real thing.

Eve Arnold, ‘Vietnam, North Carolina’, Sunday Times Magazine, March 28, 1968

Eve Arnold, ‘Vietnam, North Carolina’, Sunday Times Magazine, March 28, 1968

Eve Arnold, ‘Vietnam, North Carolina’, Sunday Times Magazine, March 28, 1968

The contents page of the magazine pairs the photo essays by McCullin and Arnold under the heading “America in Vietnam, Vietnam in America”. Two photographers, two visual strategies, two incongruent but equally valid ways to represent the Vietnam war early in 1968. How smart of the editor. And how respectful of the intelligence of the readership!

Contents page, Sunday Times Magazine, March 28, 1968

McCullin’s pictures have been recycled endlessly while Arnold’s are forgotten, never reproduced subsequently. Why is this? McCullin’s pictures fit the narrow – and largely retrospective – idea of what photojournalism should have looked like and how it functioned.

In some respects we can see Arnold’s approach as a precedent for the more recent ‘conceptual turn’ in documentary photography (a horrible term I know). Think of Broomberg & Chanarin’s Chicago, their series of photographs of the fake Palestinian settlement built by the Israeli military for training; or An-My Lê’s documentation of US preparations in Californian deserts for war in the Gulf; or Sarah Pickering’s images of police and fire department training facilities.  But let’s not forget Arnold was doing this in a mainstream magazine, not the sandpit of art with its greater freedoms but far more limited audience.

In fact Arnold’s piece is not that exceptional. If we go back and look for ourselves at the illustrated press of the past we find it is far more diverse, experimental and speculative than the written histories seem to suggest. The whole of Life magazine is now online page by page, and it’s possible to see, for example, its complex and often brave coverage of the civil rights movement, and its experiments with staged photography. (Here you can see Gordon Parks illustrating moments from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man in 1952, half a century before Jeff Wall had a go: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g1YEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA9&dq=%22invisible+man%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WLt_Ub-CE8mAONzPgJAP&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22invisible%20man%22&f=false)

We should go back and see just how much intelligent work was done, and how contemporary it often feels. This way we might perhaps get the history of photography we really deserve. But why do we need one, you may ask, when the illustrated press has been eclipsed by the cultural and economic conditions that characterize the internet? Well, we would be able to see that many of the problems we face have arisen before.  Questions to do with the politics of representation, with image/text relations, questions of context and use, pictorial challenges and so forth. This in itself can be salutary and helpful. The discourse of photography has a habit of seeing its own present problems as unique, and its own moment as the most intellectually nuanced and radical. This failing leads it to underestimate continually the sophistication of its past, and to see itself as entirely separate from it. I am reminded of a suggestive and elegant reply Umberto Eco once made to the question about the merits of study:

We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.

Umberto Eco, “It’s not what you know …” The Guardian, April 3, 2004

There’s a whole history of editing yet to be addressed, particularly as it becomes so central to photographic culture with the growth of the illustrated press in the 1920s and 30s. Suddenly there was a whole array of professional image handlers: the magazine picture editors and art directors, the new art historians taking advantage of photographic reproductions (e.g. Aby Warburg and Franz Roh), as well as the managers of the fast growing picture libraries, archives and news agencies.

That said, there have been some notable contributions lately. Jorge Ribalta’s work on what he has called the universal archive expressed by the choreography of huge numbers of images in exhibitions such as Pressa (1928) and Film und Photo (1929), Victor Burgin’s The Remembered Film (2004), Blake Stimson’s The Pivot of The World: Photography and its Nation (2006) and Hito Steyerl’s very recent collection The Wretched of the Screen (2013) come to mind. Nevertheless, even the belated recognition that the photographic page – magazines, journals, books and now screens – have been photography’s primary vehicle does not seem to have prompted much of a reflection on just what is at stake in our movement from one photographic image to the next and the next, at least not without resorting to the generalized criticisms of quantity, overload and spectacle.

When Blake Stimson writes that “The photographic essay was born of the promise of another kind of truth from that given by the individual photograph or image on its own, a truth available only in the interstices between pictures, in the movement from one picture to the next”, he points to perhaps the most vital key to our experience of photographs in particular and photography in general. If he then struggles to conceptualize exactly what is going on between one image and the next, it’s only partly because there’s almost no critical tradition to draw upon. The dearth of writings on photo editing is a symptom of how difficult it is to articulate. But I would maintain that it’s essential to try. Without it we’re left with photographs as dissolute fragments and photography as a totalized mass, precisely what any and every photo-sequence attempts to overcome.

Last year I responded to one of Bernd Stiegler’s suggestive posts on the subject of ‘Order’ with an edited sequence of quotations about photo editing: http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/01/3-order/#respond. It was a kind of meta-commentary on the problem. I had been keeping a file of these remarks as I came across them while putting together a book about the long-standing dialogues between the moving and the still image (Photography and Cinema, 2008). Although it was to be a ‘history and theory’ book, I had wanted images to do a lot of the work on the page. So before I began writing I spent several months selecting and sequencing the 127 illustrations my publisher allowed me. Film stills, posters, constructed tableau photographs, sequences, spreads from various books and magazines, and so forth.  The idea was to see if I could apply the qualities of photo-sequencing I was describing to the form of the book itself. Such experiments with editing have been my main challenge and source of pleasure in all the books I’ve published. I do the same with essays for journals and magazines, working out the images first (this blog is an exception, an attempt to bend the stick the other way). It’s partly a fear of the blank page but largely it comes from being an image-maker, writer and occasional curator. Editing is the shared term we use to describe the fashioning and arrangement of words and pictures.

Interestingly, while Photography and Cinema was well received only one reviewer picked up on this, wondering, correctly, if the picture editing had preceded the writing and if it was arranged to express and nuance the book’s central points. I’ve kind of got used to nobody really noticing, and presume that most picture editing has its ineffable effects upon experience anyway, be it in books and magazines or our own ad hoc shifts from one image to another as we move through a city or around the internet. Maybe we only notice when it’s done badly or it somehow jars. And perhaps it is this difficulty with paying attention to editing that is the reason for the lack of critical reflection. But what is photography without editing? As Walker Evans put it:

The essence is done very quickly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take you have to do the editing.

I begin with some thoughts about how Still Searching has developed since it launched last year, and what this might say about the ‘Online Discourse on Photography’, as it is subtitled. Back in January 2012 I was invited to be a co-blogger for the first two contributors, Bernd Stiegler and Aveek Sen. Since then I have watched with interest. The discussions have ranged far and wide but I note a polarization between thinking about ‘photography’, which most contributors seem to feel is too complex and contradictory to be a unified field (without quite giving up on the term all together) and considerations of ‘photographs’ (this or that image or specific project). The general and the particular. This is not unusual. The split has haunted photography at least since it became a fully mass medium and modern artistic medium in the 1920s. However, despite Sophie Berrebi’s recent posts there has been much more discussion of photography than of photographs. (And unsurprisingly, the writer mentioned very frequently across the blog is Vilém Flusser, more on whom in a while.)

As a student I once worked in an arts bookshop where, one Sunday afternoon, the writer Susan Sontag was due to give a talk.  She got the time wrong and arrived four hours early. So she pulled up a chair we began a conversation. I admired her writing, especially her early essays, and told her so. When I said I was studying film and photography she asked if I’d read her book On Photography. I think she could tell from my face I wasn’t a fan of that one.

I didn’t mind to the book’s suspicious, denunciatory tone. In fact I thought it summarized pretty well the inevitable distrust that was typical of advanced thinking about the medium by the mid-1970s. At the onset of ‘media studies’ and the rapid expansion of consumer culture, photography was bound to be characterized as unavoidably cruel, voyeuristic and distracting on a grand scale. On Photography remains a bestseller and undergraduate entry point, partly because of its powerful prose, partly because our first critical engagement with ‘photography’ (as opposed to ‘photographs’) usually involves becoming aware of the manipulative banalities of the mass media and the family album. The book delivers sobering news in magisterial, if stentorian sentences. When done well there’s a place for that, and On Photography has occupied it for longer than anything else.

Of course I didn’t say this to Sontag.  What I did say was that I didn’t like the lack of illustrations in the book. She said it was like that for economic reasons: the cost of clearing rights and printing images made it impossible to include images. I replied that it was easier to write a book on photography if it didn’t have photographs in it. Otherwise it might have to be called On Photographs and that may demand a different kind of writing.

When photographs are discussed in their absence, under the name ‘photography’ let’s say, the writer is more likely to take liberties with them than if they were there on the page/screen. The writer is also more likely to generalize.  Sontag conceded this was a valid criticism and that at the time she found it difficult to write about photographs. Her honesty surprised me. In her book she did at least call for taking particular images seriously, what she called an ‘erotics of the photograph’, but it was something she knew she could not supply. That would come with the other bestseller of the era, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

That was a long time ago but I am reminded of that conversation regularly. So much of the writing and thinking we encounter today is split between an engagement with photographs and photography (or ‘the photographic’). More broadly there is a split between writing about images in particular and ‘the image’ in general. I presume there can be no photography without photographs, and no photographs without photography. When we pick up a camera or look at a specific image we always invoke, however provisionally, some wider sense of photography (in fact we are doing this the instant we recognize an image or object as being in some way or other photographic). And when we think about photography in general we are informed by the sum of our particular encounters. Maybe that’s all photography in general really is. Not an abstract a priori, but an accumulation, partly shared, partly subjective.

In a lecture in 2002 Sontag remarked: “I have passions and interests I’ve never been able to get into my work.” That’s quite humbling. We cannot assume we will be capable of writing about all things that interest us, any more than assume we will be capable of photographing all the things or in all the ways that interest us. We are conditioned not just by our interests but by our competence (I can’t write about novels, films or pieces of music, all of which matter to me more than photographs, and far more than ‘photography’). Perhaps those who write about particular photographs have passions and interests in photography more generally but are not so able to express them. And might it be that those who are able to write about photography in general have passions and interests in particular images they cannot express?

Nevertheless it is clear that certain writing, certain arguments, certain lines of thought, certain theories about photography, and even certain photographic practices require the absence of photographs in the particular. Sontag’s On Photography is an example, as is Vilém Flusser’s now widely read treatise Towards a Philosophy of Photography.

Promisingly, Flusser’s book does have a chapter with the eminently singular title ‘The Photograph’, but then he begins: “Photographs are ubiquitous, in albums, magazines, books, shop windows, on billboards, carrier-bags, cans” and he carries on in this overarching manner, never touching the ground. The writings of Sontag and Flusser are full of jaw-dropping generalizations but readers are encouraged to accept them in good faith because they aim to address photography as a generalized, jaw-dropping cultural condition. It’s the sheer amount of photography in the world that concerns them. Sontag wrote of  ‘The Image-World’, Flusser of ‘The Photographic Universe’.  It’s worth recalling how Sontag opens her book:

In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

I recall that Bice, the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s suggestive short story ‘Adventure of a Photographer’ (1958), comes to much the same conclusion:

Perhaps true, total photography, he thought, is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.  

But the question remains as to what happens when photography is generalized into ‘total photography’. For a start it always comes out badly. No account of photography in general is positive (just as analyses of ‘the art world’ are always chilling). But what is lost in this way of thinking?

Reading the first English translation of Flusser’s book it seemed to me obvious he was above all a critical stylist and provocateur, a hilarious and gifted rhetorician enjoying wild hyperbole to make his central point: photographic technology is ideologically preprogrammed to produce a consensus complicit with the dominant capitalist/technocratic order that produced it, and there is nothing any individual can do with a camera to sidestep or surmount this. Photography is photography in general and there are no exceptions to the rule. It sounds manic when I put it like this, but there you are. It’s also tautological: all mediums have their preprogrammed conditions and limitations. That’s what a medium is (do correct me if I’m wrong). The point then is just how preprogrammed and what space there is within the given conditions. I, like you, was born into language I didn’t create. Sometimes I bump up against its limiting fixity and feel constrained by it; sometimes I am able to shape it. Perhaps photography is much the same.

The fans of Flusser’s take on photography are multiplying like rabbits but they seem to have missed the humour and the high style of his darkly comic parable (maybe it’s because they’ve read nothing else by him). I imagine these same fans also read Orwell’s novel 1984 completely straight, somehow preferring the cold comfort of the totality he imagines to the greater challenge of heeding his warning and acting upon it in our world. If we are in a position to describe totalities, then they really aren’t quite that total. Yet.  “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”, declared Raymond Williams.

Like Sontag’s book, Flusser’s book includes no images. In the afterword to a recent reissue, Hubertus von Amelunxen notes: “one should not be surprised that there are no descriptions of photographic images nor are there any photographs included by way of illustration. Flusser is not concerned here with the history of photography, but rather with presenting a way of thinking about history post-photography.” For Flusser the flood of photographic images replaces language, logic, argument, even conscious progress. He’s not really alert to the thorough intertwining of image and language, which is the nature of most of our photographic culture and should really be our chief object of study. I see no evidence of the replacement of language by photography, only new modes of interrelation. I am puzzled as to why photography today is so rarely thought/taught as a matter of image and text (although for a brief time it was).

Looking back we can see that writings about the ‘flood’ of photographs in society tend to be more prevalent when the flood surges. The advent of halftone printing in the 1880s; the huge growth of the illustrated press in the 1920s and 30s; the 1960s boom in television ownership; the early 1980s boom in commercial/advertising imagery; the 1990s arrival of the internet. All these moments prompted commentaries expressing and exaggerating the tendency towards image proliferation that we have all felt and either succumbed to, worried about or attempted to resist. One can sense a baton being passed from Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin across the Second World War to (political differences aside) André Malraux, Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard and Vilém Flusser. So before we parrot the old cliché, it is worth remembering that we’ve had nearly a century of ‘too many photographs’.  Moreover let’s not forget that it is in the nature of any image to be ‘too much’, to be somewhat wild and excessive. Photographs do not carry meanings the way trucks carry coal. Individual images have the potential to flood us too. As the photographer Lee Friedlander puts it:

I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.

Perhaps it’s this potential of any photograph stir up pleasures and terrors that is so often displaced onto the abstract idea of ‘photography in general’.

In The Writing of History (1975), Michel de Certeau criticized the perception of documents and archives as dormant sources waiting to be collected and interpreted by historians. Writing in the context of the critique of the document undertaken by historians grouped, in France, under the label nouvelle histoire, Certeau stressed the institutional aspect of historical discourse and its need to comply with academic rules. He argued, in short, that documents are never accidentally found but are always willingly constructed as such by historians through their practice.

While artists are not historians, Certeau’s reasoning describes well the position taken by certain artists who work with photography and express a keen interest in the idea of the document, understood not as unmediated evidence but as a product of specific conventions of knowledge production. Artists such as Zoe Leonard, Christopher Williams, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yael Bartana, and Akram Zaatari, whose work I have been researching for the past few years, develop different strategies such as restaging, appropriating, or deconstructing photographic documents, borrowing from and reworking different traditions of applied photography, in order to construe the document as a critical form.

To translate Certeau’s reflection on the production of historical discourse into the terrain of contemporary art entails favoring works that foreground the construction and presentation of sources over works resulting from the accidental encounter with them. It provides, as such, an antidote to the romance of found photography and the poetic value of chance encounter that has sustained practices ranging from surrealism to Tacita Dean’s 2001 Floh. This would seem all the more pertinent today in the context of the ever-greater availability of random images and digitalized archives that artists have at their disposal to produce artworks in what we may call the institution of contemporary art.

If Certeau’s words seem relevant in today’s art context it is not because, as time goes by, there are fewer photographs to be found at flea markets, but because the overabundance of visual sources that circulate digitally requires a more critical effort of selection and reworking of those available sources. Wouldn’t the digitalization of museum and library collections, of institutional as well as private archives render impossible a project such as Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s 1977 Evidence, which relied for a large part on the secrecy and anonymity of the sources it had somehow managed to obtain? (An alternative for artists might be to keep decidedly away from the digital archive as Alexandra Leykauf successfully does, focusing on the materiality of pictures reproduced in books and then translated into collages and paper sculptures.)

If the digital omnipresence of photographic sources requires a shift in conceptual strategies for artists working with archives, Certeau’s words are also an invitation to viewers to adopt a more analytic posture in front of artworks of a documentary or archival nature and to move beyond the fascination for the treasure of a little known source to questioning the protocols, thanks to which a document has been re-produced as a work of art. And if Certeau’s words seem to be even more relevant in a digital context than that of material archives and analogue prints, works such as Zoe Leonard’s Analogue (1997-2008) and Jean-Luc Moulène’s Objets de Grève (1999, 2001), make that connection clear even while they do not foreground digital technologies.

Leonard’s Analogue does so through her exhibition displays of the some 400 photographs that chronicle the disappearance of small neighborhood shops in Manhattan and follow the circulation of charity clothing in different places around the globe. In the different exhibitions of this project the artist displayed the images in grids of different sizes organized thematically that blurred the dominant subject matter of the project and created new thematic narratives and micro-histories. These visual arrangements made the series resemble more a database dependent upon its public visibility than an archive conceived as a closed body of information for select users. Moulène’s series of Objets de Grève presentés par Jean-Luc Moulène underscores the construction of documents through simultaneously addressing different contexts of reception. The work consists of a series of objects produced mainly during the 1970s and 1980s during the crisis of the manufacturing industries in France. The objects, made by workers during strikes in order to publicize or financially support social conflicts, have over the years been collected and photographed by the artist. He donated them to the Archives Nationales du Monde du Travail in Roubaix where they can be consulted as the “Fonds Jean-Luc Moulène” (reference 2003 025). The photographs representing them were acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou and also shown at the annual congress of the CGT union (French labor union federation) in March 2003. While Moulène’s collecting enabled the objects to become socially, politically, and historically visible in a context that had previously ignored them, what is even more interesting is the way in which both the objects and the photographs could simultaneously find different contexts of presentation and preservation.

What I find striking about these two projects is that they both address the way documents can be produced and convey meaning, and how that meaning might change swiftly upon a different place of presentation or the calling up of an alternative search term. At the same time, their subject matter testifies to the unraveling of the manufacturing-based economy, and to the advent of a dematerialized, finance-driven world economy that cannot but serve as an analogue for the shift from paper archives – still the dominant form at the time of Certeau’s writing – to digital ones. Through subject matter as much as material form, these works integrate the logic of the digital while being produced in analogue photography. And so if the digital, as Joanna Fiduccia proposed in her comments on my third post, has absorbed the analogue, reciprocally, these artists show they have absorbed the digital into their analogue productions.

Two of the documents in Manet’s painting have been identified as a Japanese woodblock print of a wrestler by Kuniaki II and a lithograph after Velasquez’s 1628-29 painting The Drinkers (Los Borrachos). The third picture is subject to more debate as to its medium, but, considering its smooth texture and overall deep tones and light grey highlights, I side with Theodore Reff who proposed that it shows a photographic reproduction of Olympia.^[i] Together, these three pictures represent what Walter Benjamin identified in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as the three most important steps in the development of the technical reproducibility of art. The woodcut, he explained, was the earliest form of reproduction of graphic art while lithography introduced a swiftness of execution and production that made it possible to include images alongside text in newspaper publication. “Within a few decades of its invention,” however, Benjamin writes, lithography “was surpassed by photography.”^[ii]

Reading Manet’s painting through Benjamin, we might say that those three pictures in the frame above Zola’s desk write a short history of the mechanical reproduction of the work of art. Such an interpretation is an invitation to imagine Manet’s relationship with these mechanical forms of reproduction as they inserted themselves into the practice of painting.

In this context, we might see his transformation of Olympia into a black and white portable document in the Portrait of Emile Zola as only one episode in the rubbing against photography, or more generally reproducible images that occur elsewhere in his work. Such a friction appeared more boisterously a few years earlier, in 1864, in his Combat of the Kearsarge and the Alabama. This painting responded to a recent news item: the confrontation between Union and Confederate warships off the French coastal town of Cherbourg. The engagement ended with the sinking of the CSS Alabama by the USS Kearsarge on June 30, 1864. The story made the headlines in European newspapers and drew crowds of visitors to Cherbourg. Having just missed the event, Manet painted his version of the scene, relying on the lithographs that were promptly produced and widely circulated in the press, and his Combat of the Kearsarge and the Alabama was on show in the window of a Parisian gallery a mere two weeks after the battle. Recent scholarship has suggested that Manet responded as much to the challenge of depicting history in the making as to the more personal one that was posed by one of his contemporaries, a lithographer and painter who within days of the event had produced and circulated his own, largely academic lithographic rendering of the subject. ^[iii] If that is indeed the case, the speed at which Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama was conceived and executed suggests that Manet was taking on the kind of subject matter that was becoming the stock and trade of lithography and would in due time become that of photography. At the same time, it suggests he was also challenging the documentary exactness and rapidity of diffusion of lithography by proposing an updated version of history painting, a news painting that added an epic breadth to a traditional academic genre and thereby showed the resourcefulness of painting in the face of reproducible images.

It may be this bold gesture that Manet sought to repeat in 1867-1868, when began painting the first of several works representing the execution of Maximilian, the short-lived emperor of Mexico who had been put in place four years earlier in a controversial colonization enterprise launched by Napoleon II. As news of the execution reached France in early July 1967, Manet set out on what became a long-winded enterprise that included three paintings, one oil sketch, and a lithograph. It occupied him over the following two years. The photographs that he relied on for these works depicted not the moment of Maximilian’s death, but its immediate aftermath: the firing squad, the location of the execution, and gruesomely, the demised emperor’s clothing. His frock coat and waistcoat were photographed, eerily, as if floating in mid-air, and his white starched shirt was shown pinned to a door, creased and stained by bullet holes. Several of these photographs were by Francois Aubert, who had accompanied Maximilian to Mexico as court photographer. They were described at length in press articles in France and, distilled through heavy censorship, circulated in the popular carte de visite format. Art historian Juliet Wilson-Bareau has argued that the gradual influx of documents and information concerning the event could explain Manet’s development of the subject matter across a series of works over several years, as if he were attempting to keep up with the pace of the news.^[iv] Rejecting this interpretation, John Elderfield proposed that the last versionmay be read as an allegory of “photography shooting painting,” by drawing attention to the sense of suspension and isolation of different parts of the painting, the insistent pose of its protagonists, and to the painted smoke evoking the complex flash system of early photography.^[v] Comparing the painting to the photographic documents that have survived, a sense of competition certainly emerges, but not necessarily in the direction indicated by Elderfield. Aubert’s photographs and especially those that single out the dead emperor’s clothes have the unequivocal quality of legal exhibits. Yet their indisputable power is also the mark of their limitations as documents: they present factual evidence but none of the drama. In constructing a representation of the event, Manet’s paintingsretained something of the photographic documents he used. And yet absorbing and selecting different documentary sources, for their informational content as much as for the particularities of the visual conventions some of them displayed, Manet integrated the formal characteristics of documents without following their logic. In other words, Manet’s Maximilian paintings pose the question of what a painting could do differently than photographs. If the reproduction of Olympia in Portrait of Emile Zola hinted at the fate of painting to be turned into visual documentation and the Kearsarge proclaimed instead its vigor in the face of the less thrilling lithography, the Maximilian paintings suggest an interchange between painting and photography, a exploration of the limits and possibilities offered by one medium in relation to the other. If Manet’s engagement with photography suggests that painting was not shot by photography, can we not similarly see the digital and analogue as two mediums rubbing against each other?

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
Polaroid 660 (promotional non functional)
with completely transparent plastic housing.
Produced for promotional use for display and
demonstration purposes.
Lens: 116mm f/11, single-element plastic
Automatic focus; uses Polaroid Sonar AF system.
Minimu focus: 3ft.
Electronic shutter: range 1/4 – 1/200 sec.
programmed automatic exposure syytem;
built-in electronic flash, with automatic flash,
exposure for all pictures.
Camera was introduced 1981 with an original
product price of 95$ and worked with the
Polaroid 600 Film family which all have the
following characteristics in common:
ASA 600 film speed, self-developing,
packaged 10 prints to a pack including a
self-contained battery to power camera.
Actual image area: 3 1/8“ x 3 1/8“ (7.9 x 7.9 cm)
Fotostudio Axel Gnad, Düsseldorf,
February 09, 2009
2009
Archival Pigment Print
85,5 x 93,5 cm (framed)
Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

A case in point would be the work of American artist Christopher Williams, who in his ongoing project entitled For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (2003 to present) creates a series of images that develop an iconographic program relating, in his own words, to “the restructuring of cultural life in the postwar era and in particular the Americanization of European popular culture.” This loose theme is what holds together an apparently heterogeneous ensemble of pictures that include chocolate bars and rubber tires, shower screens, socks, and photographic equipment. Yet what also brings the images together is the way in which they involve or make reference to specific forms and techniques of industrial photography. In this respect, Williams’ practice recalls Flusser’s vision of the camera memory as a device “programmed by people employed in a photo industry, (…). But those people have, in their turn, elaborated that program in a dialogue with the industrial program, which is a memory that contains a vast amount of virtual camera programs. The program of the photo industry is, in its turn, programmed by people who are elaborating the economic, cultural, political and ideological program of a society.”[1] Flusser here makes a case for the way in which photography, far from reproducing natural vision, should instead be understood as the result of a layered system, which, circle after circle, determines conventions of reading that ensure the homogeneity and legibility of photographic documents. The vision of photography that he outlines is that of conventional photography as it exists in professional, industrial, and scientific forms, and is perpetuated by professional, industrial, or scientific institutions. As he explores these different circles, Williams simultaneously exposes their limits by creating (analogue) photographs that, upon closer inspection, are improper for commercial use. His pictures exhibit awkward shadows, unsightly blemishes on a model’s ankle, dirty feet, and ill-fitting clothing samples that disturb gazes accustomed to flawless, digitally corrected or produced images and force viewers to slow down to take those pictures in. So is the case of other photographs from the series that depict photo cameras: teased and prodded in his current exhibition in Cologne, and sliced open in earlier images evoking diagrams found in user’s manuals. Such photographs that teasingly depict and dissect the black boxes, “force [the] apparatus,” we might say along with Flusser, “to somehow invert its program like a glove, and have it produce that which is unexpected from the point of view of the program.” In these photographs, Williams plays the analogue against the digital and using the resources of the photography industry (for instance working sometimes with commercial studios), he makes pictures that do not comply with their aesthetic and commercial conventions.

If it is possible to read Christopher Williams’s For Example: 18 leçons sur la société industrielle as an exploration of the industrial program of the camera apparatus as much, if not more than as an iconographic program on the visual culture of the Cold War era, and his images of cameras as teasers of black boxing, then what does his elaborate practice of analogue photography purposefully rejecting digital technology say about the shift from the analogue to the digital?

Jean-Luc Moulène, Bi-Fixe, 7 septembre 2003. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Last week I proposed to take a look at what remains of photography when photography changes. My interest lay less in technical issues than in searching for the ways in which photography imprints upon us a particular way of experiencing the world around us. To continue with this I want to shift the angle and consider not what is left over by photography, but instead things that photography makes possible, something that may be the subject of Moulène’s Bi-Fixe.

His picture can be compared to the advertisement images produced by Ty Nant and visible on the brand’s website (scroll down the page) as well as to those posted on the site of the bottle’s designer, Ross Lovegrove. In both cases, the bottles are presented against white backgrounds and brightly lit so that they appear to hover in space. The lighting emphasizes the irregularly undulating outlines of the bottles and mark with strong contrasts the bulges and recesses on their surface, thereby conveying very legibly the image of flowing water, which the design evokes. The pictures on the designer’s website, which are accompanied by a sketch, underscore the sculptural quality of the object and conceptual source of the design. On the company’s website the emphasis is oriented towards the product’s quality: the bottle is placed next to a naked female model to emphasize, rather crassly, the affinity between the natural curves of the female body and those of flowing water, however contradictory this may be, given the un-ecological character of plastic-bottled water.

By laying the almost-entirely filled bottles flat against a uniform background, Moulène blocks the light from flowing through the transparent containers. As a result, his photograph shows light bouncing off the plastic and creating bright swirling lines that highlight all the nooks and crannies on the surface of the bottles, which comparatively lessens the visual impact of their outlines. Bubbles of air created by the partial absence of water and a few trickles of water dropped onto the exterior of the bottles add to the visual complexity of the image. Whereas the pack shots underscore the outlines of the bottles enclosing the water, Moulène’s picture seemingly frees the water from its containers, creating a tactile, sensuous representation that is, however, paradoxically rendered possible only by the industrial object that contains it.

By playing container and contained against one another, the photograph disturbs the close affinity between object and photograph that the commercial images display: instead of emphasizing the bold design and the purity of what it contains and, in turn, of displaying the virtuosity of professional camera work, his picture works against the grain of that mutually enhancing contraption. At the same time that it unhinges the proximity between mass-produced object and industrial photography, Bi-Fixe suggests that photography is also at the origin of the object: the shape of the bottle directly proceeds from a photographic capturing of flowing water; it is an image that has been translated into a three-dimensional object.

In retrospect, Bi-Fixe reads like a prototype for investigations by the artist that have subsequently led him into experimenting with object design. Taking his cue – or so it would appear – from the photographic origin of Ty Nant’s PET bottles, Moulène has devised several objects that not only resort to computer design but that clearly manifest, like the Ty Nant bottles, the fact they originate in a two-dimensional design that has been translated into three dimensions (rather than conceived and constructed in volume). His Histocamembert (2004) is a case in point, an object reminiscent of a pie chart blown up and translated into volume. No doubt the most conspicuous of these objects is Body (2011), an irregular bean pod-like shape some 8.5 meters long that Moulène produced in collaboration with the car manufacturer Renault. Similarly to his photographic rendering of the Ty Nant bottles, Body reads counter-intuitively: it exhibits color variations and dividing lines that bear, in fact, no relation to its actual shape, it is seemingly translucent yet opaque, and it is industrially produced but as useless as an object made by a 3D printer. Yet it is in fact anything but an object made by a 3D printer, a technology that directly implements the translation of images into simple objects. Body is a visual conundrum that evokes the two-dimensional, “photographic” quality of designed objects translated into volume by confusing the relationship between object and photograph. It is not unlike the glazed wickerwork pattern drawn on potteries traditionally, yet no longer encased in basketry, but messed up: a computer-generated design that takes us back to a photographic experience of the world and invites us, in turn, to look at photographs less as pictures of things than as objects that address the conditions of their making.