Series editors:

John Armitage
Ryan Bishop
Joanne Roberts

Photography Off the Scale

‘This book’s refreshing and much needed take on photography cuts through the
infoglut and explores the apparatus, infrastructure, and operations of contemporary
pictures. Addressing everything from snapshots to machine vision, Photography Off the
Photography
Scale unfurls a vital field of technology, politics and aesthetics reshaping the world.’
Lisa Parks, University of California-Santa Barbara Off the Scale
‘Among the many fundamental changes taking place in contemporary photography
and media culture, probably the most important are changes in scale. The new
magnitude of image production, the instant global dissemination of billions of new Technologies and Theories
images, and the adoption of AI that turns these images into big data are only some
examples of how the visual has been “scaled up” in the twenty-first century. Now we of the Mass Image
finally have a first book that rethinks the history and theory of photography through
the lens of scale - and connects this concept to a range of others including measure,
politics, gender, subjectivity and aesthetics.’
Lev Manovich, Presidential Professor, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

‘Someone takes a picture somewhere in the world. Such a trivial action is multiplied
by a trillion. Or much more, since the majority of pictures today are produced by
machines for machines. This collection of essays brilliantly explores the unheard-of
effects of scale on the ontology of photography and it touches upon the sublime of
the infinity of digital images.’
Peter Szendy, Brown University

Tomáš Dvořák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography, FAMU

in Prague.

Edited by Tomáš Dvořák

Jussi Parikka is Visiting Professor in the Department of Photography, FAMU in Prague
and Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art,
University of Southampton. and Jussi Parikka

Edited by Tomáš Dvořák

Cover image: Bildung (The Growth of the I), dated 2019, Abelardo Gil-Fournier
and Jussi Parikka
Cover design: first pulse design

2462 eup Dvořák&Parikka_PB.indd 1 01/12/2020 17:45

Photography
Off the Scale
Technicities
Series Editors: John Armitage, Ryan Bishop and Joanne Roberts, Winchester
School of Art, University of Southampton

The philosophy of technicities: exploring how technology mediates art, frames

design and augments the mediated collective perception of everyday life.
Technicities will publish the latest philosophical thinking about our increasingly
immaterial technocultural conditions, with a unique focus on the context of art,
design and media.

Editorial Advisory Board

Benjamin Bratton, Cheryl Buckley, Sean Cubitt, Clive Dilnot, Jin Huimin,
Arthur Kroker, Geert Lovink, Scott McQuire, Gunalan Nadarajan, Elin O’Hara
Slavick, Li Shqiao, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

Published
Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Information and
Art
Ashley Woodward
Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media
Edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics
Edited by John Beck and Ryan Bishop
Fashion and Materialism
Ulrich Lehmann
Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities
Edited by Rohit K. Dasgupta and Debanuj DasGupta
Zero Degree Seeing: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics
Edited by Ryan Bishop and Sunil Manghani
Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practices
Edited by Paola Crespi and Sunil Manghani
Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image
Edited by Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka

www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/TECH
Photography
Off the Scale
technologies and theories
of the Mass Image

edited by tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic
books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences,
combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic
works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka, 2021
© the chapters their several authors, 2021

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Designed and typeset in Sabon

by Biblichor Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 7881 6 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 7884 7 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 7882 3 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 7883 0 (epub)

The right of Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka to be identified as the Editor of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents

Acknowledgementsvii
Series Editors’ Preface viii
Notes on Contributors ix

1 Introduction: On the Scale, Quantity and Measure of Images 
Jussi Parikka and Tomáš Dvořák 1

I SCALE, MEASURE, EXPERIENCE

2 Mass Image, Anthropocene Image, Image
Commons
Sean Cubitt 25
3 Beyond Human Measure: Eccentric Metrics in
Visual Culture
Tomáš Dvořák 41
4 Living with the Excessive Scale of Contemporary
Photography
Andrew Fisher 61
5 Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language
and Mood Capture
Michelle Henning 77
6 Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary
Feminist Visual Politics
Tereza Stejskalová 97

II METAPICTURES AND REMEDIATIONS

7 Photography’s Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale
in Repurposed Slide Libraries
Annebella Pollen 113
8 The Failed Photographs of Photography:
On the Analogue and Slow Photography Movement
Michal Šimůnek 140
vi  Contents

9 Strangely Unique: Pictorial Aesthetics in the Age of Image

Abundance
Josef Ledvina 158

III MODELS, SCANS AND AI

10 On Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See: Practices
of Light beyond Photography
Jussi Parikka 185
11 Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory
of Climate Emergency
Lukáš Likavčan and Paul Heinicker 211
12 Undigital Photography: Image-Making beyond
Computation and AI
Joanna Zylinska 231
13 Coda: Photography in the Age of Massification
A Correspondence between Joan Fontcuberta
and Geoffrey Batchen 253

Names Index 289

Subject Index 293
Acknowledgements

This book was kickstarted at the Film and TV School of the Academy of
Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague and supported by the Czech Science
Foundation project Operational Images and Visual Culture: Media
Archaeological Investigations (19-26865X). In addition to the institu-
tional support from FAMU, the Czech Science Foundation, and
Winchester School of Art at University of Southampton (Jussi Parikka’s
other institutional affiliation), we are thankful to the many people  –
colleagues, friends and others  – who supported this project with
conversations, ideas and suggestions. Thanks go, on behalf of us both as
co-editors of the project (and in no particular order), to Ryan Bishop,
Sean Cubitt, Pasi Väliaho, Mihaela Brebenel, Carol Macdonald, Michelle
Henning, Sunil Manghani, Ed D’Souza, Jane Birkin, Abelardo
Gil-Fournier, Simone Venturini, Silvie Demartini, Martin Charvát and
Veronika Jirsová.
We also want to thank, together, the Operational Images project team
as well as the editors of the Technicities series. We owe a thank you to the
Edinburgh University Press staff for their diligence and support in getting
this book out and into the world. It has been a pleasure. And we also
specifically want to thank Elise Hunchuck for her work and expertise in
fine-tuning our language and our arguments. A further thank you to
Fiona Screen for the copy editing.
Series Editors’ Preface

TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION has profound and frequently

unforeseen influences on art, design and media. At times technology
emancipates art and enriches the quality of design. Occasionally it causes
acute individual and collective problems of mediated perception. Time
after time technological change accomplishes both simultaneously. This
new book series explores and reflects philosophically on what new and
emerging technicities do to our everyday lives and increasingly immaterial
technocultural conditions. Moving beyond traditional conceptions of the
philosophy of technology and of techne, the series presents new philo-
sophical thinking on how technology constantly alters the essential
conditions of beauty, invention and communication. From novel under-
standings of the world of technicity to new interpretations of aesthetic
value, graphics and information, Technicities focuses on the relationships
between critical theory and representation, the arts, broadcasting, print,
technological geneaologies/histories, material culture and digital techno­
logies and our philosophical views of the world of art, design and media.
The series foregrounds contemporary work in art, design, and media
whilst remaining inclusive, both in terms of philosophical perspectives
on technology and interdisciplinary contributions. For a philosophy of
technicities is crucial to extant debates over the artistic, inventive,
and informational aspects of technology. The books in the Technicities
series concentrate on present-day and evolving technological advances
but visual, design-led and mass mediated questions are emphasised to
further our knowledge of their often-combined means of digital trans-
formation.
The editors of Technicities welcome proposals for monographs and well-­
considered edited collections that establish new paths of investigation.

John Armitage, Ryan Bishop and Joanne Roberts

Notes on Contributors

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of

Oxford. Batchen’s work as a teacher, writer and curator focuses on
the history of photography. Besides his interest in the historiography
of the medium, Batchen has helped to pioneer the study of vernacular
photographs. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception
of Photography (1997, and in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Slovenian,
Chinese, Italian and Ukrainian); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography,
History (2001, and in Chinese); Forget Me Not: Photography and
Remembrance (2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (2008); What of Shoes?:
Van Gogh and Art History (2009, in German and English); Suspending
Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010, in Japanese and English); Repet­
ition och Skillnad (in Swedish, 2011); Emanations: The Art of the
Cameraless Photograph (2016); Obraz a diseminace (in Czech, 2016);
More Wild Ideas (in Chinese, 2017); and Apparitions: Photography and
Dissemination (2018). He has also edited Photography Degree Zero:
Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited
Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012). His exhibitions have
been seen in Brazil, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States, Japan,
Germany, Iceland, Australia and New Zealand.

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne.

His publications include The Cinema Effect, Ecomedia, The Practice of
Light: Genealogies of Visual Media, Finite Media: Environmental Impli­
cations of Digital Technology and Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from
Hollywood to the Mass Image. Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT
Press, his current research is on political aesthetics, media art history,
ecocriticism and practices of truth.

Tomáš Dvořák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography

at FAMU in Prague. He studied philosophy, art history, media studies
and sociology at Charles University in Prague and The Graduate Center,
City University of New York. His research focuses on philosophy and
x  Notes on Contributors

history of media, and philosophy and history of science, and the inter­
relations between these fields, especially media archaeology of science
and knowledge. He has authored or co-authored a number of books in
Czech: Epistemology of (New) Media (NAMU 2018), Photo­graphy,
Sculpture, Object (NAMU 2017), Temporality of (New) Media (NAMU
2016), Contemporary Approaches in Historical Epistemology (Filosofia
2013), Chapters from the History and Theory of Media (AVU 2010), and
Waste Management: Texts, Images and Sounds of Recent History (Filo-
sofia 2009).

Andrew Fisher is a research fellow in the Department of Photography

at FAMU in Prague, and Principle Investigator of the Prague-based
collaborative research project ‘Scale, Measure and Proportion in
Contemporary Visual Cultures’. He is founding editor of the peer-re-
viewed journal Philosophy of Photography (2010–present) and, between
2008 and 2019, was Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at
Goldsmiths, University of London. One of his major research interests
is the significance of different conceptions of scale for historical and
contemporary forms of photography. This has resulted in a series of
publications including: ‘Imaginative Variation: Photographic Scale and
Photographic Horizons’, in Too Big to Scale, Florian Dombois and Julie
Harboe (eds), Zurich Hochschule der Künste, Scheidegger & Spiess
Verlag, Zürich, 2017; ‘On the Scales of Photographic Abstraction’, in
Photographies Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 2016; and ‘Photographic Scale’, in
On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation, Daniel
Rubinstein, Johnny Golding and Andrew Fisher (eds), Birmingham,
ARTicle Press Birmingham City University, 2013.

Joan Fontcuberta is a renowned conceptual photographer, as well as

being a writer, editor, curator and teacher, who has played a significant
role in achieving international recognition for the history of Spanish
photography. Fontcuberta graduated in Communication at the Auto­
nomous University of Barcelona in 1977. After working in advertising, he
taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona from
1979 to 1986. He was one of the founders of Photovision magazine,
which was originally launched in 1980 and became a major publication
in the field of European photography. From 1993 to 2010 he was Profes-
sor of Communication Studies at the University Pompeu Fabra in
Barcelona. Among the most representative institutions where his work
has been exhibited are: MACBA (Barcelona), Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), CCCB (Barcelona), MNAC (Barcelona),
Zabriskie Gallery (New York), the Science Museum (London), The Art
Institute (Chicago), MoMA (New York), and the Maison Européene de
 Notes on Contributors   xi

la Photographie (Paris). In 1994 he was ordained Knight of the Order of

Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2011 he won the
National Essay Prize in Spain and in 2013 obtained the prestigious
Hasselblad Photography Award.

Paul Heinicker is a design researcher, investigating critical and specula-

tive design concepts with a focus on the culture and politics of diagrams
and data visualisations. He is a research associate at the Interaction
Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam and PhD
student at the University of Potsdam at the Institute for Media and Art.
He received an MA in Design from FH;P in 2015 and participated in
post-graduate programs at Malmö University and Strelka Institute for
Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow.

Michelle Henning is Professor in Media and Photography at the University

of Liverpool. She has written numerous essays on photo­graphy, new
media, museums and exhibitions and cultural history. Her book Photo­
graphy: The Unfettered Image was published by Routledge in 2018. She
is also the editor of Museum Media (Blackwell 2015) and author of
Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (Open University Press 2006). Her
background is in art, art history and cultural studies. She has combined
academic research with her work as an artist/designer since 1991, design­
ing record covers for PJ Harvey among others. Her current writing
addresses both historical and contemporary photographic media and is
concerned with the relationship between technology, materiality and
aesthetic and sensory experience. In 2018–19 she was awarded an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship to research in the 1920s and 1930s archives of the
photographic company Ilford Limited. She is currently turning that research
into a book, and writing on ‘affective realism’ in digital photography.

Josef Ledvina is Assistant Professor at the Film and TV School of the

Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) and editor-in-chief of
Prague-based art magazine Art+Antiques. He studied art history and
history at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of several book
chapters and articles in Czech scientific journals and regularly contrib-
utes to Czech art magazines as an art critic. His lecturing focuses on the
history of twentieth-century art and photography. His research currently
focuses on general questions of critical evaluation and aesthetic experi-
ence in visual arts.

Lukáš Likavčan is a researcher and theorist, writing on philosophy of

technology and political ecology. He teaches at the Center for Audio­
visual Studies, FAMU in Prague, and Strelka Institute for Media,
xii  Notes on Contributors

Architecture and Design, Moscow. Likavčan is a member of Display  –

Association for Research and Collective Practice, Prague, and the author
of Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Strelka Press, 2019).

Jussi Parikka is Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at

University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at FAMU, Prague
where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019–
23, funded by the Czech Science Foundation). He is the author of several
books on media and digital culture, alongside work on media archaeol-
ogy. Books include Digital Contagions (2007, 2nd edn 2016), Insect
Media (2010), What is Media Archaeology (2012) and A Geology of
Media (2015). He is the co-editor of books such as Media Archaeology:
Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2010, with Erkki Huhtamo)
and Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in
2048 (2015, with Joasia Krysa). In addition, he was a co-editor of Across
and Beyond: A Transmediale Reader on Postdigital Practices, Concepts,
and Institutions (2016).

Annebella Pollen is Reader in History of Art and Design at University of

Brighton, UK. Her research interests include histories of popular image
cultures, especially in relation to mass photographic practice. She has
published on photographic abundance in her books Mass Photography:
Collective Histories of Everyday Life (2015) and Photography Reframed:
New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture (2018, co-edited
with Ben Burbridge), as well as in numerous scholarly essays. Her other
books include a 2015 study of a utopian interwar youth movement, The
Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, and the forthcoming
Art without Frontiers, a commissioned history of the British Council’s
art collection and its use in eight decades of global cultural relations.

Michal Šimůnek is affiliated with the Film and TV School of Academy of

Performing Arts in Prague. Educated in media studies and sociology, his
research and lecturing focus on the theory and history of photography,
media, visual culture and consumer culture. His current research inter-
ests include vernacular photography, creative misuse of technology, and
photographic communities of consumption. He is the author of several
book chapters and articles in Czech scientific journals and is also the
translator of Geoffrey Batchen’s Photography and Dissemination:
Towards a New History for Photography (NAMU, 2016) and Jussi Parik-
ka’s What is Media Archaeology? (NAMU, forth­coming).

Tereza Stejskalová is Assistant Professor at the Film and TV School of

the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and curator at tranzit.cz. Her
 Notes on Contributors   xiii

recent endeavours include a long-term research on the cultural diplomacy

and internationalism of Czechoslovakia in collaboration with Zbyněk
Baladrán. She is the editor of Filmmakers of the World, Unite! Forgotten
Internationalism, Czechoslovak Film and the Third World (Prague: tran-
zit, 2017) and co-editor of Navigation edition (tranzit.cz). Her research
interests include feminist and postcolonial perspectives on Eastern Euro-
pean contemporary art.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist, curator and – according to the

ImageNet Roulette’s algorithm – a ‘mediatrix’. She works as Professor of
New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.
The author of a number of books, including The End of Man: A Femi­
nist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and
Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017), she is also involved in exper-
imental and collaborative publishing projects such as Photomediations
(Open Humanities Press, 2016). Her art practice involves playing with
different kinds of image-based media.
1 Introduction:
On the Scale, Quantity
and Measure of Images
Jussi Parikka and Tomáš Dvořák

At Which Scale?
As tHe WeAtHeR and climate seem increasingly off their hinges, so,
too, do our images of the world. With the frequency of so-called ‘extreme
weather events’ increasing, forms of representation have had to come up
with commensurately complex ways of dealing with this new reality that
does not easily take the form of an image. Weather and climate models and
simulations operate only due to the extensive computational capacities
that enable the emergence of visualisations of predictable and increasingly
unpredictable events. The imaging capacities that have been handed down
since the nineteenth century  – data visualisation, graphical information
systems such as maps of different statistical quantities, as well as photo-
graphs and especially scientific photography – have had to try to keep up
with this mass of information, extensive both in scope and impact.
While weather and the climate may be acute reference points and
metaphors to discuss how computational culture and big data have trans-
formed forms of photographic discourse as part of visual culture, leading
into discussions of data visualisation, cultural analytics by computa-
tional means, and the sheer storage capacity for the organisation of
images as datasets that throw our usual coordinates for what is a photo­
graph off the scale, this also works the other way round – at least as far
as the popular discourse about images goes.

Figure 1.1 (next page) Erik Kessels: 24 Hrs in Photos, installation, 2014, courtesy of
Eric Kessels/Kessels Kramer. Figure 1.1 Erik Kessels: 24 Hrs in Photos, installation,
2014, courtesy of Eric Kessels/Kessels Kramer.
4  JUSSI PARIKKA AND TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

Indeed, a sense of the catastrophic has crept into how we speak, think
and write of photographs in digital culture. The current state of photo-
graphic production is often characterised in the apocalyptic terms of a
deluge or avalanche, an explosion or eruption, a tsunami or storm.
Each of these terms evokes the impression of an unmanageable and
unstoppable cascade of images that exceeds any traditional notion of
photographic aggregates of series, collections, archives or databases,
and their catastrophic overtones indicate a moment in which photo-
graphs cease to act as mediators between us and the world, instead
making it opaque and obscure. In his installation, 24 Hrs in Photos, Erik
Kessels visualised the feeling of drowning in images by filling a room
with the hundreds of thousands of printed images uploaded to online
image-sharing sites during one day (Figure 1.1). The promise of total
visibility and transparency, whether joyfully embraced or worryingly
defied, opens a horizon of blindness, just as looking directly into too
much light means we see nothing at all. This horizon of blindness relates
to the often perceived quantity of images in cultures of big data: to see
an image is by necessity to consider it as part of an extensive dataset or
a database.
Despite an increase in methodological attempts to deal with images as
data (with computational means such as cultural analytics, for example),
and given that the photographic and visual spheres are seen anew and
differently through such quantities, the visual and the photographic are
not simply resolvable by the calculation of quantities alone. Instead, this
book sets out to address and explain why and how questions of scale and
its related concepts of measure and quantity are central to contemporary
photographic and visual culture. While a conversation about photo-
graphic scale in network culture (see, for example, Fisher 2012) has been
slowly emerging over the last decade, we aim to offer a strong set of
conceptual coordinates and thematic anchors that address the two ques-
tions that bind this volume together: first, in what ways are questions of
the contemporary technical media culture of photography understood
through discussions of scale and quantity; and, second, how does this
discussion include issues of politics, subjectivity, gender and technologi-
cal practice as part of its repertoire in ways that shift the terms of
aesthetic discourse into a firm dialogue with broader developments in
media and cultural theory?
Could it be that scale is not only a useful entry point to photographic
theory and history, but that photography also offers its own contribu-
tion to the broader questions of the humanities concerning scale and
measure? In many ways, photography already included the possibility
of representation and transformation across multiple scales. It also
included the possibility of combining varied, dynamic perspectives, for
 Introduction   5

as Andrew Fisher (2012: 323) points out: ‘a basic function of all forms
of photography is also to register the ostensible spatial and temporal
state of things, to fix these together at a certain scale and according to
a combination of prefigured and anticipated scales.’ Indeed, scales are
constantly made and remade, differentiated but also synthesised, in a
combinatorial fashion.
In this introduction, we offer a first set of suggestions as to why the
question of scale is important, how the insights in this book aim to
address it, and where the connections to the broader field of the investi-
gation of digital visual culture are to be located. Our opening chapter is
followed by texts that will offer methodological, thematic and critical
angles on how to discuss contemporary visual culture of mass quantity
and scale. At a time when big science has become normalised as business
as usual in terms of dealing with the interdisciplinary scale of complexity
of the contemporary world (see Fukushima 2018), with billions of
pictures snapped daily, quintillion bytes of data transmitted daily or tera-
bytes after terabytes of data stored in various archives and datasets, we
must also assess what the terms of these discussions are. What kind of
entity is one billion photos? What kind of perceiver does it presuppose?
Do such vertiginous quantifications imply something about the changing
nature of photography, and, if so, in what sense? What happens to images
when the displays are turned off? Are we producing streams of redundant
images just to train machines to see?
These are not merely technical questions. They are also part of how
we design our research frameworks, where questions of scale are incor-
porated into how we formulate our objects of reference (see Lobato 2018)
to ensure they are treated dynamically – as they should be. Thus, in our
book, scale becomes less a reference to things big or small, many or less,
but rather a dynamic of qualification, of positioning, and of valorisation
that is part and parcel of such material practices and discourses of quan-
tity and measure.

Photographic Blind Spots

We often assume an abundance of objects when it comes to our contem-
porary culture of data and images  – such as in the rhetoric of an
overwhelming quantity of digital data – and see this as part of the current
technical condition. But what we assume here also sits as part of a
longer-term characterisation of the impact of media vis-à-vis our
capacities to interpret and experience the world. The sense of the over-
whelming becomes expressed both in vocabularies of experience and in
the meticulous search for management and order that one subsequently
finds in information systems such as libraries.
6  JUSSI PARIKKA AND TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

The history of information overload, which can be traced back to

complaints about the abundance of manuscripts in antiquity and the
acceleration of book production after the introduction of printing in the
fifteenth century (Blair 2010), teaches us that the experience of overload
is tightly connected with the enthusiastic drive to accumulate, collect,
memorise, share and make accessible. The experience of information
overload was limited to a privileged elite before the nineteenth century
when the industrial-scale production of texts and images began to inun-
date most of the Western population. However, the gradual impact of
schemes on how to deal with collections through metadata, knowledge
about knowledge, and the quantities of so-called cultural objects through
qualitative evaluation persisted as the important link where experience
and information infrastructures met  – and are continually meeting  –
every time we dealt with search queries, access, organisation of data, and
the excavation of items from a mass that is itself otherwise beyond our
cognitive capacities to comprehend. Or as Sean Cubitt (2014: 7) puts it,
‘[e]numeration is a pledge against disorder’, where counting and calcula-
tion assure us of an ordered presence when faced with a multitude: the
promise of measure underpins many of our epistemological coordinates
since modern technical media, and the quantified world of discrete units
comes to rule our cultural sphere and experience too.
While valorisation of the unique has persisted in aesthetic discourse
since the nineteenth century, new technical media such as photography
came along with the promise of the multiple. Since its early days,
photography has been praised for its ability to reproduce an image in
large numbers. More precisely, certain photographic techniques were
championed for their reproducibility, portability and accessibility, as
David Brewster’s comparison of the Daguerreotype with Talbot’s paper-
based negative process makes clear:

The great and unquestionable superiority of the Calotype pictures . . . is

their power of multiplication. One Daguerreotype cannot be copied from
another, and the person whose portrait is desired must sit for every copy
that he wishes. When a pleasing picture is obtained, another of the same
character cannot be produced. In the Calotype, on the contrary, we can
take any number of pictures, within reasonable limits, from a negative;
and a whole circle of friends can procure, for a mere trifle, a copy of a
successful and pleasing portrait. (Brewster 1843: 333)

The ‘reasonable limits’ were breached, step by step: through the

perfection and simplification of the photographic process; the prolifer­
ation of inexpensive, easy-to-use cameras; the delegation of specific
sections of the process to professional services. It was the gradual
 Introduction   7

automation of all aspects of taking and making photographs. Indeed, the

sense of automated mass imagining and its promise of objective images
‘uncontaminated by interpretation’ (Daston and Galison 2010: 139) that
characterised early scientific photography already in the nineteenth
century finds an echo in more recent discourses about objectivity by
numbers and validity through data.
But such images, mass-produced and seemingly automated, come
with politics attached. Walter Benjamin’s (2008/1936) notes about repro-
ducibility demonstrate the link between reproducibility, aesthetics, and
capitalist modes of quantification and production. One could indeed go
as far as to claim that the forms of abstraction and exchange that emerge
in technical media since the early nineteenth century – if not earlier – and
the contemporary capitalist money form are in close resonance, or as
Cubitt (2014: 7) puts it: ‘both are mediations’. Peter Szendy devoted his
latest book and an exhibition at Jeu de Paume (The Supermarket of
Images, 2020) to the economic aspects of the life of images – their circu-
lation, exchangeability, storage and management  – or, what might be
called ‘the double iconomic equivalence’, where ‘not only is currency
made in the image of the image, but the image, in turn, is made in the
image of money’ (Szendy 2019: 7). These questions gain urgency precisely
due to the current over-production of images.
Even if the multiple and questions of reproduction were already
features of early photographic discourse through a recognition of the
technicity of the medium, it is not clear that photographic scholarship
has ever been able to fully address the issue of the mass image. Let us
consider, for example, two recurring touchstones of theory from the
early 1980s, the period when digital imaging started to become increas-
ingly discussed: Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Vilém Flusser’s
Towards a Philosophy of Photography. The two books are vastly differ-
ent in both their approach and aim and can be seen, at best, as
complementary: Barthes has much to say about the way we look at
photographs and Flusser about the way we make them. However, if we
focus on what they each avoid to address rather than on what they claim,
both books reveal a shared blind spot – a blind spot which can be attrib-
uted to their (rather unorthodox) phenomenological inclinations and
their particular rhetoric in how they address photographs.
The analysis of photography and our experience of photographic
images in Camera Lucida proceeds through a detailed discussion of
several images (Figure 1.2). Twenty-five are reproduced, while one of
them, the child portrait of Barthes’s mother and uncle in the Winter
Garden, is not reproduced in the book, and another one, Daniel Boudi-
net’s polaroid from 1979 (which is the only colour reproduction, though
not mentioned in the text itself), is included as a frontispiece  – and is
 Introduction   9

surprisingly omitted in many later editions. If we look at the images

Barthes chose en masse, almost as if they were assembled on a contact
sheet and so most likely in a different perspective from the one which the
author intended, we notice that they have something in common: they all
picture faces, human figures or groups of human figures. A few do so
indirectly: the Boudinet polaroid shows a bedside with pillows and
curtains; there is the Dinner Table by Niépce, mistakenly labelled as ‘the
first photograph’ and probably included for that very reason; and the
house in Alhambra by Charles Clifford, with a tiny, dwarfed figure sitting
next to it that Barthes labels with the caption: ‘I want to live here . . .’
Even these three unpeopled images are filled with the traces of human
presence: the table is laid out for diners, someone just got up from the
bed, the house asks to be inhabited.
Barthes’s preference for human subjects becomes even clearer when he
discusses images that do not affect or interest him in any way: ‘There are
moments when I detest Photographs: what have I to do with Atget’s old
tree trunks . . . ?’ (Barthes 1981: 16). Here we may recall Walter Benjamin’s
comments on the emptiness of Atget’s photographs, of the images of a city
devoid of humans, of deserted streets, of empty corners, the margins and
recesses of the cityscape. Within that same discussion in his Little History
of Photography, Benjamin pronounces that ‘to do without people is for
photography the most impossible of renunciations’ (Benjamin 2005: 519) –
a renunciation that seems truly impossible for Barthes but, as we see, is
now increasingly a topic for nonhuman photography (Zylinska 2017).
Another, even more revealing example is found in Barthes’s comment
on Edgerton’s strobe photography, images that reveal things human eyes
could never see:

For fifty years, Harold D. Edgerton has photographed the explosion of a

drop of milk, to the millionth of a second (little need to admit that this
kind of photography neither touches nor even interests me: I am too much
of a phenomenologist to like anything but appearances to my own meas-
ure). (Barthes 1981: 33)

Camera Lucida circumscribes a certain field within the photographic

realm that is to the scale of a particular human observer. In our context,
it also raises the question of what measures are left out, which measures
are important, and how measures are themselves an entry point to what
photographic theory could be.
In many ways, Flusser takes a different strategy when approaching
images but reveals another blind spot, which for our purposes is a useful

Figure 1.2  Camera Lucida illustrations. Photograph by Tomáš Dvořák/Zuzana Lazarová.

10  JUSSI PARIKKA AND TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

cue. Flusser does not discuss individual images, but rather suggests to
draw a line between categories of informative and redundant photo-
graphs. He selects a handful of meaningful pictures from the vast universe
of images:

In the following, no account will be taken of redundant photographs since

the phrase ‘taking photographs’ will be limited to the production of
informative images. As a result, it is true, the taking of snapshots will
largely fall outside the scope of this analysis. (Flusser 2000: 26)

The strategy seems, at first, smart: focus on quality rather than quantity,
select exclusive and valuable specimens rather than stereotypical banal­
ities. In other words, define a measure, standard or parameter of what a
(good) photograph is. In the mathematical theory of communication
that Flusser draws on, the redundant is something conventional, predict-
able, repeatable and repeated. In the case of photography, the redundant
is typically image clichés from birthday photographs to sunsets. In the
logic of his apparatus theory, it is not only important that friends or
tourists take the same or very similar pictures but that they travel and
organise birthday parties to take such pictures in the first place.
The realm of the redundant, ordinary or vernacular has also been
traditionally excluded and downplayed by curatorial and historiograph­
ical approaches. In terms of numbers, however, it constitutes the vast
majority of photographs ever made and to be made. It deserves to be
taken seriously and rid of the prevalent depreciation and prejudice. Geof-
frey Batchen called vernaculars ‘photography’s parergon, the part of its
history that has been pushed to the margins (or beyond them to obliv-
ion)’ (Batchen 2000: 262) and stimulated a whole range of scholarly
studies (see, for example, Zuromskis 2013; Pollen 2016; Campt et al.
2020) that are beginning to fill this gap in photography’s history. Thus,
instrumental and vernacular modes of photography exemplify measures
that have certainly shaped what photography theory could be but also
what it might become.

The Image as Quantity

Is it possible to argue that contemporary discourses about the mass
image and the excluded parergon are now even more so the entry point to
understanding practices of digital images, from snapshots to machine
vision? We find it useful to consider what, besides pictures, are incorpor­
ated in photographs; namely, infrastructures, operations, apparatuses,
and the aesthetic questions of measures and scales. Our contemporary
networked and data-intensive phase of image production adds a further
 Introduction   11

infrastructural layer to earlier questions about reproduction and the

multiple. Online image-sharing platforms not only enable and stimulate
image production and circulation but also make it possible to ‘see’ the
gigantic proportions of the picture universe while this seeing is, itself,
instrumental to the functioning of the current platform capitalist econ-
omy (Srnicek 2016). The metaphors of overflow are often supported by
staggering statistics, accompanied by vast numbers that tend to grow at
an ever-increasing pace: ‘Around sixty billion photographs are taken
every year,’ estimated Julian Stallabrass (1996: 13). However, Joan Font-
cuberta updated those figures more recently: ‘800 million images are
uploaded to Snapchat every day, together with 350 million to Facebook
and 80 million to Instagram’ (quoted in Batchen and Fontcuberta’s
chapter in this volume). When Josh Lovejoy presented Google Clips, a
hands-free AI-powered camera which automatically recognised and
captured moments without human intervention, he emphasised the over-
whelming amount of images that seem to break away from human vision:
‘This year, people will take about a trillion photos, and for many of us,
that means a digital photo gallery filled with images that we won’t actu-
ally look at’ (Lovejoy 2018). This does not, however, remove the possibility
that ‘your pictures are looking at you’, as Trevor Paglen (2016) argues in
the context of machine vision and the primacy of machine-readable
digital images, where issues of data and visibility conflate at the centre
of recent and ongoing discussions about facial recognition and urban
spheres of surveillance.
What these vertiginous figures – or at least, the rhetoric that mobilises
such figures – indicate is that ours is an age of image excess; they denote
a situation of liminality when a normative order has been exceeded.
Excess often evokes negative associations like abundance and waste,
matter out of place, pathological and epidemic. Some of this discourse
carries with it troubling gender connotations (see Henning’s chapter in
this collection), while some of it is based on unchecked disciplinary bias.
It is, after all, claimed that the arts and humanities have not considered
quantitative imaging, image analysis software, and subsequent expert
practices with the same epistemological focus and intensity as the sciences
(Elkins 2011). In astronomical proportions, photographs become
inflated, trivial, redundant and contaminated; they cannot be measured
by traditional standards and norms. In other words, the excessive photo-
graph is not a photograph any more in the sense that the photograph had
become a stabilised object of reference during the history of photo-
graphic theory: it has become a different kind of image – or perhaps even
a different kind of entity. And it is these questions of quantity, data and
scale that are the crucial coordinates required to map this transition.
For some, this causes anxiety (images exceed the human capacity of
12  JUSSI PARIKKA AND TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

interpretation); for others, it presents a case of the new normal (photo-

graphs are simply data, and as such, part of the modus operandi of
contemporary digital culture).
In either case, data visualisation is often pitched as one response to
reformulating data as experiential, but also a new form of visual express­
ion although, as one can point out, it dates back at least to the nineteenth
century, with an even longer history in statistics (Beniger and Robyn
1978). Diagrams and graphs might not be part of the history of photo­
graphy, but they are part of the media archaeology of visual expression
of mathematical measures in ways that came later to intersect with
photography, for example, through photogrammetry. However, perhaps
it is only through data visualisations that the quantity of images can
become represented as visual statistics. It is thus essential to note that
questions of scale and quantity, as they are posed to photographic prac-
tice and theory, are also shared in many of the critical data visualisations.
As Richard Wright (2008: 79) explains:

One of the fundamental properties of software is that once it is being

executed it takes place on such a fine temporal and symbolic scale and
across such a vast range of quantities of data that it has an intrinsically
different materiality than that with which we are able to deal with unaided.
Visualization is one of the few techniques available for overcoming this
distance.

Such arguments concerning the centrality of software and data for our
sense of the visual then trigger multiple parallel histories and tracks of
investigation for photography in addition to merely the photographic:
histories of information systems, data management, and practices of
graphs, diagrams and charts (see Cubitt 2017). Or even more provoca-
tively, as John May (2019: 50) argues, current digital and electronic images
are not related to the history of photography so much as they are part of
the lineage of electrical engineering, telegraphy, television, military intel-
ligence and experimental physiology. According to his reasoning,
photography, when understood through its chemical base, is merely an
obsolete remainder of a reference that misses the major transformation
as to imaging in contemporary contexts of digital data.
The availability of large datasets and the focus on data as a (cultural)
resource has also triggered a range of methodological suggestions, espe-
cially in Digital Humanities. Dealing with quantities by way of digital
tools has produced suggestions such as ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2013)
and other computational methods. Perhaps closest to the field of
photography and visual culture remains cultural analytics, mainly
promoted by Lev Manovich, as one of the most prominently discussed
 Introduction   13

techno-methodological frameworks of the past ten to fifteen years.

Cultural analytics is premised as a visual analytical method to engage
with large datasets, moving beyond what is argued to be the traditional
humanities focus on ‘small data’, or even canons (Manovich 2016).
Hence, cultural analytics as a form of ‘science of culture’ is suggested
both as a way to deal with the vastness of large data (instead of restricted
interpretational methods) and as a new way to understand the vernacular
visual culture, as Manovich argues (2016): ‘Tens or hundreds of millions
of posts, photos, or other items are not uncommon. Since the great
majority of user-generated content is created by regular people rather
than by professionals, social computing studies the non-professional,
vernacular culture by default.’ Photographs, whether from historical
archives or from contemporary platforms such as Instagram,1 are then no
longer merely visual objects so much as quantified input for data visual-
isation and pattern recognition.
Cultural analytics positions its approach not only in terms of existing
datasets and units of description (cf. Birkin, forthcoming) but also in
terms of how digital objects incorporate and reveal other scales: the
images as counted units (one to many); but also what the image contains
as multiple dimensions. To paraphrase Manovich, it is not merely a
matter of counting existing units, but being able to (somewhat) forensi-
cally investigate images at a multitude of scales. Hence it calls for
importing some methods from machine vision and computer science to
the arts and humanities:

In the fields of computer media analysis and computer vision, computer

scientists use algorithms to extract thousands of features from every
image, a video, a tweet, an email, and so on. So, while, for example,
Vincent van Gogh only created about 900 paintings, these paintings can be
described according to thousands of separate dimensions. Similarly, we
can describe everybody living in a city according to millions of separate
dimensions by extracting all kinds of characteristics from their social
media activity. For another example, consider our own project On Broad­
way where we represent Broadway in Manhattan with 40 million data
points and images using messages, images and check-ins shared along this
street on Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare, as well as taxi ride data and
the U.S. Census indicators for the surrounding areas. (Manovich 2016: 14)

Wide data expresses potentials in ‘very large and potentially endless

numbers of variables describing a set of cases’ (Manovich 2016: 14). The
digital image, whether photographic or other, is itself already always a
quantity that can shift across scales of description, analysis and compar-
ison in ways that puts measure into focus, and in novel ways. The image
14  JUSSI PARIKKA AND TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

then contains a multitude of scales of potential interpretation that rede-

fine what counts as a photograph in the age of the quantified, calculated
image that was, in the first place, a sensorially sampled bit of light trans-
formed into discrete signals. If photographs have been fundamental in
the quantification of cultural reality since their origins in the nineteenth
century, current electronic and digital images have opened up any image
as a multitude of scales of reference, zooming in and out, across pixel
space and its multitude of combinatorial possibilities.
However, such methodological suggestions do not resolve the complex
ecology of aesthetic and epistemological concerns about the constitutive
conditions of scale and quantity. In other words, we are interested in how
such a mass mobilisation of photographs and images as data relates to
questions of infrastructure as well as the material loop between method-
ologies of visualisation of large datasets as part of the restructuring of,
for example, urban patterns. Is there enough range, then, to question
how these methods work, instead of mobilising them as computational
solutions to fundamentally social, political and aesthetic concerns (see
also Drucker and Bishop 2019)? This book’s chapters provide responses
to these issues.

The Structure of the Book

This introduction works to set the scene for the in-depth and detailed
analyses that follow. The book is written by a wide range of authors
with different disciplinary backgrounds but the same brief and task: to
engage with the mass image and its variations in cultural and media
discourse of photography and visual culture to provide us with a set of
coordinates as to how images scale, and what measures we need to take
to understand this.
The five chapters in the first section, ‘Scale, Measure, Experience’, link
epistemologies and rhetoric of measure with the embodied and political
realities of experience. How are the operations of measured normalis­
ation and photographic scale related to embodied forms of socio-political
realities in contemporary visuality? How are archaeologies and genealo-
gies of photographic practice informative of insightful analysis of the
current data-driven mass-image culture? What is the formative function
of a visual aesthetic that builds on notions of scale but also embeds ques-
tions of scale as an approach into the online circulation of images?
This section responds to the seemingly incommensurable question
raised by Sean Cubitt in his text; while images seem meaningful to many
of the people taking, looking or uploading them, the ‘images themselves
are insignificant’, functioning as mere data points in databases and big
data analytics. Cubitt builds on the history of photography towards an
 Introduction   15

analysis of the non-representational operations of images now in the

context of contemporary powers of data-driven image practices. Tomáš
Dvořák’s chapter continues this line of thought by offering a more
detailed genealogy of the history of photography. Seen through issues of
scale and measure, he asks how this history is entangled with questions
of aesthetics such as scales of the sublime. Moving in and out of specific
genres such as scientific photography, Dvořák presents these themes as
one way to narrate the implications of the gigantic and the immeasurable
as they sometimes attach to practices such as astronomy – for example,
the black hole imaging project of 2019 – but also as ways to re-narrate
the media archaeology of photography. In his chapter, ‘Living with the
Excessive Scale of Contemporary Photography’, Andrew Fisher renews
the discussion about aesthetics and philosophy of photography in the
contemporary context. In dialogue with the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy,
Fisher develops an elegant argument about the qualitative impact that
comes from vast amounts of photographic images; from the mere regis-
tering of the plentifulness of images, there is a much more fundamental
question of aesthetics and subjectivity at play that articulates ‘asymmet-
rical, heterogeneous and variable modes of being in relation to others’.
Here, as Fisher makes clear, such a question is not merely tied to the rigid
division of analogue versus digital photography. Fisher takes Nancy’s
philosophical discussion even further, making connections to themes
that Cubitt raised earlier, of the possibility of thinking photography
beyond the human subject of the click to ‘include all sorts of functions,
machines, distributed forms and artificial intelligences . . . which have
the ability to inaugurate a photographic event’.
Michelle Henning’s chapter maintains the politics of the subject in a
different way, offering additional nuance by way of discussions of gender.
‘Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language and Mood Capture’
links the book’s discussion to the twentieth-century development of a
universal language with references to Edward Steichen and Otto Neur-
ath, the inventor of Isotype. According to Henning, in ‘the mid-twentieth
century, it became commonplace to argue that photography is the one
“language” able to transcend national and cultural boundaries, matched
only by the presumed universality of human facial expressions’. This
pronouncement leads into a discussion of the contemporary online
culture of emojis as part of this innovative genealogy of photographic
emotion leading to mood capture. More than merely noting this geneal-
ogy and its ties to photographic discourse, Henning brings into play a
necessary specification as to the gendered discourse of photography of
the mass image often branded as kitsch and how this reads in relation to
the current politics of emotions. Consequently, the vocabularies of a
‘flood of information’, tsunami, deluge, and so on, come with the
16  JUSSI PARIKKA AND TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

historical baggage of being heavily gendered through the political history

of the masses depicted as both feminine and passive, where emotional
capitalism relies considerably on the strategic mobilisation of discourses
of authenticity and affective investment.
Henning’s detailed discussion offers a platform for Tereza Stejska-
lová’s chapter, ‘Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary
Feminist Visual Politics’, which examines US Democratic Party politi-
cian Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s public image (including her Instagram
feed) in relation to theoretical discourses ranging from Hito Steyerl to
Lauren Berlant. The generation of empathy relates both to the often
unacknowledged labour of emotional expression and sharing as well as
to the collective politics of empowerment. Stejskalová connects these
multiple registers to current debates about images and empathy, from
experimental VR (such as Hyphen-Labs) to the politics of online images.
Here, questions of gender and women of colour are crucial reference
points for Stejskalová as she carves out one response to the question of
capitalist contexts of social production and reproduction: activist histo-
ries of feminism can be storehouses, leveraged for the political use of
social media.
In the second section, ‘Metapictures and Remediations’, articulations
of different practices and their discursive repetitions problematise clear
divisions between the analogue and the digital, investigating both histor-
ical and institutional circumstances of what scale has meant in different
contexts. A key concept that the section mobilises is the metapicture,
defined by W. J T. Mitchell as a picture that also reveal things about
a picture: metapictures embody a self-referential quality that triggers a
metalevel discursive opportunity to consider what and where, when and
how pictures operate: ‘Any picture that is used to reflect on the nature of
pictures is a metapicture’ (Mitchell 1994: 56). As such, one can already
see metapictures as being at the centre of questions of scale and measure
as they conceptually enable the understanding of scalar shifts and repo-
sitioning of pictures and photographs in visual culture.
Annebella’s Pollen’s chapter, ‘Photography’s Mise en Abyme’, discusses
the repurposing of slide libraries as metapictorial devices, where a core
infrastructure that has sustained art history  – slide libraries  – is
approached from the point of view of the metapicture. Mentioning theo-
retical entry points from writings by other contributors to this volume
including Andrew Fisher, Michelle Henning, Geoffrey Batchen and Joan
Fontcuberta, Pollen’s take on the post-photographic context includes not
only a discussion of recent photographic art such as that of Erik Kessels
and Oriol Vilanova but also calls attention to slide libraries as original
sites of collection and accumulation, where the quantity of images
turned into qualitative techniques of image analysis. Pollen’s chapter
 Introduction   17

thus shows how such seemingly obsolete ‘media infrastructures’ of

education and interpretation harbour fascinating points about quantity
in ways also expressed in conceptual art.
A different sense of the obsolete is negotiated in ‘The Failed Photo-
graphs of Photography: On the Analogue and Slow Photography
Movement’. Here, Michal Šimůnek addresses the Lomography move-
ment as a seeming resistance to the abundance of digital images that
contemporary scholarship often addresses. The chapter’s discussion of
counter-practices of photography opens to what at first appears to differ
from the digital and yet, is completely embedded in digital platforms and
digitally enabled practices. Šimůnek mobilises Marc Lenot, Ernst van
Alphen and Vilém Flusser’s theoretical work – among others – in order to
understand the hybrid status of such practices, all the while focusing on
Lomography. A position of against the mainstream is not, however, one
easily resolved. What come to the fore are various contradictions and
frictions that characterise the apparently singular in the context of the
mass image. Questions of the unique and the generic are maintained,
albeit in a different fashion, in Josef Ledvina’s chapter, ‘Strangely Unique:
Pictorial Aesthetics in the Age of Image Abundance’. The chapter draws
a link from the earlier, assumed period of image scarcity to the current
proliferation of the image in and across digital platforms, from issues of
scale that hone in on the image at the level of its pixels and glitches to the
question of the copy and its identity. Ledvina’s discussion draws from
philosophical aesthetics and art history, from László Moholy-Nagy’s
Telephone Pictures to contemporary digital images, including the artistic
practice of Penelope Umbrico. While Goodman’s Languages of Art
offers one point of reflection, Ledvina moves to a provocative but
much-needed proposition: even in the age of seemingly freely multiply-
ing images every single image inscription can be addressed as a unique
instance, begging for a more careful methodological and conceptual
consideration.
One of our book’s aims, addressed explicitly in the third section,
‘Models, Scans and AI’, is to elaborate the transformation of photo­
graphy in the context of technologies of automation and artificial
intelligence, including the new kinds of mechanisms of imaging that
emerge in systems such as autonomous vehicles. In cases such as those
discussed, it becomes clear that photography becomes a historical refer-
ence point, whereas the actual imaging processes are closer to genealogies
of calculation. While our book steers clear from structuring our argu-
ments around the assumed change that comes about with the switch
from analogue to digital, or old media to new media, it is important to
track the post-optical, post-lenticular landscapes that define practices of
visuality in computational culture. In such cases, issues of infrastructures
18  JUSSI PARIKKA AND TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

of imaging become a central way to look at the multiscalar operations of

visuality and digital images.
Jussi Parikka’s chapter examines autonomous vehicles and techno­
logies, such as lidar, as forms of nonhuman photography, as coined by
Joanna Zylinska (2017). Parikka contends that such technologies of light
pulsing have a history that reaches back to the nineteenth-century emer-
gence of the controlled light pulse. Used as a form of measurement and
the foundation of radar technologies, these light pulses have become a
non-visual way of mapping urban and non-urban landscapes, as demon-
strated by the work of ScanLAB and in Liam Young’s experimental video,
Where the City Can’t See. The text engages with the multiple and
complex scales of infrastructural arrangements that build upon the city
as an ecology of light and sensing that is itself the target of new post-­
lenticular practices, demonstrated by ScanLAB’s Post-lenticular Landscapes
and Dream Life of Driverless Cars.
Lukáš Likavčan and Paul Heinicker continue the dialogue about scale
through a consideration of Earth imagining in the context of climate
emergency. Likavčan and Heinicker propose that we are not dealing with
traditional data-driven images but, instead, autographic visualisations
(building upon the work of Dietmar Offenhuber), where the Earth
becomes legible as a forensic trace, from tree rings to ice-core samples,
from inscriptions to other patterns. This legibility represents a position-
ing of the planetary surface as ‘a photographic inscription of human and
nonhuman processes’. Exploring such inscriptions through the visual
art of Susan Schuppli and the forensic work of Eyal Weizman, Likavčan
and Heinicker propose that the Earth is no longer merely a visual image,
but a material evidential trace of its own dynamics.
In ‘Undigital Photography: Image-Making beyond Computation and
AI’, Joanna Zylinska contends that questions of scale in digital culture
are not merely about quantity, but are more about the changing ontology
of photographic practice. Zylinska’s chapter offers essential insight into
how traditional subject positions of photography seem to be taken over
by the machine. This does not, however, lead to simplistic nonhuman
futurism. Instead, she evaluates the contexts of AI in relation to, for
example, human labour. With references to contemporary photographic
discourse and practices related to AI and machine vision, such as that of
Trevor Paglen, Zylinska outlines a case for the undigital photographic
image. Besides referring to the digital post-processing of images, undigi-
tal photography becomes a conceptual tool for ‘rethinking our current
frameworks and modes of understanding image-making as developed in
both media theory and visual culture’. In Zylinska’s case, this also
includes View from a Window, her photographic project which engages
with Amazon Mechanical Turk labour operations. As the other side of
 Introduction   19

AI, it is itself undigital ‘in the sense that, even though it uses digital tech-
nology to perform at least partially digital tasks, simulating the work of
machines in its quiet efficiency, it also ruptures the seamless narrative and
visualisation of the machine world’.
Through our investigation of photography off the scale, we were led
to the fundamental task of studying what scales, models, theories and
concepts we are employing in the first place. It is only fitting, therefore,
that our book concludes with a discussion between photographer Joan
Fontcuberta and theorist and historian Geoffrey Batchen. Moving
from post-digital photography to the mass image and contemporary
photographic art, their conversation provides us with a snapshot of
theory–practice dialogues deeply relevant to current photographic
discourse, rounding up many of the core themes of the book. As Batchen
declares in the interview: ‘The death of photography has been declared
so many times that I regard such declarations as signs of life, as an inev-
itable marker of the rise of yet another photographic phoenix from the
ashes of its predecessor.’ This echoes our contention too: investigating
scale, quantity and measure is a methodological way to approach not
just a shift in how many images there are – stored or circulating, seen
or unseen  – but how images operate in cultural practices and their
infrastructures.

Note
1. For a sample of projects working on photography, see the Cultural Analytics
Lab website at <http://lab.culturalanalytics.info>

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 Introduction   21

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I Scale, Measure,
Experience
2 Mass Image, Anthropocene
Image, Image Commons
Sean Cubitt The Mass Image

The Mass Image Hypothesis

Let us stARt where I would like to end, with the mass image: not the
image of apocalypse but the apocalypse of images, as Jean Baudrillard
might say. Absurdly, given the immense proliferation of images, the mass
image is, strictly speaking, invisible (Mackenzie and Munster 2019). It is
a name for the huge aggregation of images and their metadata amassed
in the vast corporate databases of Google – YouTube – Facebook – Insta-
gram  – WhatsApp  – Twitter  – Vine  – IAC  – Vimeo  – Tinder and in
repositories of medical and scientific imaging, by CCTV, with its supports
of facial recognition and biometrics collected not only by police forces
but at airports and shopping malls, and in rather different ways and
under severe financial constraints in cultural archives. To exist, an image
must be discoverable, and for that it must be incorporated in a database.
We retrieve some few images for care and attention – the care of attention
characteristic of cultural archives – but there are limits. At a conservative
estimate, in 2018 over thirty million images were uploaded to Twitter,
fifty-two million to Instagram, and 350 million to Facebook – daily. If
everyone on Earth dedicated eight hours a day, they could not possibly
look at all of them with any kind of seriousness.
In many respects, even though they retain significance for their upload-
ers and their immediate circle, the images themselves are insignificant.
From the perspective of the database, the image is not only meaningless
(the machine does not recognise semantic or affective values), it exists
only as a point of transit for what databases really treasure – relations.
Relational databases like these are more interested in metadata  – geo-
location, personal identifiers, device identifiers, date stamps, facial
recognition, distances and dimensions recorded by autofocus functions,
26  SEAN CUBITT

upload addresses and the kinds of measurement prized by astronomical

and meteorological databases. Commercially operated databases com­
bine such data with data from searches and likes, swipes, shares, tags and
other interactions, to construe from the relations between images a mass
image of the world in constantly evolving organisational diagrams that
only machines can read.
Run an image search for any popular tourist spot. If it isn’t already
tagged by the user or their device, algorithms associate uploaded GPS
data with data from Google Maps and Street View to fill in information
on cameras’ orientations; temporal data provides a fourth dimension.
The mass image of your site appears. It is an aggregate portrait tending
towards a total image, especially of popular sites like Times Square, or
the Charles Bridge, extending in time (during spring; at dawn; in 1945).
Your search results will include links to video content, whose moving-­
image and audio elements also become components of the account the
machine can now give itself of the place. Google is busy training artificial
intelligences to recognise the world they depend on but which their status
as representational media excludes them from. On the one hand, the
mass image aspires to become the most ecological image possible:
complete, formed of intricate webs of connections, and permanently
evolving. On the other, it is already the most environmentalising of
images, in the sense that it constructs a total image of the world so
complex and complete that it excludes the world it depicts, turning it into
pure context, pure environment, that which environs what is truly valued.
The mass image inscribes the world as data.
At its first level, the one we can at least glimpse if not really see, the
mass image undertakes to compose a total photographic and video-
graphic image of the world. At a second level, this image is invisible. The
individual images we see arrayed in the archetypal modernist grid are
only an epiphenomenon of the mass image, whose actuality is constant
processing in topologies we might vaguely intuit, and whose properties
we could derive from the algorithms if they were public, but which even
then we would not be able to see in action because the mass image is only
truly perceptible to the machines that house it. What you saw in an image
search yesterday will not repeat tomorrow, and you will get a different
result from me, because the display responds to your data history and its
position in the evolving global environment of searches, clicks and links.
The display page of an image search is itself a representation, not of
Times Square or the Charles Bridge but of the activity of the database
collating the images and the behaviours of its viewers. It looks like a wall
of pictures but is in fact a data visualisation.
 The Mass Image   27

Archaeology of the Mass Image

To understand how this might constitute an apocalypse of images, let me
try a very short history of photography. The earliest photographs concen-
trate the duration of exposure into a single artefact, the plate, in this way
imitating drawing, a temporal practice that results in an immobile object
which, however, because it was made over time and of time invites us to
spend time contemplating it. Long-exposure glass plate photography
represented time, not only by recording and making endure, but, as
Benjamin wrote, by producing ‘the inconspicuous spot where in the
immediacy of that long-forgotten moment, the future nests so eloquently’
(Benjamin 1999: 510). To look into one of those early photos is to recog-
nise, curled within it, the viewer’s present, as potential and as an
obligation to honour that lost moment: there is a continuum between the
sitter and the viewer. Here re-presentation, while never denying the exist-
ence of the sitter, focuses on what connects the sitter and the viewer: the
continuity of history that relates one to the other. The photographic
snapshot invented in the mass take-up of the Box Brownie created a rift
in time by tearing the stilled instant out of the continuum; both the
continuum of sitter and viewer and the ecological continuum of time.
The snapshot’s capture of reflected light fails to unify image, appearance
and being (in the way drawings could aspire to). And yet, snapshots
have a saving grace, deriving from their exile from the continuum: they
are negatives not only in the technical sense of the physical intermedi-
ary between exposure and print, but because they negate what they
represent – the unhappiness of the world that confronts them as refer-
ent. What we look at and prize in a snapshot is not the truth of the
moment but its non-identity: the capacity of the moment to be other-
wise than it is.
The movies came almost immediately to repair both trauma and
non-identity by adding another image and another and another in emula-
tion of the flow of time that the snapshot had interrupted. They created
a new art whose raw material was time. Scanned and interlaced video
introduced time into the individual frame, and overcame the ending
problem that dogged cinema, replacing the interruption that structured
films as narrative units with unending broadcast flow. Today, however,
there is a new cure for the trauma of images: the mass image construed
in relational databases. In place of the temporal arts of film – montage,
mobility, under- and over-cranking and all – the mass image agglutinates
every image, still and moving, into a single vast, inter-connected artifice.
The mass image heals the rift by negating the negation of the real, so
losing the capacity to picture the world as otherwise than it is. The mass
image is relentlessly positive, and therefore incapable of change. Thus in
28  SEAN CUBITT

its way the mass image fulfils Fox Talbot’s claim to allow reality to write
itself in the photograph. In place of perpetual change, establishing
networks connecting each item to any other is a more complete, more
complex emulation of the planetary ecology than film or broadcast flow
could ever provide.
At the same time, the mass image not only negates the world as poten-
tial but the image too. The mass image is no longer interested in the
image as image, that is, as artefact in and of time, nor even in the tragic
seriality of the moving image, whose striving for impossible completion
so accurately sums up the alienation of humanity from nature. The
mass database collects images not for themselves but as instances of
behaviours and the distributions that behaviours form. Potential as the
presence of futurity is annihilated in the simulation of the world accom-
plished in the mass image, which no longer distinguishes between real
and probabilistic.
The ubiquity of exchange value has its equivalent in the equivalence of
all nodes and all relations in a database. Not only is every image exchange-
able for any other, as is clear from the unique results of every given image
search, but the various forms of relation between images are allocated
numerical values to render the relations machine-readable. These numer-
ical relations distinguish the database from the ecologies, social or
physical, that it still tries not only to replicate (as total image) but to
displace (the represented world-as-data is analysable as messy reality is
not). The total image of the world risks not only emulating the futureless
world of waste and debt, and not only healing the rift in time by ending
time altogether, but of making it appear that the world is truly accounted
for in this architecture without potential, where action can no longer
occur, and no future other than the present can emerge. As Flusser (2013:
57) says, only slightly over-stating the case, ‘[t]he aim of networked
dialogues is not the production of new information but feedback.’
The ecology (in the singular), which includes the natural, techno­
logical and human worlds, is not the same as the internal ecology of a
database. This is so because, firstly, the planetary ecology, dependent on
lunar cycles and sunshine and bathed in cosmic radiation, is borderless,
but there is a definitive outside-of – an outside that defines – the data-
base, which creates and is defined by its externalities and environments.
Secondly, the planetary ecology has no goal, while the goal of proprie-
tary databases is profit. The planetary ecology has an eschatology, the
database has a teleology. The teleology of the mass image is no longer
human, because the profit that it calculates is entirely financial and no
longer anchored in even residual lip-service to the welfare of humanity or
planet; and because the viewer for whom, phenomenologically, the mass
image exists, is no longer human but mechanical. The apocalypse of
 The Mass Image   29

images in database logic heals the rift in time by constructing a timeless,

homeostatic universe which – and this is its tragedy – is also the model of
the ecology seized on by deep ecology and other environmentalist move-
ments. Such cybernetic models of ecology posit stasis as the only
alternative to disaster.
Jennifer Gabrys calls the social effect of this ‘Programmable Earth’:
‘Programmability, the programming of Earth, yields processes for making
new environments not necessarily as extensions of humans, but rather as
new configurations or “techno-geographies” that concretize across tech-
nologies, people, practices, and nonhuman entities’ (Gabrys 2016: 4).
Her analysis not only suggests that the dynamic structuring typical of
the database economy is the pinnacle, to date, of the logistics of empire,
but also makes a critical distinction between environments as techno-­
geographies and as extensions of humans. Those early photographs still
presumed an individual human viewer. Photography and cinemato­graphy
in their use as scientific instruments moved towards a collective subject,
Science, the assembled ‘One who knows’. But with the mass image, the
phenomenological centrality of the human, individual or collective, in
technical media, reformulates the decay of individualism, not into a new
social formation like science, but into a distributed cloud of behaviours.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates this phenomenological crisis more than
the ubiquitous selfie, a photo we capture so repeatedly precisely because
the self is in crisis, an action vainly attempting to anchor its presence as
present in the moment of its dissolution.

The Anthropocene Image

The eternal present of homeostatic systems, among which we must now
count the mass image, is the enemy of history which, as Dipesh Chakra-
barty (2009) has argued, is now indistinguishable from natural history.
The mass image, however, does not exclude the Anthropocene but
attempts to assimilate it. To understand this attempt we have to look at
the genesis and practice of data visualisation so crucial to contemporary
understanding of climate change.
Though it has a precursor in maps (Harley 2001; Kitchin et al. 2017),
data visualisation can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, when
William Playfair’s Statistical Breviary (Wainer and Spence 2005) intro-
duced the use of pie charts, bar charts and line diagrams and standardised
the use of the horizontal t-axis to include time in spatial representation.
Like earlier map-makers, Playfair assembled information garnered from
various sources, reconciled them to his satisfaction, and produced a
visual account. This first stage involved turning already existing narra-
tives and numerical tables into graphical form by an act of abstraction.
30  SEAN CUBITT

The second phase arrived with the design of instruments tailored to the
production of new data in forms ready for abstraction, specifically
instruments that not only tracked vectors, like a compass, but that
returned numerical accounts of the phenomena they observed, like ther-
mometers and seismometers. In the third stage, networks of standardised
measuring instruments provided large, and eventually huge, quantities of
usable readings (Adams 2003; Edwards 2010), processing so as to make
them amenable to the abstracting processes of data visualisation.
One of the instruments tailored for this informational processing was
the photographic camera. The advent of CCD and CMOS chips brought
the principle of sampling into photography. Each discrete pixel on the
chip reacted to incoming photons by averaging their wavelength and
frequency to produce a single value for the pixel over the duration of
exposure, expressed as charge. Digitising the charge (and the addresses
of the pixels it was associated with) produced an account of the light
reaching the whole chip in an array typically arranged in the same order
as the receiving pixels, thus delivering an image. But as anyone who has
used photographic software knows, there are many other ways of read-
ing image files through histograms and other visualisation tools. Digital
images are in this sense visualisations, specific orderings of data in a
form perceptible to humans. They become truly data visualisations
when the recording instrument not only administers light but also the
metadata associated with the exposure (time-stamp and location for
example, corresponding to the address already associated with a particu-
lar colour and luminance value for individual pixels). The mass image
completes the final step in processing the data produced from photons
and their spatio-temporal placing when it organises all images in its
purview under a single topological regime. Structured not only by the
unit-counting of discrete devices and the assimilation of time (starting
with date stamps, rising to the ability to sort vast numbers of images by
date), this topology also conforms the relations between images to the
commodity form.
The mass image is in this sense an already functioning post-human
hybrid of work and labour performed by natural human and technical
agencies. But it is also structured in an ascending hierarchy of enclosure,
the production of units, and the conversion of units into tradable enti-
ties. The isolated unit is subsumed into relational topologies where its
individual characteristics are of diminishing value, but only because they
can be treated as counters in an exchange whose capacity to produce
value is greater than that of the units traded. The depth of this organisa-
tion of what once was given but is now captured, stored and processed
for profit can be seen in the cultural ubiquity of grids, from interfaces to
street maps, and their functional universality in workplace media.
 The Mass Image   31

It is no longer a question of conforming, or attempting to conform,

human perception to the media, because human perception is no longer
central to the media’s functioning. Reduced to their behaviours, humans
need only perceive in order to respond, and their responses have no
agency because they are raw materials for processing as data commodi-
ties. This has its positive side: the individualism that plagued Western
civilisation from Luther to Freud is overcome by a simultaneous dissolu-
tion of the self and the compulsory collection of its fragments into
supra-individual formations that are no longer exclusively human.
Becoming human is an unfinished project. We are in the middle of a sea
change in its history. Since we are no longer senders and receivers, it is
clear that all of us are channels, although not entirely returned to the
primal state in which we were all media. Channels are after all commu-
nicative rather than mediating: they connect pre-existing senders and
receivers, but in this instance the sender and the receiver are the same: the
enclosed feedback loop of a cyborg communication system. Our dreams
of identity are symptoms of our estrangement from this cycle which
nevertheless subsumes us under its own dream of totality.
Individual photographic images are still shaped by an older system,
centred on the camera body imitative of the human eye socket and lenses
designed to reproduce ‘perspective as symbolic form’. That system
persists in promoting the idea that the sovereign individual (historically
denoted by the gender-presumptive ‘Man’) is the focal point and fixed
centre of the universe. The new network system has no centre, its dynamic
topology has no fixity, and it has no focus because it is not primarily
visual (or in any humanly recognisable sense perceptual). At the interface
between these two systems, the human that disappears is only the ‘data
subject’ articulated by the European Union’s General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR), already necessarily performing its commodifying
and biopolitical tasks in the mass image. The human as data is wholly
subsumed, but the human as code, and therefore performative, also
persists as the ghost of work in a world of labour.
The human code is performative, then, but in great measure only for
the network. Its value lies in being an intermediary between the network
(which in its quest for universality must exclude what environs it) and the
planetary ecology it externalises. It is because humans still have bodies
and senses that they can act as intermediaries. At the same time, because
they are both embodied and networked, emblematised in the mass image
as the mismatch between perspective and diagram, humans in the wealthy
sectors of the world – those closest to and most integrated in networks –
are suffering an epidemic of mental illness. Torn between (physical and
therefore ecological) body and (photographic and data-oriented, app-­
mediated) body-image, the contemporary human condition is that of the
32  SEAN CUBITT

schiz once proposed by post-structuralism as the panacea for bourgeois

individualism. Yet this dividual condition is indeed the grounds for a
more generative, post-digital, post-network collectivity. As intermediary
between ecology and technology, the human mass is no longer an aggre-
gate of individuals, a single population acting as an efficient agent in the
market model of economists like von Mises (1998), but an affective
storm, whose capabilities are unexplored and dangerous.
So, too, may prove to be the forces of technology, notably of artificial
intelligences at work analysing the behaviours collected in the mass
image. In the Grundrisse, Marx (1973: 690–711) describes technologies
as ‘dead labour’, the aggregation into concrete form of all the skills and
knowledge gathered by our forerunners, owned and enslaved in the form
of ‘fixed capital’. Where traditional cultures respect and converse with
their ancestors, we keep ours locked in black boxes. Liberating comput-
ers (Nelson 1974) is an admirable strategy towards freedom of all humans
(‘Even the dead will not be safe’, as Benjamin [2003: 391] wrote, if fascism
triumphed); but the risk of auto-orienting AIs is that the ancestors, after
their centuries of isolation and indentured labour, may be mad. The
same may be the case, we are beginning to understand, with the symp-
toms of the Anthropocene, a savage return of repressed nature. All three
phyla – human, technical and natural – are potentially on the brink of
catastrophic breakdown, although it is the technical sphere that seems to
be triumphant in the ubiquity of programming and its embedding not
only in machinery (my computer does not play certain files, not because
it doesn’t want to but because Apple doesn’t want it to) but in, for exam-
ple, the audit culture that everybody hates and few people escape or rebel
against. Affective irrationality is, however, only the obverse of techno-­
rationality; and mental illness is not a solution because it hurts. Politically,
in the day-to-day conduct of public affairs, the Anthropocene features
only as a terrain for antagonism between the credibility of science and
neo-populist table-thumping. As with radicals discovering that they
needed to defend the FBI against Trump, environmentalists rally to the
cause of science, even though science’s credibility and politically progres-
sive credentials are by no means assured. On the negative side, science
rested on a set of protocols designed to produce certainty but which have
moved towards the production of probabilities and the uncertainty prin-
ciple. More self-reflexive but more prone to self-doubt, science no longer
claims to know but to ascertain likelihood. Science no longer lays claim
to Truth as it did in its triumphal era from Newton to Humboldt. On
the positive side, science’s planet-spanning networks have undone an
older faith in the reliability of witnessing, of the self-evident, of the eye-­
witness, of the testimony of my own senses when weighed in the scales
against the witnessing of others, human and nonhuman. Dr Johnson
 The Mass Image   33

could not refute Berkeley today by kicking a stone. The value of this
photograph of a departed friend does not prove that the mass image
doesn’t exist, and vice versa.1
Bereft of universality, truth fails. It cannot form the basis of politics in
its second sense – the pursuit of happiness for all of us – because even
science admits that no truth is universal. The suspiciously coherent rage
of demagogues may truthfully encapsulate the wrath of electorates but
cannot articulate the differences within them, since it is bound to the
logic of representation. The mass image can claim universality but only
by environmentalising the ecology, including much of what we cling to in
our residual and ecologically embedded bodies. Its truth as representa-
tion rests on this curtailed universality, and so is not truth if by truth is
meant a statement that both names and enacts what is the case. The
central problem, especially as expressed in photography and the mass
image, is that the modes of truth they appear to claim rest on either the
identity of the image with the object-world it names, or the self-identity
of the image. In the first case, no flat, rectangular image is the world it
pictures; in the second, both the gap between represented and representa-
tion, and the distinction between the image as image and the image as
print or screen display, demonstrate that there is not even a self-identity
(the image, qua object in the world, does not contain in itself the reason
why it is so and not otherwise). Images are inherently non-identical, and
to that extent cannot be bearers of truth. The unique capacity of photo-
graphic images, however, is to picture not what is the case but the potential
of the represented to become other than it was, since that has already
happened in the moment when the scene in front of the lens became an
image, that is, something utterly different. Photographs do not image the
world as it is but in the moment of its becoming otherwise. They show
the world as it might or could or should have been or be or become.
Photographs are subjunctive.
Or perhaps photographs were subjunctive, and retain the power of the
subjunctive as a residue of their older role that distinguished them from
drawing. Drawing produced a complete and self-sufficient work: photo-
graphs, as tears in the continuum, were insufficient, until the mass image
constructed a framework for producing a total image of the world, an
image which by definition is complete and certainly aims to be self-­
sufficient, specifically in the sense of no longer requiring the world to
complement it. Without that congruence and its inconsistency, the mass
image can no longer reveal the non-identity and therefore the potential of
the world to be otherwise. This could not have come at a worse time. The
subjunctive is the precise mode we need for a humanity defined by its
massed behaviours and a nature in crisis. It is the one mode that can
embrace the pure act of giving that erases itself in the moment of the gift,
34  SEAN CUBITT

and the great chain of giving that modulates and evolves whatever passes
along it. Can it be possible that the subjunctive retains its utopian power
when we consider the mass image as the activity of ancestral labour made
concrete in its apparatus?

The Image Commons

When humans donate their work to a system that abstracts it in the form
of data, property and exchange value, they act exactly as their ancestors
did. Their free gift of knowledge, skill and creativity was concretised in
the dead labour of machinery. So, too, is our living work concretised
in the vast accumulations of the mass image. As we have seen, this must
be understood as an enclosure of free creativity, and a result of the real
subsumption of consumption, but it is also accumulation in the economic
sense of investment in land, machinery and money itself, from which
capital expects to derive profit. Investment implies both accumulation
and the extraction of profit. In theory, corporations invest in human
capital and expect to accumulate and exploit it. In practice, they invest as
little as possible, demanding that other agents, formerly the state, now
the individual, invest in themselves so that capital can exploit them. The
importance of the mass image is that it represents a novel way to accu-
mulate human capital in a form that can be exploited, like technology,
without paying wages. The problem is the risk of over-accumulation.
There appears to be a generalised belief that the accumulation in the
digital industries, especially among the FAANG companies (Facebook,
Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), is infinite; that there will never
come a moment when the accumulation of capital and its reinvestment
fails to find new consumers. There is a degree of truth in this belief. The
systems of image capital are premised on a feedback loop whose major
channel is human behaviours and which can be constantly monitored to
track evolving desires and meet these with evolving products. This
solution succeeds earlier ones – continuing enclosure of new sources of
physical or informational wealth (primitive accumulation seen as a
permanent resort of capital since Rosa Luxemburg’s 1913 analysis
[Luxemburg 1951], moving fixed capital to new territories and the crea-
tion of new markets). Each of those, however, eventually comes up against
the limits of growth, marked in our instance by the finite resources of the
planet characterised most distinctively by the Anthropocene. Culturally
we are caught between faith in infinite continuation of the present regime
of accumulation and fear of its sudden and catastrophic demise as a
result of external factors. But these factors only appear external because
they have been environmentalised, excluded as externalities from the
internal working of a total system that recognises nothing beyond itself.
 The Mass Image   35

This contradiction, rather than the contradiction between over-accumu-

lation and under-consumption that instigated the debt crisis of 2007, sets
the new terms for a new crisis. We have grown used to the idea that capi-
tal never lets a good crisis go to waste: that there are always factions
within capital that make a profit from disaster. We also have a historical
record that tells us that economic crises have a tendency to favour despot-
ism. The exceptions have been aspects of Keynesianism and welfarism,
state infrastructural investment providing employment to enable new
consumption and state investment in social well-being to create new con­
sumption and new opportunities for capital to contract for state business.
There is every reason to ask why the oppressed have not similarly made
the most of crises.
For historical reasons – basically the privatisation of telecoms in the
Reagan–Thatcher era just before the internet and mobile communication
booms – the state has little traction in the infrastructure or regulation
of digital networks. In the period since the welfarist epoch in the wake of
the Second World War, the historical trend has been towards state capture
(Hellman et al. 2000), to the point that even the most powerful political
factions are constrained to deliver the requirements of corporate and
other capital – so bitterly clear in the incapacity of states to rein in the
fossil fuel industries. Yet it is also the case that states act as a major buffer
between their populations and the worst predations of capital (du Gay
2005). Regulation is correctly seen as the operation of power, but in many
instances it is also the site of operations of resistance, assaulted by capi-
tal as ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘red tape’ opposed to the untrammelled working
of the profit motive. This resistance has emerged historically as noise in
the technical system, both environmental noise from beyond the system
and system-generated noise, deriving from insufficiently disciplined
uploaders and the internal frictions of operating protocols and the hard-
ware they run on. Since the system reduces significance to a minimum in
order to prioritise pure exchange, meaning functions as noise and vice
versa: noise is meaningful. Where desire cannot be directly expressed but
only assimilated indirectly in the form of behaviours, it operates as
meaningful noise; and we should take technically generated and ecologi-
cal noise as the expression of the excluded and unassimilated desires of
natural and technical phyla.
Affective images – images designed to shock, images of excess – do
not work in this way. They provide a reward for the beleaguered self in
the form of feedback rather than new information, and reinforce the illu-
sion that meaning is generated by and for a self rather than in a channel
operating within a total system. If instead we take affect as the condition
of primal mediation, then its mobilisation as meaningful noise, that is
to say, desire, matches far better the new condition of distributed
36  SEAN CUBITT

behaviours. Thus on the one hand humans become more intensely organ-
ised as channels and intermediaries through their dissolution into
behaviours optimised for data mining, but on the other, beyond the behav-
ioural schiz they become less exclusively human, approaching more and
more the condition of ancestors and, as affect, the condition of nature.
It is time to reverse Stallman’s motto, ‘Free as in speech, not free as in
beer’. Today free speech is not the right of free citizens that proves they
are free, but compulsory and unpaid participation in generating content
(Dean 2005). Nor does Stuart Brand’s slogan ‘Information wants to be
free’ foot the bill, not because information wants to be shared or has no
volition of its own but because, as information, it has already lost the
freedom of the gift. Instead, we could be forgiven for arguing, the visual
wants to be free as in free beer: without cost, and prone to evoke jollity
and mayhem rather than efficiency or, least likely, equilibrium.
The atomisation of the self has also shown that there is no single
happiness that binds us: if there is to be a ‘we’, then not a single one can
be left behind. If there is to be a ‘we’ adequate to the intermediary status
of humans, it must be inclusive, and therefore bring to an end the politi-
cal exclusion of ecology and technology, domains that are governed
without a role in their own governing. The primordial soup of mediation
is symmetrical: the same in every direction, forwards and backwards in
time. Communication, with its structural division of sender, channel and
receiver, introduced time as the condition of the message and its inter-
ruptions. At root belonging to the indicative mood that separates the
speaker from the spoken (‘There is a tree’), communication has always
been vulnerable to takeover by the imperative (‘Let the tree exist’). In its
seizure of distribution, network communication not only assumes the
imperative as the formal mood of software design but arrests the forward
trajectory of time implicit in the communicative model, producing not
timeless symmetry but the eternity of perpetual feedback. Noise  –
glitches, breakdowns, crises of over-production, over-accumulation and,
more recently, over-distribution  – reintroduces history as the zone of
conflict within and between material and informational levels of the
network.
The greatest of these crises is ecological, and on it depends the specific
operation of older culturally specific binaries (religious, ethnic, gendered).
The eternity of distributed networks has taken to itself a second mood,
adding to the imperative the conditional, which allows it to simulate the
future as projection of present data. Given that simulation is predomi-
nantly a technique for protecting against risk, it is ironic that many
simulations point towards catastrophe. Humans are caught between
image regimes: on one side the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC)’s infamous hockey stick diagram of vertiginously rising
 The Mass Image   37

temperatures; on the other emblematic images of a polar bear on an ice

floe, shattering glaciers, or roof-stranded citizens of Dhaka. Any photo
or video short outdoors today bears evidence of air pollution. Sharing
and liking only assimilates these futures into the planned regime of
networks, governed now more by concerns for security (as in climate
change security for the wealthy masked as anti-migrant and anti-poor
security and the ‘war on terror’ [Werrell and Femia 2018]) than for the
welfare of humans, planet or even the technological infrastructure of
the system itself.
The great skill of revolution is to precipitate a crisis that the oppressor
cannot benefit from but the oppressed can. One possibility is an image
strike: to refuse to make, upload or interact with images. For that to work
beyond the individualist ethics of a consumer boycott requires organis­
ation on the scale of the industrial-era trades unions which, however, can
always be criticised for adopting the same disciplinary structures as the
factory discipline they aimed to end. More powerful are those move-
ments which have aimed at new organisational principles and new tasks,
like the shop stewards’ movement at Lucas Aerospace in the UK in the
1970s that proposed to turn the factories over from arms to socially
useful products (Salisbury 2019). Now, in the era of distribution, it is not
only production but distribution that needs to be remade. Practices
aimed at developing tactics and strategies that might precipitate the crisis
for the planetary oppressed are everywhere. Their major characteristic is
their claim to the commons, from collaborative art and social projects to
the Peer-to-Peer movement, and their openness to a future which, unlike
the conditional simulations of the network, is entirely subjunctive. The
lesson of the mass image for this aesthetic politics is that the future need
not and should not be planned; and that it can only emerge in a working
(but not labouring) alliance of humans, nature and technology. Already
necessarily exceeding the prison-house of networks and the limits of
human chauvinism, the means of revolution must be as joyful as the end.

Coda
Labour in the mass image is everywhere freely given and everywhere in
chains. It encompasses

1. the work of the planetary ecosystem and the labour of capturing the
free gift of light and natural processes;
2. the work of uploaders and viewers, freely donated, and the labour of
converting it into copyright-protected and exchangeable units; and
3. the work of ancestors to devise skills and knowledges, an unforced
legacy purloined as forced labour in the form of machinery and
constrained to convert the use value of units into exchange value.
38  SEAN CUBITT

In all three cases, natural, human and technical work initially forms a
commons which is then enclosed and exploited in the interests of capital.
The initial work involves sharing; the labour involves ownership: convert-
ing into units, commodifying, and reducing to exchange value. It is clear
that the labour component of these three layers of activity is entirely
unnecessary, inefficient and absurd, since its only effect is to add a price
tag to free beer. The mass image is novel because it completes the circuit
of enclosure, objectification and conversion to exchange value. In the
mass image, the real subsumption of consumption completes the cycle by
converting viewing from playful reprocessing into labour. This happens
in two phases. First, consumption becomes purposeful, a trait exploited
by the excessive efficiency of search engines, which always deliver what
you look for. The purpose of search engines is to provide gratification, in
much the same way that classical cinema does: creating a desire in Shot A
to see something, then magically providing it in Shot B. Gratification
becomes self-fulfilling when we associate searching and finding as a
single moment. Second, purposes become readable in the form of clicks,
links and likes, and so become tradable data. Desires and gratifications,
now identical, can form new objects, whose organisation into larger
aggregations in database topologies provides the end-user  – no longer
the viewer but the database itself – with an image of gratified desire on
which to build new self-enclosed micro-circuits of aspiration and fulfil-
ment whose efficiency can be instantly read off from the next set of
viewer behaviours. The result of this system is stasis, as such imitating
homeostatic models of the free market and environmentalism with their
belief that, if only aberrant agents like states and humans stopped inter-
fering, the system would be perfectly self-equilibrating. Work is time,
labour is eternity.
Unifying the collectivity of the three phyla in strength and hope at the
crossroads of resistance, desire and meaning, the name of the commons
is beauty.

Note
1. This does not prove that truth is relative, only that (phenomenologically) it
appears differently to different observers. However, if truth is not manifest
in itself but only in appearance, then it is no longer singular and self-­
sufficient, and therefore is not Truth as it was defined in the classical
scientific era.
 The Mass Image   39

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3 Beyond Human Measure:
Eccentric Metrics
in Visual Culture
Tomáš Dvořák

What was too small for the eye to detect was read by the
aggregates; what was too large, by the units. (Emerson 2009: 23)

RAFAeL LoZAno-HeMMeR’s project Zero Noon from 2013 is a digital

clock that uses hundreds of different reference systems to ‘tell time’: it
displays numbers of various occurrences on a clock dial, starting each day
at noon. The clock aligns and compares the counts of, for example, the
heartbeat of an average human being, quads of solar energy that hit the
Earth, spam emails received, plastic bags used, deportations that have
taken place in the US, Google website visits, tonnes of tortillas eaten in
Mexico, UFOs spotted in Canada, suicides committed worldwide, numbers
of financial transactions in Brazil, or the number of animal species that
become extinct per day. The work is based on internet-refreshed statistics
that come from government, financial and academic institutions, NGOs or
media and reveal the immense scope of quantification of various natural,
social, cultural, economic and other processes produced and released in
nearly real-time. By gathering and synchronising them on one display, or
several coordinated displays, Lozano-Hemmer makes these measurements
commensurable: the viewer can switch from one metric to another with the
push of a button, comparing them according to their own pace. ‘The appli-
cation of quantitative methods of thought to the study of nature had its
first manifestation in the regular measurement of time’ (Mumford 1934:
12); by remediating the clock dial with data from mobile apps, self-tracking
devices, GPS trackers, scientific instruments and statistical offices, Zero
Noon manages to link the current quantification rush with aged and sedi-
mented practices of taking the measure of things in order to understand
and control them (Figures 3.1 to 3.3).
The following chapter will address encounters with similar kinds of
metrics, ones we experience on a daily basis. Quantified descriptions and
42  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

self-descriptions seem to reveal something about us and the world we

inhabit, yet we know that they are not simple representations of some
pre-existing reality, but rather, generative methods that construct that
world and, most importantly, specify our position in it through measur-
ing, scoring, ranking and scaling. I will be not so much concerned with
the reliability of similar data or with the broader issues surrounding the
information economy, but primarily with the problem of confronting
oneself with these figures. How do observers of Zero Noon relate to the
numbers they see, browse through, and correlate? Can we understand
metricisation as a process that contributes to ‘the invention and projec-
tion of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale’
that Fredric Jameson (1991: 54) proposed over thirty years ago? Or does
it instead partake in a visual and discursive regime that is inherently
decentring, ‘that disorients under the banner of orientation’ (Kurgan
2013: 26)? In other words, are the numbers and patterns created from
them an unacceptable and distorting reduction of our lives or are they

Figures 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer:
Zero Noon, 2013.
Photograph by
Antimodular Research.
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    43

the essential, and perhaps the only, tool of achieving greater awareness of
complex matters in the contemporary world?

The Epoch of the Gigantic

This book is concerned with numbers of images  – large and growing
numbers of images, to be precise. The number of pictures taken or
uploaded per second would be an apt addition to Zero Noon’s metrics:
the count seems so excessive that it suggests some kind of phase trans­
ition, a change in the state or character of what was once known as
photography. The staggering statistics and metaphors of exponential
growth imply a transformation, a leap through which the quantity of
images becomes their new quality.
Interestingly enough, the origin of this figure of thought historically
coincides with the emergence of photography itself, specifically with the
developments in chemistry around 1800, a crucial field for the establishment
44  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

of our medium. Although the ‘law of transformation’ by which quantita-

tive change becomes qualitative change is best known from Marxism – as
formulated in Marx’s Capital and Engels’s Anti-Dühring – and from the
later vulgar versions of dialectical materialism – especially the twentieth-­
century Soviet pataphysics of Michurin and Lysenko – the idea was first
conceived by Hegel in his Science of Logic (its two volumes were published
in 1812 and 1816; the revised edition in 1832).
Hegel introduces three stages of the determination of being: ‘qual-
ity’ is the determinacy that is identical with being and is immediate;
‘quantity’ is indifferent and external to it. A house remains a house,
whether it is bigger or smaller; red remains red, whether it is brighter or
darker. The third stage is ‘measure’: the unity of quality and quantity,
‘qualitative quantity’, in which the being attains its complete determi-
nacy. All things have their measure or magnitude as they are determined
both qualitatively and quantitatively, and although the quantity is to
some degree indifferent to them, it has its limits. Hegel illustrates this
point by the classical philosophical paradoxes of ‘the bald’ and ‘the
heap’:

The question was put: does the plucking of one hair from someone’s head
or from a horse’s tail produce baldness, or does a heap cease to be a heap
if one grain is removed? The expected answer can safely be conceded, for
the removal amounts to a merely quantitative difference, and an insignifi-
cant one at that. And so one hair is removed, one grain, and this is repeated
with only one hair and one grain being removed each time the answer is
conceded. At last the qualitative alteration is revealed: the head or the tail
is bald; the heap has vanished. In conceding the answer, it was not only the
repetition that was each time forgotten, but also that the individually
insignificant quantities (like the individually insignificant disbursements
from a patrimony) add up, and the sum constitutes the qualitative whole,
so that at the end this whole has vanished: the head is bald, the purse is
empty. (Hegel 2010: 290)

These examples show that the quantitative is not wholly arbitrary or

external and cannot be divorced from the qualitative since the alteration,
which at first appears to be only quantitative, suddenly changes into a
qualitative one. There is a certain critical or tipping point that interrupts
the gradual change and induces an irruption of another state, a leap, just
as the alterations of water temperature don’t just make it colder or
warmer but at some point cause it to pass into solid or gaseous states. In
the section on measure, Hegel refers to contemporary developments
in chemistry (oriented at the time towards determining qualitative differ-
ences between elements through numerical classifications) and converts
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    45

its concepts into categories of logic. The category of measure is, however,
applicable beyond the realms of natural science or logic:

In moral matters, inasmuch as they are treated in the sphere of being, there
occurs the same transition of the quantitative into the qualitative; different
qualities appear to be based on a difference in magnitude. It is by a more
and less that the measure of frivolous delinquence is overstepped and
something entirely different comes irresistibly the scene, namely crime
which makes right into wrong and virtue into vice.  – Thus states, too,
acquire through their quantitative difference, other things being assumed
equal, a different qualitative character. The laws and the constitution of a
state alter in character whenever its territory and the number of its citizens
expand. A state has its own measure of magnitude and, if this measure is
trespassed, it irresistibly disintegrates internally under the same constitu-
tion which, when with just different proportions, was the source of its
good fortune and strength. (Hegel 2010: 322–3)

For Hegel, both nature and society are discrete, made of different
orders of magnitude or scale domains. Although quantitative dimensions
seem to unroll continuously in abstract universality and we can measure,
for example, physical length from nanometres to parsecs, the world
behaves differently in various regions of the scale, according to its
measure.
Martin Heidegger picked up on this point in his seminal lecture ‘The
Age of the World Picture’ from the mid-1930s, a critical analysis of the
metaphysical foundations of modernity through the interrelated
processes of science becoming research, humans becoming subjects and
the world becoming a picture. In the modern age, the human subject
became the measure of all things by calculating, planning and moulding
the world to its disposal. Techniques and processes of quantification and
calculation that made the world representable expanded to the point at
which the ‘gigantic’ made its appearance. The gigantic is not the endlessly
extended emptiness of the purely quantitative, says Heidegger, it is
‘rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and
thus a remarkable kind of greatness’ (Heidegger 1977: 135). It manifests
itself in the very large and simultaneously in the very small; for example,
in the numbers of atomic physics, in the annihilation of great distances
by modern modes of transportation, or in the bringing of remote worlds
close to us daily, by way of photography or radio.

But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and
making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special
quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated
46  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable. (Heidegger

1977: 135)

Quantifying and calculating become excessive when reaching scales

beyond human measure. Although we can still take measure of extreme
phenomena in certain ways, they become unrepresentable in the tradi-
tional sense; an invisible shadow is cast around the well-structured world.
‘By means of this shadow the modern world extends itself out into a
space withdrawn from representation’ (Heidegger 1977: 136). Heidegger
understands modern technology as a way of seeing – a structured percep-
tion of things as extended, calculable, measurable and controllable, ‘the
pattern of generally calculable explainability, by which everything draws
nearer to everything else equally and becomes completely alien to itself’
(Heidegger 1999: 92). The gigantic is not only a figure of extreme propor-
tions; it is also a name for the shift in which the technologies of
world-picture-making develop into something unimaginable. Our ethics,
aesthetics and epistemology, whose basic principles were formulated in
previous centuries under conditions of low population density, shorter
life span, smaller states and seemingly unlimited access to resources, face
the problem of the gigantic:

The Anthropocene is itself an emergent ‘scale effect’. That is, at a certain,

indeterminate threshold, numerous human actions, insignificant in them-
selves (heating a house, clearing trees, flying between the continents, forest
management) come together to form a new, imponderable physical event,
altering the basic ecological cycles of the planet. (Clark 2015: 72)

Universal Equivalent
The effects of systematic foregathering on visual culture were analysed in
André Malraux’s incisive study The Imaginary Museum from 1947. The
rise of museums in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries imposes
a wholly new attitude on spectators: as works of art are brought together,
they are measured and valued against one another and simultaneously
divorced from their original contexts. ‘For they have tended to estrange
the works they bring together from their original functions and to trans-
form even portraits into “pictures”’ (Malraux 1974: 14). In a museum (or
a dealer’s shop), the portrait’s model is suppressed, and the image is
determined instead by the name of its maker; ‘Rembrandts’ and ‘Titians’
become kinds of brand names. Assembling large numbers of artworks in
museums evokes the idea of a collection of all the world’s artworks,
further propagated by art reproductions. It is, first of all, photographic
reproductions that disclose the universe of artworks in its entirety.
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    47

‘Photography . . . seemed destined merely to perpetuate established

values. But actually an ever greater range of works is being reproduced,
in ever greater numbers, while the technical conditions of reproduction
are influencing the choice of works selected’ (Malraux 1974: 17).
Photographic reproductions extend the realm of available artworks
from masterpieces to less significant works, thus transforming the very
understanding of what a masterpiece is and substituting contemplation
for an intellectualised attitude of pitting works of art against each other.
Such an effect is not limited, however, to reproductions of artworks.
As early as 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes published his praise of the
stereoscope and in its final paragraphs outlined the future development
of photography. In a confusing mixture of allusions to Aristotelian
physics and ancient atomists’ theory of vision, Holmes understands
photographs as forms divorced from matter; thin membranes that peel
off objects to be fixed by the camera:

There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of poten-
tial negatives have they shed, – representatives of billions of pictures, – since
they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear;
form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now,
and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of
Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. (Holmes 1980: 60)

Holmes envisions the formation of public and private stereographic

collections that would house and preserve these billions of images and
calls for ‘a comprehensive system of exchanges’ to facilitate their use. He
compares photographs to bank notes; money is his main metaphor for
the stereoscope’s dematerialised forms. In his 1981 essay ‘The Traffic in
Photographs’, Allan Sekula suggests that Holmes’s description of
photography is analogous to the capitalist exchange process, in which
exchange values are detached from the use values of commodities, and
concludes that:

For Holmes, photographs stand as the ‘universal equivalent’, capable of

denoting the quantitative exchangeability of all sights. Just as money is the
universal gauge of exchange value, uniting all the world goods in a single
system of transactions, so photographs are imagined to reduce all sights to
relations of formal equivalence. (Sekula 1984: 99)

We may extend Sekula’s analogy even further, beyond the parallelism of

photography and bourgeois political economy. Thinkers like Weber,
Simmel and Sombart have recognised that an economic system is deter-
mined by socially evolved calculative practices (of accounting and
48  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

bookkeeping), and the rational economic mentality emerges within the

larger and deeper tendency of mathematisation and parameterisation of
nature and society. It has been common in writings on photography to
stress its reliance on the laws of optics and chemistry, thus furnishing the
belief in the mathematical and objective truth of the camera. The behav-
iour of light and the nature of photochemical reactions, however, do not
imply any necessary form of representation – the photographic image is
not natural or neutral in any way but instead governed by a set of discur-
sive and graphic conventions. Photography, an industrial product of
modern science as research, capitalises on modern society’s ‘trust in
numbers’ (Porter 1995) and its cultural techniques of quantification that
translate our confusing and complex world into the standardised
language of numbers. It is part of a broader set of technologies of repre-
senting and governing, including official statistics of modern states, the
expansion of markets and capitalist economies, the introduction of
unified systems of measurements and calibrated scientific instruments,
or standardisation in industry and trade.
A number of authors have commented on these elective affinities,
switching from Holmes’s optimistic outlook to a more critical assess-
ment. Susan Sontag is a case in point: ‘Crushed hopes, youth antics,
colonial wars, and winter sports are alike – are equalised by the camera.
Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world
which levels the meaning of all events’ (Sontag 1977: 11). ‘Photography’
or the ‘camera’ is often treated in these writings as taken for granted,
thus prolonging the faith in its scientific neutrality. It is not, in fact,
photography as such that has this effect but rather the techniques, prac-
tices and conventions that constitute photography as we know it. Holmes
already hinted at the fact that the making of photographs needs to be
standardised first:

To render comparison of similar objects, or of any that we may wish to see

side by side, easy, there should be a stereographic metre or fixed standard
of focal length for the camera lens, to furnish by its multiples or fractions,
if necessary, the scale of distances, and the standard of power in the stereo­
scope lens. In this way the eye can make the most rapid and exact
comparisons. (Holmes 1980: 60)

To make things commensurable and to stabilise and standardise

phenomena, we need techniques of measurement and standardisation,
which first have to be standardised themselves. Before stating that photo-
graphs reduce all sights to relations of formal equivalence or that they
level meaning of all events, we have to ask how and why photography has
become this universal gauge in the first place. Looking at professional or
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    49

pre-automatic photographic gear and materials, one quickly realises how

essential measuring is to photography. The camera is covered with
numbers, for the amount of light reaching the film or image sensor must
be tamed by aperture size and shutter speed. Focal length is a measure of
the convergence or divergence of light in the optical system; photographic
processing involves measuring the density and contrast and close control
of temperature, agitation or time. Any photograph is the result of a
complex series of measurements, often embodied into standards and
norms to facilitate the process. Even though in most contemporary
devices the computing is done automatically and without our knowl-
edge, it does not preclude the fact that every pretty picture emerges out
of sedimented practices of measuring, scaling, grading and calibrating.

Disproportion of Vision
‘Astronomical’ figures originated, not surprisingly, in astronomy.
Although measuring the universe has always dealt with large numbers, it
was only during the seventeenth century that the proportions  – the
number of stars, their distance from the Earth and the size of the
universe – expanded truly off the scale and beyond human imagination.
The de-centring of the universe resulted in eccentric figures. In the
pre-modern, ancient and medieval world, the reach of the human senses
corresponded with the limits of the universe and human beings were
understood to be naturally endowed with the capacity to experience and
know their surrounding world. The human sensorium was believed to be
made to the measure of the world, compatible with it and in proportion
to it. Hans Blumenberg speaks of traditional astronomy’s ‘postulate of
visibility’, which ‘corresponds to the assumptions of an anthropology in
which man and cosmos are seen as coordinated in such a way that no
essential incongruence can be assumed between man’s organic equip-
ment and the constituents of reality’ (Blumenberg 1987: 629).
The Copernican Revolution and the discoveries of the telescope and
microscope have significantly undermined this postulate and led to the
divorce of the human senses from reality (or, more precisely, a redefining
of what reality is) while substituting incommensurability and immeasur-
ability for the symmetrical construction of the finite universe and man’s
central position in it.

The breakdown of the postulate of visibility – understood in the widest

sense – is brought to a point by a kind of reversal: The visible world is not
only a tiny section of physical reality, but is also, qualitatively, the mere
foreground of this reality, its insignificant surface, on which the outcome
of processes and forces is only symptomatically displayed. Visibility is
50  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

itself an eccentric configuration, the accidental convergence of hetero­

geneous sequences of physical events. (Blumenberg 1987: 642–3)

The new optics of the seventeenth century exposed the immensity of

nature and opened up other scales, inaccessible to human beings directly.
In the process of making the previously unseen visible by means of optical
instruments, the meaning of vision and sensory perception was redefined
and denaturalised. The telescope does not just make new things visible; it
demonstrates the difference between the visible and the invisible and
reconstructs eye vision and telescopic vision as distinct regimes of visibil-
ity, where the theory of the instrument is informed by the theory of the
eye, and vice versa. All observation is made conditional, dependent on its
medium and surrounded by new realms of the imperceptible: telescopic
vision simultaneously generates an anaesthetic field. ‘We may understand
this as the birth of a certain idea of science, positioned in the awkward
space between sensory evidence and abstraction’ (Vogl 2007: 22).
A similar abyss can be found at the other extreme, the microcosm.
Blaise Pascal famously described humans’ humiliating position between
the two infinities of science in his fragment on ‘Man’s Disproportion’,
where he finds us situated between the extremities of the miniature and
the gigantic, between the vastness of the firmament and the most delicate
things known:

Limited as we are in every respect, this condition of holding the midpoint

between two extremes is apparent in all our faculties. Our senses perceive
nothing extreme. Too much noise deafens us; too much light dazzles, too
great a distance or proximity hinders our view. A great length or great
brevity obscures the discourse; too much truth confounds us . . . We feel
neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Qualities in excess are harmful to
us and cannot be perceived: we no longer feel but suffer them . . . In short,
extremes are for us as though they did not exist, nor we for them. They
escape us, or we them. (Pascal 2004: 61)

The incommensurability of the human perceptual mesocosm with the

molecular and cosmic dimensions of nature gave rise to the new aesthetic
concept of the sublime. The new postulate of invisibility also became a
recurrent topos in philosophy; it often surfaces as the invisible shadow of
technological breakthroughs in the visualisation of new layers of reality.
But we may also encounter various attempts at reconciling the propor-
tions of the human sensorium to the world.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote his short but remarkable fragment,
‘That More than Five Senses are Possible for Human Beings’, at the very
close of his life, most likely in 1780. In several paragraphs, he outlines a
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    51

conception of human development from simple forms to complex and

advanced ones: human sensory apparatus is not fixed once and for all but
evolves towards greater refinement and complexity. Our present stage of
five senses was achieved through the combinatorics of individual ones:
the soul ‘will first have had each of these senses singly, then all ten combi-
nations of two, all ten combinations of three, and all five combinations
of four before it acquired all five together’ (Lessing 2005: 180). The pres-
ent combination is not, however, the final stage of development: senses
determine the limits of the soul’s representations, they are their order
and measure and the way the soul is conjoined with matter – the senses
are themselves material. Matter, however, is not monolithic; it contains
homogeneous elements or masses that correspond to particular senses.
Because we know that there are more than five homogeneous matters
(although we cannot know for sure how many there are in the world alto-
gether), we can assume that more senses are possible:

Thus, just as the sense of sight corresponds to the homogeneous mass

through which bodies attain a condition of visibility (i.e. light), so also is
it certain that particular senses can and will correspond, e.g., to electrical
matter or magnetic matter, senses through which we shall immediately
recognize whether bodies are in an electrical or magnetic state. We can at
present attain this knowledge only by conducting experiments. (Lessing
2005: 181)

Lessing illustrates his thesis with the classic motive of sensory impair-
ment: if we lacked vision, for example, we would not be able to form
any conception of it. After gaining sight, a ‘whole new world will
suddenly emerge for us, full of the most splendid phenomena’ (Lessing
2005: 182). In the same way, we are aware (thanks to scientific research)
of the existence of electrical or magnetic powers, but we cannot perceive
them because we haven’t developed special senses for them yet. Human
perception is dependent upon a psychophysical constitution, which is not
invariable.
Of course, Lessing does not speak in terms of purely biological evolu-
tion; his system is ‘the oldest of all philosophical systems’, the system of
the soul’s pre-existence and of metempsychosis. The idea of a process in
which an immortal soul migrates into new complex beings was very
popular in Lessing’s time; aside from a rich tradition of metempsychosis
speculation, he was most likely inspired by Charles Bonnet’s theory of
palingenesis.
Bonnet was one of the first authors to use the term evolution, although
in a different manner to how we understand it from the nineteenth
century on. His Leibnizian approach to evolution was marked by a belief
52  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

in preformation, according to which every living being encapsulates in

itself a primordial seed, an unchanging miniature replica of itself that is
activated at fertilisation and develops into new identical organisms. At
the creation of Earth, all future generations of living beings were embod-
ied in these primordial germs, and the breeding of new creatures is
essentially the production of an endless series of copies of a given species.
Preformationism excludes change or variation in the later evolutionary
sense. It is not, however, an entirely static system. In his Philosophical
Palingenesis of 1769, Bonnet delineates an image of catastrophic revolu-
tions that radically alter living conditions on Earth and lead to new
rebirths. The physical bodies of organisms are destroyed during these
periodical catastrophes, but their germs survive and are born again into
new worlds. These new worlds bring about different living conditions
from the preceding ones, which is the reason why organisms acquire new
forms corresponding to these new environments. ‘I conceive that the
germs of all organized beings were originally constructed or calculated
with a determinate correlation with the diverse revolutions which our
globe was to undergo,’ says Bonnet (cited in Lovejoy 1936: 285). Cata-
strophic revolutions are predetermined, just like the forms of the living,
and they allow organisms to evolve towards greater biological complex-
ity and higher spiritual perfection.

Translating the Scales

One consequence of the abandonment of the geocentric universe was a
radical enlargement of the cosmos, by orders of magnitude. If the
Earth orbits the Sun, how could constellations of stars look the same
from all points along the orbit? This would be possible only if the stars
were so far away that, from their perspective, the trajectory of the earth
is negligible, a mere single dot. Around 1600, distances of the fixed
stars were guessed at thousands of earth radii, while around 1700 the
distance of the nearest stars was estimated to be billions of the same
units.

[T]he distance to the nearest fixed stars in terrestrial radii, let alone in
miles, was awkward to express and almost impossible to comprehend. In
the Middle Ages the then almost incomprehensible distance to the fixed
stars, 20,000 e.r., had been illustrated by the calculation of how many
years Adam would still have to walk, at a rate of 25 miles per day, to reach
the fixed stars, had he started his journey on the day he was created. Now
a new illustration was needed. Huygens’s cannon ball, traveling at 600 ft/sec.
was adequate for distance within the solar system, but it would take
691,600 years to reach a fixed star which he had calculated to be 27,664
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    53

times as far away as the Sun. Such a time span, was, however, itself difficult
to comprehend. (Van Helden 1985: 159)

The newly discovered magnitudes exceeded not only human experi-

ence or the traditional Christian time frame of a few thousands of years;
they were impossible to imagine, and so a number of rhetorical devices
were invented in an effort to translate them into comprehensible scales.
Huygens switched from distances to the time needed for a swift cannon
ball to traverse such a distance. Another common simile was that of a
falling body. Before geology, deep time was discovered as an equivalent of
extreme distances. Jean de La Bruyère is an illustrative case in point since
his writings addressed courtly society rather than astronomers. In his
explanation, the speed of an orbiting moon is ‘five thousand six hundred
times faster than a race-horse running twelve miles an hour’, the course
of Saturn is ‘above fifty-four hundred millions of miles in circumference;
so that a race-horse, if supposed to run thirty miles an hour, must be
twenty thousand five hundred and forty-eight years in going this round’.
The distance between Sun and Earth is illustrated by a falling millstone:
if it comes down ‘with all swiftness imaginable, and even swifter than the
heaviest bodies descend’, it will take 114 years to fall down. This distance,
if compared to that of the other stars, ‘is so inconsiderable, that compar-
ison is an improper term when mentioning such distances; for, indeed,
what proportion is there between anything that can be measured, what-
ever its extent may be, and that which is beyond all mensuration?’ (La
Bruyère 1885: 480–2)
The question is whether and how we can translate that which is beyond
all mensuration into our quotidian earthbound world of limited facul-
ties; whether and how we can place the gigantic into some sort of
comprehensible perspective; and whether and how we can see phenom-
ena whose existence is hidden to an observer with field of vision limited
by the humanly meaningful coordinates of locale or lifetime. ‘After
months of record temperatures, scientists say Greenland’s ice sheet expe-
rienced its biggest melt of the summer on Thursday, losing 11 billion tons
of surface ice to the ocean – equivalent to 4.4 million Olympic swimming
pools’ (Tutton 2019).
It may be due to the limits of my own imagination, but I have to confess
that the comparison doesn’t help me at all. I somehow understand it is a
huge amount and an irregular and alarming event; however, I am not able
to picture millions of Olympic swimming pools any better than billions
of tonnes of ice. We encounter similar conversions almost daily, when-
ever there is some excessive, out-of-place occurrence. We usually
understand them as ‘records’. There is a close connection between the
meaning of the word ‘record’ as an item of information that is put down
54  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

Figure 3.4  A 2.4-kg chicken is

pictured next to 14,600,000
bolivars, its price and the
equivalent of 2.22 USD, at a
mini-market in the low-income
neighborhood of Catia in
Caracas, Venezuela, 16 August
2018. Globe Media/Reuters/
Garcia Rawlins.

Figure 3.5  A kilogram of carrots

is pictured next to 3,000,000
bolivars, its price and the
equivalent of 0.46 USD, at a
mini-market in the low-income
neighborhood of Catia in
Caracas, Venezuela, 16 August
2018. Globe Media/Reuters/
Garcia Rawlins.

in some physical medium (as when we write down daily temperatures in

a table to preserve them and make available for comparison) and as the
most extreme value or achievement. Recording produces records, compar-
isons and ranking. In 2017, FC Barcelona sold the Brazilian footballer
Neymar to Paris Saint-Germain. He became the most expensive player to
date, worth 222 million euros. The press and social media were immedi-
ately filled with nonsensical conversions and comparisons that were
meant to put the exceptional transfer fee into some kind of perspective,
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    55

asking typically what one can buy for the price of one Neymar: three
Boeing 737–700 passenger planes; enough spaghetti to cover Barcelona;
792,000,000 Freddo chocolate bars; the entire GDP of Tuvalu or 0.001%
of the US national debt (BBC 2017). Eccentric figures can be measured
only by other eccentric figures. It almost seems as if they should have
their own category of numerals: before the Hindu-Arabic notation, the
Egyptian hieroglyph for 1,000,000 or ‘many’ was expressed by a man
with his arms stretched toward heaven in amazement.
An inflated value  – one that is higher than it should be or than is
reasonable – asks to be turned into a quotidian, commonplace measure
in order to be comprehended at all. Price inflation, namely hyper­inflation,
has created its own photographic trope, juxtaposing images of everyday
food and household items with piles of near-worthless banknotes. One
recent example is the Venezuelan currency the bolivar, which hit
1,698,488% inflation in 2018. At the time, a 2.4-kilogram chicken cost
14,600,000 bolivars, a toilet roll 2,600,000 bolivars, a bunch of carrots
3,000,000 bolivars (BBC 2018) (Figures 3.4 to 3.6).
The photographs visualise the disproportion between a conventional,
expected price, where money is believed to have some ‘real’ value or

Figure 3.6  A roll of toilet paper is pictured next to 2,600,000 bolivars, its price and
the equivalent of 0.40 USD, at a mini-market in the low-income neighborhood of
Catia in Caracas, Venezuela, 16 August 2018. Globe Media/Reuters/Garcia Rawlins.
56  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

‘substance’, and the hyperinflated medium of money, which ceases to be

the measure of anything but its own deterioration. The everyday prod-
ucts provide scale, like a human next to a pyramid, a matchbox next to
an unfamiliar object. The abstract universality of homogeneous units is
confronted with traditional vague and representational measures, such as
were typically derived from human limbs and labour. The standard
procedure of valuation is reversed: it is not the amount of money that
determines the price of a commodity, but the commodity that determines
the value of money instead. If the images pictured only the piles of bank-
notes, they would most likely evoke wealth and abundance, yet when
compared with the ‘standard’ of a chicken, toilet roll or a bunch of
carrots, they collapse into a nonsensical number. Of course, the images
here are framed by a particular narrative, and we are used to similar illus-
trative pictures at least since the wheelbarrow money of the Weimar
Republic. With a different kind of explanation, we could be looking at
so-called singular goods such as unique and expensive chickens or carrots.
In our contemporary era of fiat money where there is no capacity to
measure its value against an external standard, such as gold, its purchas-
ing power is determined by statistical indexes.
Photographs constitute spaces of equivalence and commensurability:
‘What in reality is discrete, images join’ (Sontag 1977: 175). This does
not, however, necessarily imply that the meaning of all objects and events
is levelled and universally equivalent, rather simply that the conditions
for comparing things are established, especially when photographs circu-
late within large administrative and political systems of standardisation.
It is the coming together necessary for any comparison and commensu-
rability: images join realities as their tertium comparationis. They create
relations between apples and pears through a common metric by defin-
ing their standards of appearance.

Transcending the Scales

One of the specific, puzzling, and often overlooked characteristics of
photography is the way it relates to  – and redefines  – the relationship
between the visible and the invisible. We often find passing comments on
this power of the camera, typically in the context of discussions of micro-
scopic and telescopic imagery:

[P]hotography from being merely another way of procuring or making

images of things already seen by our eyes, has become a means to ocular
awareness of things that our eyes can never see directly. It has become the
necessary tool for all visual comparison of things that are not side by side,
and for all visual knowledge of the literally unseeable. (Ivins 1969: 134)
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    57

The fact that through photographs we can bring both the observable
and unobservable in front of our eyes and place them side by side seems
like a trivial statement. I would argue, however, that it has serious impli-
cations for our understanding of photography and technical images in
general. In most traditional scholarship, we encounter a more or less
implicit demarcation line between photographs that picture things that
can be seen by a naked eye (at least potentially – the photographer can
mediate views of remote or inaccessible scenes that could nevertheless be
seen) and that picture the so-called ‘invisible’, delegated typically to the
realm of ‘scientific photography’. A number of books and exhibitions
explored this phenomenon, often making the demarcation clear in their
titles and opening statements. Take as an example Jon Darius’s book
Beyond Vision, which defines scientific photography as that which
provides information inaccessible to the human eye: ‘On all scales from
the submicroscopic to the cosmic, photography has the ability to expand
our limited vision, revealing invisible radiations, fleeting events, vanish-
ingly faint images, remote realms of space and ocean which the naked eye
cannot capture’ (Darius 1984: 5).
Circumscribing photography of the invisible into the realm of scien-
tific photography is rather unfortunate because it implies that a
non-scientific photograph is basically a reproduction of the appearance
of objects, a mirror reflection of reality, identified with human vision.
This is clearly not the case as no photograph is adequate to our unaided
visual impressions. We could develop a whole range of case-specific and
heterogeneous categories of in/visibility, un/seeability, un/observability,
in/accessibility, un/noticeability that would characterise the peculiar rela-
tionships of photographs to human vision and bypass the simplified
dichotomy of the visible and invisible. The dichotomy feeds on the
history of the disproportion of vision, outlined above, and also resur-
faces in many contemporary accounts of nonhuman visual systems. The
differences between the human and the technological and between the
visible and the invisible do not match, but rather overlap in complex
and evolving forms. The assumed distinction between the visible and the
invisible needs to be replaced with studying the ways of generating
the eccentric configurations of visibilities simultaneously with anaes-
thetic fields of invisibility: ‘The entire history of images can thus be told
as an effort to visually transcend the trivial contrasts between the visible
and the invisible’ (Didi-Huberman 2008: 133).
This history is not about what particular instruments and images
reveal but rather about the multiplication and conjunction of images,
their coming together and laying side by side. This history is less
concerned with the relationship between the image and its referent than
with the relationship between images themselves, since images en masse
58  TOMÁŠ DVOŘ ÁK

constitute new kinds of referents, paradoxical entities that are simultane-

ously real and constructed. Photographic aggregates transcend the here
and now – the ‘unique existence in a particular place’ (Benjamin 2006:
103) – much like statistical regularities that cannot be attributed to indi-
viduals. It is not only particular objects or events that become
commensurable through photographs but, more importantly, the various
scales of reality, from the subatomic to the galactic, that can meet side
by side.
Oliver Wendell Holmes continues his above-quoted discussion of
rendering comparison of similar objects through photography with a
prophetic paragraph:

The next European war will send us stereographs of battles. It is asserted

that a bursting shell can be photographed. The time is perhaps at hand
when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning which
shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall preserve the very instant
of the shock of contact of the mighty armies that are even now gathering.
The lightning from heaven does actually photograph natural objects on
the bodies of those it has just blasted, – so we are told by many witnesses.
The lightning of flashing sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype
itself in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as
we see it self-pictured. (Holmes 1980: 61)

From mirrors with memory or drawing by light, Holmes turns to a

very different register of metaphors, where photography becomes a
discharge of enormous force and energy, lightning, a tumbling water-
fall, a clash of armies in a battle. Such a massive image was soon to be
realised in the Great War, the seminal catastrophe later called the First
World War: not only did it picture battles, but it became part of warfare
itself as the first occasion of aerial photography being strategically
deployed as part of intelligence-based military operations. It required
industrial production of thousands or rather millions of photographs
pasted together and continuously updated: ‘20 workers might produce
as many as 1,500 prints in an hour, working 16-hour shifts’, notes Allan
Sekula in his essay on instrumental images. He also points out the
experience of cognitive dissonance inherent in seeing human figures in
these images:

[T]he human presence is peculiarly marked in these photographs. This

markedness derives from a conflict between scale and desire; the human
figure has to be searched out, dragged out, of the image. The anonymity
of combatants and civilians teeters on the edge of invisibility. (Sekula
1984: 45)
 Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture    59

In the First World War, the gigantic became reality. It is an event that can be
best described by horrifying and astonishing figures and, simultaneously,
from the perspective of its participants, as something utterly absurd and
meaningless. In the First World War, human existence came closest to
being a mere number. In his 1975 essay on the ‘twentieth century as war’,
Jan Patočka urges us to rethink war not as an exceptional event  – an
unpleasant but necessary pause from the perspective of peace – but rather
as that very perspective from which we need to interpret our present:

WWI was a turning point in the history of the twentieth century and
decided its whole character. It demonstrated that it necessarily takes a war
to transform the world into a laboratory which would actualize energies
accumulated over billions of years. It thus amounted to a definitive break-
through in the way of understanding being, a breakthrough which began
in the seventeenth century with the emergence of mechanistic natural
sciences. It removed all those conventions that had lain in the path of this
release of force and reevaluated all values in the name of force. (Patočka
1976: 119)

Our visual culture needs to be interpreted from this perspective as

well: the mass image as a means for releasing accumulated force.

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4 Living with the
Excessive Scale of
Contemporary Photography
Andrew Fisher

QuestIons oF sCALe permeate contemporary photography. To take up

a photographically enabled device or to encounter a photographic image
today is to be confronted with unprecedented and unavoidable facts of
scale, processes of scaling and conditions of scalability (Fisher 2013). The
most obvious (and most often noted) aspect of this situation is the enor-
mous and ever increasing number of photographs now created and
circulated on a daily basis (see Stallabrass 1996; Bratton 2016; Meeker
2019). This expansive and difficult-to-grasp horizon of large number frames
every photographic image – as well as each act of imaging – in ways that are
not yet really understood, despite the frequency with which they are
remarked upon (Cohnen 2008; Hand 2012; Dombois and Harboe 2017). A
vast de- and re-scaling of photography has transformed the ways in which
photographic images continue to graft individual concerns onto global
processes and, vice versa, how photography insinuates large-scale economic
and political interests into individual lives (Steyerl 2011; Zylinska 2017).
More than ever before, photographic images act as uncertain points of
convergence between different possibilities and problems of scale (Fisher
2017). Coming to terms with the gigantic scale of contemporary photo-
graphy will, accordingly, entail understanding what it means to say that the
photographic image takes form as a constellation of scaled relations.
This chapter sets out to pursue this task through readings of two
essays by Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘Nous Autres’ (We Others) and ‘Human
Excess’ (Nancy 2000, 2005). The continuing promise of the photographic
image – to render the world sensible and thus shareable – has been thrown
into disarray by the exponential rescaling of photography. Considered
alongside each other, these essays suggest a framework within which to
conceptualise and to evaluate this situation. Key, here, will be a
62  ANDREW FISHER

suggestion that Nancy makes in ‘Nous Autres’ to the effect that photo­
graphy makes manifest our strangeness to ourselves and that it does so by
articulating asymmetrical, heterogeneous and variable modes of being in
relation to others. He writes:

Each ‘subject’ in the photo refers tacitly, obstinately, to all the others, to this
prodigious universe of photos in(to) which we all take ourselves and one
another, at some time or another, this colossal and labyrinthine phototheque
in whose depths there stalks – like a Minotaur – the monster, the monstra-
tion, and the prodigious image of our strangeness. (Nancy 2005: 106)

Note the scaled language of this passage, which is pivotal to Nancy’s

essay. Firstly, it is into a ‘prodigious universe of photos’ that we are ‘all’
swept at some time or other (intertwined temporal and spatial modes of
scaling applied to the mass of humanity). Then there’s the second char-
acterisation of photography, as such, and by allusion to Greek myth, as,
‘this colossal and labyrinthine phototheque . . . in whose depths there
stalks’ an ‘image of our strangeness’. This strangeness, itself, takes on the
scale of ‘the universe of photos’ insofar as it, too, is ‘prodigious’.
This is part of an overall theoretical picture in which being with others
is ontologically primordial – fundamental to being human and, as such,
for Nancy, to Being itself  – and central to his philosophy (see Nancy
1991). Elaboration of what this means is the core concern of Being Singu­
lar Plural, the English edition of the book in which ‘Human Excess’ is
published. Elsewhere in the book Nancy writes: ‘That which exists,
whatever this might be, coexists because it exists. The co-implication of
existing . . . is the sharing of the world’ (Nancy 2000: 29). In this light, at
the risk of being reductive, one can remark upon the way in which the
title Being Singular Plural announces Nancy’s insistence that Being, as
such, does not precede coexistence but, rather, emerges in and through
being with others. Thus: ‘Coexistence does not happen to existence; it is
not added to it, and one cannot subtract it out: it is existence’ (Nancy
2000: 187). As far as humanity is concerned, this incorporates an origi-
nary moment of alienation.

Man began with the strangeness of his own humanity. Or with the human-
ity of his own strangeness. Through this strangeness he presented himself:
he presented it, or figured it to himself. Such was the self-knowledge of
man, that his presence was that of a stranger, monstrously similar. (Nancy
1996: 69)1

What is significant to note is that Nancy suggests that one’s relation to

others passes in a similar manner through that array of technical
 Excessive Scale   63

operations, historical practices and cultural formations that we gather

together under the name of photography and conventionally condense
into discussion of photographic images. To say this is to read against the
grain of much scholarship on Nancy’s writings about art and visual
culture, which concentrates itself on his sustained analyses of the
aesthetic category of the image (see Nancy 2005; Lechte 2012; Heppell
2016).2 What may be different and distinctive about the theoretical char-
acterisation of photography in ‘Nous Autres’ has received surprisingly
little, if any, comment (see Giunta and Janus 2016). The inherently scaled
character of this essay’s notion of photography has, to date, gone
completely unremarked.
‘Nous Autres’ unfolds as a densely wrought articulation of the large
scale of photography figured through the small scale of a problematic
and generalised existential standpoint. Nancy places at the heart of
photography its capacity to articulate relations and this takes the form
of an encounter with ‘our strangeness to ourselves’ as we navigate a
‘colossal and labyrinthine phototheque’. The linkage between this and
‘Human Excess’ to be made here follows an intuition, namely, that
photography’s recent de- and rescaling threatens to dissolve this defining
moment of alienation. What happens, one might ask, when the ‘colossal
and labyrinthine phototheque’ mutates to appear yet more colossal and
more labyrinthine with every passing moment? What happens to the
colossal as a limit figure of perception and the labyrinth as a concern for
orien­tation when the operations of a greater and greater percentage of
images become ambivalent with regard to humans (are never appre-
hended by anybody who might get lost in their appearances) (see Derrida
1987; Mason 2013). What happens when every swollen statistic gener-
ated emphasises the sense in which, whatever has become of photography,
the figures of the labyrinth and the colossal no longer seem adequate to
it, appear restrictive where they used to imply the unbounded?
‘Human Excess’ calls into question the modes of excess and incalcula-
bility that are supposed to lie at the heart of demands for measure and
proportion and that inform critical discourses of dismeasure and dispro-
portion. It reorients relationships between these poles and questions the
notion of the human as a measure of both the known and of that which
exceeds knowledge. Read as an extension of ‘Nous Autres’, it also calls
into question the assumption that the scaled character of contemporary
photography can be resolved with any appeal to the human as its ulti-
mate measure. But, rather than rendering the human obsolete or irrelevant
to an understanding of contemporary photography, I argue that this
challenges one to reconceive the way in which the figure of the human is
presumed to have secured understanding of photography in its previous
guises and how it operates in the contemporary photographic milieu.
64  ANDREW FISHER

The notion that photographic images take form in and as a constellation

of scaled relations emerges, here, as a promising basis upon which to
address this situation.

Photographic Constellations of Scale

If one wants to understand the ways in which photographic images help
us to construct the fractious and heterogeneous visual world of the pres-
ent it is, I argue, imperative to understand the constellations of scale met
in and through these images. But what does this mean? A clue arises from
the fact that the relations of scale in question here are multiple, complex
and often vehemently contested. They matter. In the face of such vehe-
mence, it is important to keep this multiplicity and this complexity in the
foreground of analysis. Consider, for example, the individuals and tech-
nologies, political interests and geographies compounded in visualisations
of migration across the Mediterranean in recent years. How is scale a
specific issue for photography here?
It was encountered at simultaneously intimate and world-spanning
registers in photographs showing the diminutive body of Aylan Kurdi
washed onto a beach on Kos in 2015: a set of images that circulated glob-
ally to affect millions and produce moral outrage on a huge scale but that
had little or no lasting political effect (Vis and Goriunova 2015). Here
one is confronted by tragically compounded questions of scale that play
over the surface of the image and that haunt its public form, not least
because of the manner in which the images in question ended up rein-
forcing what appears to be an inescapable antinomy of photographic
ethics.3
By contrast, consider the lack of images and of global outrage – but
the centrality of distributed imaging devices – in the story of a packed
migrant boat registered by surveillance agencies but left to drift across
the Mediterranean in 2011; what became known as the ‘left-to-die’ boat
(Heller and Pezzani 2014). This vessel’s occupants were rendered visible
from the skies while holding up mobile devices to photograph the poten-
tial rescuers hovering above them in a helicopter. The resulting situation
did not end in their rescue nor did it produce a definitive image, but it
was saturated with photographic concerns and possibilities. As Ariella
Azoulay has shown, the visual characteristics of events like this might be
highly attenuated, because on the face of it they produce no pictures, but
they are no less ‘photographic’ for this fact (Azoulay 2008).
The point here is that attention to photography’s role in these
connected but contrasting examples shows it to be structured by
multi-layered and simultaneous operations of scale, such as those meas-
uring out the spaces and times of an image’s making and reception, of
 Excessive Scale   65

embodied comportment towards particular places and events, of applied

technical processes of scaling, mobilisations of mass emotion, determi-
nations of social value and effects of unevenly distributed geo-political
power. These very different senses of scale, scaling and scalability – picto-
rial, technical, phenomenological, social, geographical and political – collide
with each other in these photographic events and in the images they
generate. If one brackets, for a moment at least, the always pressing
concern for what such fraught images may show, then what is left over is
the variety of intercalated scales that enable them, that they operate
within and which are applied to them (Fisher 2013: 311). On these bases
one can remark that, whether realised materially and seen widely, or not,
a photographic image takes form as the more or less stable meeting
point between otherwise divergent senses, expectations, practices and
possibilities of scale.
The photographic event of the ‘left-to-die’ boat stresses one implica-
tion of this insight, precisely insofar as it produced no defining image
and yet nonetheless exemplifies the operative technical, geographical
and political processes of scale at work in all photographic events. The
often bemoaned inability of even the most tragically affective and singu-
lar images, like those of Aylan Kurdi, to effect real social and political
change signals the difficult-to-accept fact that, for all that they concen-
trate attention on what they represent, and for all that this is tragic,
images such as these coalesce around powerful and invisible forms of
abstraction that determine how they come to be seen and that shape
how they can exert affect (see Fisher 2016). Such cases stand to teach us
that bracketing the dominance of representation analytically to reveal
the constellations of scale that structure contemporary photographs is
not a formal and unmotivated exercise. Rather, it promises ways of
understanding how the most fraught and difficult of our images come to
operate in the ways they do.
At risk of repetition, one can remark that in such fraught photographic
situations, as well as in less heavily burdened cases, to take up a photo-
graphically enabled device, to be photographed or to encounter a
photographic image, places one at the centre of a constellation of differ-
ent facts of scale, processes of scaling and conditions of scalability. This
has no doubt always been true of photography in its various historical
forms but it has only recently become obvious as a consequence of
globalised networked digital imaging technologies. In this milieu, scale
takes on novel spatial and temporal, technical and experiential meanings
that combine to shape what a photographic image can be and what it
might do. Further, to make or encounter photographic images in this
context involves dealing with the legacy of photography’s promise to set
the world to measure and to grant things proportion. But it also entails
66  ANDREW FISHER

the obverse insofar as it situates one in a visualised world that seems

governed by dismeasure and disproportionality (see Steyerl 2011; Weiz-
man 2012). Theoretical elucidation of this convoluted state of affairs
promises to enable ways of reconceptualising the ethically and politically
urgent questions of visualisation that delineate the present and to under-
stand photography’s vital role in its making.

Photography as a Scaled Relation to Others

In ‘Nous Autres’, Nancy sets out to theorise a mode of being in relation
to others. He does this through analysis of what it means to utter three
pronouns and related pronominal phrases: ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘we others’.
Significantly, in doing this, he engages with photography as a suite of
activities: the act of photographing; the act of being photographed; and
the act of looking at photographs. He takes these photographic activities
to be interrelated modes of enunciation that identify someone or some
group in a way that operates as if saying ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘we others’. In
drawing this parallel between acts of photography and linguistic utter-
ances, Nancy effectively reconceives of photography as a mode of
being-with-others (in contrast, for instance, to taking it as a secondary
apparatus of identification that is antecedent to pre-existing relation-
ships). Moreover, he thinks of photography as a way of being-with-others
that teaches one about a defining estrangement shaping all claims to
identity, a fundamental entanglement with others that also passes through
the machineries of photographing, being photographed and looking at
photographs. Apart from one other essay in which photography features
centrally, ‘Masked Imagination’ (which in many ways reads as a compli-
ment to ‘Nous Autres’), I can think of no other point in Nancy’s oeuvre
at which machinic operations of visualisation are granted such a signifi-
cant, ontologically inflected role (Nancy 2005).
Nancy’s argument in ‘Nous Autres’ unfolds as follows. To say ‘I’ is to
identify oneself, to stake a claim to being a subject while also distin-
guishing oneself abstractly in opposition to all of those others who can
say and do the same. He writes: ‘In a definitive way I constitutes a
performative in the sense that linguists give to the speech act: the enun-
ciation itself produces the truth of the statement. I am by saying “I am”’
(Nancy 2005: 102). He turns to a telling example to fill this out: ‘I can
emerge . . . like the snap of a camera shutter: by pressing down, the
finger says I’ (Nancy 2005: 101). This is an act of identification that rests
on a paradox, namely, while in performing it one marks oneself out as
being without substitute  – ‘it’s me, I’m here!’  – one also implicitly
acknowledges that this grammatical form routinely substitutes anybody
and everybody in one’s place.
 Excessive Scale   67

This enunciative possibility hinges not just on the release of a shutter

per se but on the explicit act of someone photographing someone else. I
press the shutter and, in the process of picturing another, enunciate my
presence and identity but also my isolation from and exchangeability
with anyone else who can do this. Given that ‘we all take ourselves and
one another’ into the ubiquitous visual milieu opened up when we
embody such acts, the implication is that photography operates at some-
thing like the same level (in parallel to but separate from) as that of the
strictly linguistic possibility after which Nancy models it. While it shares
a necessity for embodiment with performative linguistic utterances, the
photographic possibility placed in question here is also materially
machinic or apparatic.
While the click of the camera shutter might say ‘I’, the photographic
situation thus inaugurated also produces a ‘you’. Because being photo-
graphed is not passive but is an act in its own right, someone else comes
on the scene to say ‘I’ in performing the act of being photographed. A
series of asymmetries is thus produced. The ‘you’ that also says ‘I’ in
performing the act of being photographed embodies a superimposed
enunciation of identity. And the possibility that this other, so to speak,
intercalated subject might then take up the camera and turn the tables
stands open as an implicit aspect of the intersubjective relation thus
inaugurated. Furthermore, acting in unison, these two might go on to
compound the enunciations of their-selves in the act of viewing the
resulting image together, sharing in its relationality albeit from asymmet-
rically articulated standpoints. Thus an expanding series of intertwined
but distinct photographic acts accrue as compounded modes of enuncia-
tion that are layered over and anticipated by the first.
Yet more possibilities of enunciation relating to this initial series could
and do, of course, spin off to encompass effectively everyone and
everything in the field of photographic relations. The positions and rela-
tions staked out in this way actively constitute an intersubjective
topography. With an impressive economy of means this theory of photo-
graphic relationality spirals out to characterise the enormity of
photographic culture and promises purchase on how it is lived, namely,
from the billions of different points of simultaneous and consequent
action – whether realised, in process or in potentia – that make up the
contemporary visual milieu. This theory of photographic relationality is
not exhausted, obviously, by the bare act of laying claim to one’s numer-
ical identity with oneself. An account of other possible modes of
relationality is required to flesh it out.
Nancy continues: ‘It is a quite different matter when it comes to saying
“we”’ (Nancy 2005: 101). This differs from the notional self-coincidence
involved in saying ‘I’ or ‘you’, as it lays claim to a shared identity which is
68  ANDREW FISHER

yet to be realised. It is to solicit something or to make a demand on some-

one: ‘Every time someone says “we” . . . he formulates a request for
identification’ (Nancy 2005: 102). A ‘we’ has to be filled out in time and
space. It implies a lack of coincidence in contrast to that supposed to be
met with in saying ‘I’. ‘We’, Nancy claims, is a pronoun of generic iden-
tifications, and of appeals to identity that often impose a generalised
identity upon those it sets out to encompass, by soliciting compliance or
demanding submission.4
Nancy returns to these questions of relation and the linguistic forms
through which they are articulated in repeated analyses, such as in the
following discussion of the pronoun ‘we’ and the concept of society from
Being Singular Plural:

Society knows itself and sees itself as bared, exposed to this common
excess [démesure]. At one and the same time, it sees itself as something
quite evident and transparent, whose necessity eclipses that of every ego
sum, and as an opacity that denies itself every subjective appropriation. At
that moment when we clearly come [to stand] before ourselves, as the lone
addresser(s) facing the lone addressee(s), we cannot truly say ‘we’.
But it is through this that we now have to attain to a knowledge of the
‘we’ – attain to a knowledge and/or praxis of the ‘we’. (Nancy 2000: 75–6)

The exemplary status granted photography in ‘Nous Autres’ – that it

holds out the possibility of different ways of articulating social being –
secures for it a very interesting if not fully thematised role in Nancy’s
broader ontological framework. I take this to be something like the
necessity that Nancy posits in this passage, namely, of having to come to
terms with an unresolvable knowledge of that dismeasure or excess lying
at the heart of societal relations and revealed at the point of their enact-
ment. It is notable that Nancy’s contrast between the grammatical
possibilities of saying ‘I’ and ‘we’ is more starkly delineated in the version
reworked for publication in The Ground of the Image in comparison to
in its original form as an essay accompanying a photographic exhibition
of the same title in 2003. In particular, in the earlier text, a point of indif-
ference appears to shape the relation between the possibilities of saying
‘we’ and ‘we others’.

Whereas I produces or creates its own identity, we projects it or super-

poses it. We others admits the understanding that when the time comes,
upon enquiry, this we could become another subject entirely. ‘We others’
jointly contains a presumption, based on no evidence to back its enunc­
iation. Who pronounces this ‘we others’? That is anything but clear.
(Nancy 2003: 124)
 Excessive Scale   69

The intervening years since 2003 have seen reality shaping itself socially
and politically around a much starker take on the rhetorics of ‘we-ness’
than Nancy projects in either version of this essay.
Between the bare alienation of the utterance ‘I’ and the coercive expec-
tations imposed by assertions of ‘we’, lies, for Nancy, another possibility
of enunciation, namely, the ‘we others’ of the essay’s title. The phrase
remains untranslated in the version I read because it doesn’t exist in
English. It is a grammatical possibility of Spanish (the language of the
essay’s original publication) and French, which Nancy takes to introduce a
space for identification – and thus of relation to others – that does not take
the bare serial form of ‘I’. Nor does it impose the norms he associates with
the act of lining up under a ‘we’. To say ‘we others’, here, is to introduce
questions of asymmetry, heterogeneity and productive non-coincidence
into one’s way of enacting one’s relations with others. It has to be negoti-
ated and at least starts out without imposing a norm. Crucially, it is
photography and not language that stands as his example for this possibil-
ity: ‘An essential non-coincidence makes us other than ourselves . . . This
non-coincidence passes through photography in an exemplary way’
(Nancy 2005: 104). Here, to expand on photography’s role in all of this:

The secret of the photograph, . . . is its flight into the strange in the very
midst of the familiar. The photo captures the familiar, and immediately,
instantaneously, it strays into strangeness. . . . The photograph estranges,
it estranges us. Between the subject of the click and the subject grasped,
there is a coexistence without coincidence. (Nancy 2005: 106)

Recall that, for Nancy, ‘Coexistence . . . is existence’, i.e., a basic shar-

ing of the world (Nancy 2000: 187). But, here, the serial form of alienated
identity implicit in the expectation of coincidence with oneself as an ‘I’
is absent, and so is the coercive horizon of any imposed coincidence with
others in a determinate ‘we’. Photography, in its acts of enunciation and
modes of relation, captures the character of subjectivity in a ‘coexistence
without coincidence’ that passes through the three modes of operation
made central by Nancy: taking, being taken, and sharing in the taking of
one another into the world of photography. The operations of the appa-
ratus thus delineated appear basic to the shared but indeterminate world
he articulates: ‘Such is the straying and secret I am of the photo. Thus it
does not say, “I is an other”; rather, it proffers the wholly other “I am”
whose text consists in “we others”’ (Nancy 2005: 106). Recall, also, that
the question of who these others are remains in principle open, though it
is, at least temporarily, concrete.
Insofar as it articulates a theory of relationality, the idea of photo­
graphy developed in ‘Nous Autres’ is not tied to any particular form or
70  ANDREW FISHER

apparatus of photography (‘analogue’ as opposed to ‘digital’, for

instance). Nor does the entity that operates the controls and inaugurates
these relationships need to be an embodied or present human being. The
‘subject of the click’ (or whatever register of operation is entailed) has
only to be able to set the process off. Nancy emphasises human-to-­
human relations here. But nothing in his analysis actually excludes the
plethora of other possibilities of relation that combine to make up
contemporary photography and that include all sorts of functions,
machines, distributed forms and artificial intelligences – as well as, for
that matter, bums acting in conjunction with trouser pockets  – which
have the ability to inaugurate a photographic event.
Before its recent expansion – remember that ‘Nous Autres’ was first
published in 2003 – one finds Nancy reimagining photography, in scaled
terms, as a massively convoluted milieu of actions and operations
through which identity and intersubjectivity are articulated and within
which they learn of their ownmost modes of estrangement. Estrange-
ment in this scaled framework is not incidental and does not come after
the fact. It is integral to selfhood, and photography is pivotal to the reve-
lation of this. As photography functions by dint of scaled operations and
possibilities, its modes of scale, scaling and scalability appear integral to
the formation of selfhood and relations to others. How, then, to under-
stand this scaled idea of photographic relationality in the context of the
exponential de- and rescaling of photography that is such a striking
feature of contemporary life?

Negotiations of Measure
In ‘Human Excess’ Nancy develops a critical analysis of measure and
dismeasure in an era habituated to bloated statistical values and the acceler-
ated production of truthful but hollow measurements: ‘Ten billion people
on earth’ as a ‘prospective demographic truth’, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the trivial generation of huge numerical abstractions which estab-
lish ‘facts devoid of meaning but not of truth’ (Nancy 2000: 177).
Measure, in Nancy’s analysis, is defined as ‘the name for a propriety
of one Being to another, or to itself’, i.e., the degree of proportion that
can be established between them (Nancy 2000: 177). What determines a
particular measure of one thing against another is convention. Think of
Nancy’s characterisation of photography as a ‘colossal and labyrinthine
phototheque’, where the meaning of the untranslated French word
‘phototheque’ is photo-library or photographic archive. Whatever the
level of rigour with which it may be applied, and however widespread its
use may be, the system of order applied to the images contained by the
phototheque is imposed by convention. But one might also want to
 Excessive Scale   71

illustrate the size of this archive itself by, for instance, describing how
many times it contents would span the world if laid end to end, a familiar
trope that doesn’t tell one anything significant about the images
contained. For Nancy this would be to produce ‘facts devoid of meaning
but not of truth, albeit infinitely impoverished truth’. And, crucially, he
continues: ‘Within this order excess is impossible’ (Nancy 2000: 178).
Whether in the name of imposed convention or impoverished truth, he
goes on to write, acts of bringing something to measure are engagements
emerging from specific historical, economic and social contexts that
constitute what he projects as the worldliness of a world construed, inso-
far as part of it is set to measure. In this context, regardless of their
trivial or tragic character: ‘each time, these figures measure a responsibil-
ity’ and, further, ‘. . . the proliferation of large numbers in our culture,
our interests and our needs . . . also defines the exponential growth of
such responsibility’ (Nancy 2000: 178).
This sketch of a critically articulated theory of measure seems
particularly resonant with regard to the situation of photography
discussed at the beginning of this chapter, especially given the ways in
which photography’s massive and accelerating rescaling impacts on
individuals, institutions and social groups across the board. As noted
briefly in the chapter’s introduction, the contemporary photographic
image carries over a promise from earlier photographic forms, namely,
that it might render a disorientating world sensible and proportionate
and enable individuals as well as institutions to orient themselves within
the conflicted milieu they are supposed to share. It is debatable whether
photography was ever able to fulfil such promise. But while the promise
to render things commensurable has expanded in scope along with
photography, any widespread belief in photography’s ability to make
good on its promise seems only to have diminished. This often-­remarked
prospect reveals something important with regard to the meaning of
scale in and for photography today. More than ever before, photo-
graphic images act as uncertain points of convergence between the
large scale and the small scale and thus new relationships forged
between, for instance, power and desire, individuals and social groups,
bodies and institutions. Coming to terms with the gigantic scale of
contemporary photography will entail understanding what it means to
say that the photographic image is such a convergence of scales or,
better, that the photographic image takes form through a constellation
of scaled relations.
Nancy’s critique in ‘Human Excess’ maps onto the scaled theoris­
ation of photography developed in ‘Nous Autres’, at least to the extent
that the massive horizon of number  – both qualitatively and quanti-
tively characteristic of contemporary photography  – entails an
72  ANDREW FISHER

intensified and very often noted demand to understand the forms of

dismeasure and disproportionality it introduces into the world. This is,
indeed, a powerful figure of exponential growth in responsibility as
Nancy describes. It also echoes the responsibility one bears in the face
of that ‘common excess’ that characterises social being and that Nancy
writes of as demanding ‘we attain to a knowledge of the “we”’ as
mentioned above (Nancy 2000: 75–6). Further, within this context, the
individual image or photographic event and any individuals inter­
polated in and through them all too easily come to stand in relation to
the photographic horizon of very large number, just as the single count-
able thing stands in relation to the statistical abstraction that, Nancy
argues, marks out a true but hollow fact incapable of encountering the
excessive in any real sense.
In this light, I read the notion of responsibility that Nancy articulates
in ‘Human Excess’ in parallel to the topologies of photographic relation
developed in ‘Nous Autres’. Responsibility appears as a moral or ethical
call for a meaningful response, insisting on an answer but ultimately
coming without any kind of proscribed measure. In this, it is precisely
what is placed in question in Nancy’s analysis of the possibilities of
enunciation: ‘I’, ‘we’ and, in particular, the non-normative and open-
ended relation implied by ‘we others’.
Further, Nancy writes:

excess is its own propriety and forms the measure of an ‘un-heard-of’

measure. It measures itself, that is, it is engaged as a totality. In today’s
world, excess (la démesure) is not an excess (un excès), in the sense that it
is indeterminate with relation to normative structures. (Nancy 2000: 179)

The expansive scale of contemporary photography is conventionally

discussed using vocabulary  – deluge, flood, overload, multiplicity,
multi­tude  – that presumes that some norm, boundary, convention or
acceptable standard has been exceeded.5 And very often such presump-
tions colour an understanding of the relationship between photography’s
exponential growth and whatever appropriately gargantuan measures
might have to be projected in order to cope with it. Read in terms of
contemporary photography, ‘Human Excess’ highlights the ways in
which the vocabulary applied to such massive scale is often mired in the
determinate concerns of one or other partial viewpoint (which come all
too often, also, with a strong undertow of racism and sexism or other
mode of prejudice). Reference to Nancy’s observations on excess aids
in critically reconceiving the dismeasure, disproportion and disarray
induced by the massive growth of photography. Importantly, he artic­
ulates the sense in which no appeal to humanity, to the axiomatic scale
 Excessive Scale   73

of human embodiment or humanistic principle, would resolve this

situation.

This magnitude, which is its own ‘excessive’ measure or measured excess,

also provides the scale of a total responsibility . . . Man as the measure of
all things has taken on a new, excessive meaning: far removed from every
relation to the human as some mediocre standard, and also far removed
from its remnants, this meaning relates humans themselves to an immense
responsibility. (Nancy 2000: 179)

His point is not that if we search hard enough we might find an as yet
unarticulated axiom of human scale that will ground everything. Nor is
it to make yet another in a long line of calls to order or measure.

In a certain way, all calls to measure are in vain, since there is no excess that
can be determined with relation to a given measure, norm, scale, or mean.
Thus, the use and/or the norm that gives the measure must itself be
invented. (Nancy 2000: 180)

Rather, ‘Nous Autres’ and ‘Human Excess’ dovetail at this point to

produce an idea of the photographic that is scaled according to the vast
numbers that frame and impinge on the possibilities of the mass of indi-
vidual relations that comprise this sphere. And, as ‘Nous Autres’ suggests,
the modes of enunciation through which this numerically enormous
horizon is thrown into relief can be thought of in ways that dissolve the
hollow discourse of dismeasure that obscures the difficult relationships
and responsibilities figured by photographs. The questions of scale fore-
grounded by contemporary photography suggest different photographic
topographies of relation, ones that start out at least by soliciting negoti-
ations of their own measure of being with others and that do not
determine in advance who or what those others may be.

Notes
1. The translator, Peggy Kamuf, carries over Nancy’s heavily gendered
language into the English. In the current context it stands out as a prime
example of the critique of coercive claims to shared identity developed
below on the basis of other writings by Nancy.
2. See, for instance, Chris Heppell’s discussion of ‘Nous Autres’ and the
photographic image in ‘Uncanny Landscapes of Photography’ in Carrie
Giunta and Adrienne Janus (eds), Nancy and Visual Culture, pp. 206–11.
An exemplary instance of Nancy’s analysis of the category of the image is
‘The Image–The Distinct’ in The Ground of the Image, pp. 1–14. A study
74  ANDREW FISHER

that is heavily influenced by Nancy’s theorisation of the image, and which

examines the historical continuities and disjunctions between traditional
and contemporary image forms is John Lechte’s Genealogy and Ontology
of the Western Image and Its Digital Future (2012).
3. Now-classic moments in the history of ethical debates about the inability of
such images to effect change are heavily shaped by Susan Sontag’s influen-
tial studies On Photography (1977) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).
Judith Butler’s 2009 book, Frames of War, offers a trenchant critical evalu-
ation of Sontag’s view that photography remains largely inadequate in the
face of traumatic events. Other notable studies are: Susie Linfield’s The
Cruel Radiance (2010); Sharon Sliwinski’s Human Rights in Camera (2011);
Geoffrey Batchen et al.’s Picturing Atrocity (2012); Thomas Keenan and
Tirdad Zolghadr’s The Human Snapshot (2013); and Liam Kennedy and
Caitlin Patrick’s The Violence of the Image (2014).
4. Out of a depressingly wide swathe of relevant examples from contemporary
political life, one might refer here to the vocabulary of the racist German
anti-immigrant movement Pegida and the Alt-right politics and cynical
language of the Alternative für Deutschland party with their aberrant
claims in the name of ‘wir Deutsche’ (we Germans). For a specific analysis
of such coercive and dubious uses of the pronoun ‘we’ in this context, see
Heinrich Detering’s astute analysis of such claims to shared identity in his
Was heißt ‘wir’? Zur Rhetorik der parlamentarischen Rechten (‘What does
“we” mean here? On the rhetoric of the parliamentary right’) of 2019,
which presents trenchant critical analyses of a number of recent public
speeches made by key figures in Pigeda and the AfD. At the time of writing,
parallel and equally alarming rhetorical strategies and racist overtones
continue to shape divisive debates about Brexit, immigration, the ‘sover-
eignty’ of British institutions and the maintenance or dissolution of the
United Kingdom.
5. In Chapter 3 of this volume, Tomáš Dvořák articulates an intellectual
history of the gigantic as a figure of measure in modernity and with a focus
on shifting relations between ideas of quantity and quality, especially in
Hegel’s and Heidegger’s accounts of measurement. These antecedents
inform Nancy’s short critical theorisation of measure, proportion and
disproportion in ‘Human Excess’. Dvořák’s analysis focuses on the prob-
lematic relation between proportionality and disproportionality in
anthropomorphic understandings of the world construed through visual
media. Nancy’s account of excess as ‘its own propriety’ speaks to this
problematic, especially, as I argue, when figured through contemporary
photography.
 Excessive Scale   75

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76  ANDREW FISHER

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5 Feeling Photos:
Photography, Picture
Language and Mood Capture
Michelle Henning

It HAs oFten been argued that social media photography is a type of

speech. A number of writers have noted this, describing it as ‘visible
speech’, as ‘gregarious’, as a speech made of grunts and nods and ‘silent
mutterings to the self’ (Rubinstein 2005: 113–118; Lister 2014: 11–12;
Crano 2019: 1132). This idea recalls an earlier moment – projects such as
August Sander’s book The Face of our Time (1929) which he described
as ‘basically a declaration of faith in photography as universal language’
and Edward Steichen’s much-discussed exhibition The Family of Man
(1955), which Steichen saw as providing ‘irrefutable proof that photo-
graphy is a universal language, that it speaks to all people; that people are
hungry for that kind of language’ (Sander 1978: 677; Steichen 1958: 167).
These proponents of the idea of photography as a universal language
thought that documentary photography, in particular, communicated
shared human feelings and emotions as well as facts about the world.
Now that so many people are taking photographs and sending them back
and forth to one another, or displaying them to a potentially vast (but in
practice often very small) audience, photography appears not as a
language, but as speech: conversational and at the same time a form
of ‘speaking into the air’ with perhaps the hope, but not the expectation, of
a response.1 As Paul Frosh notes, social media photography is phatic, a
‘hi’, a ‘how are you?’, a type of enunciation that is not so much about its
apparent content as about maintaining sociability, forging connection,
keeping a channel open (Frosh 2012: 133). The idea of photography as
language seemed to singularise it, setting it apart from other media
(except, perhaps, film) but the idea of photography as speech envisages
something more hybrid, inseparable from text, graphics and video. While
the notion of photography as a universal language seemed to aggrandise
78  MICHELLE HENNING

it, the vision of photography as chit-chat seems to present it as some-

thing diminished in status, if not in scale.
Arguments that photography is language-like and that it is speech-like
are both accompanied by a recognition that it has become a mass practice.
Discussions about photography as conversational respond to the context
of mass mobile phone use, and while The Family of Man dealt with docu-
mentary and reportage, not amateur practice, Steichen’s approach was
informed by his observation that photography had introduced picture-­
making on an unprecedented scale (Steichen 1958: 159). Photography was
associated, very early on, with a certain affectlessness, a cold gaze, a
machinic inability to distinguish the meaningless from the meaningful,
which in turn seemed to give it a kind of indifference (Henning 2018:
121–2). However, both the early conception of photo­graphy as a universal
language and the more recent analysis of (digital, networked) photo­
graphy as chatter suggest that photography can absorb and transmit
nuances of communication that are primarily expressive and emotional,
despite its historical claim to objectivity. Both see photo­graphy, used on a
mass scale, as a technical mediator of human sociability.
This chapter reflects on the currency of social media photography,
within an environment that includes text and emoji, and on the critical
response to this. Observations that photography is like language or
speech are rarely neutral. If to conceive of photography as a universal
language requires an optimistic assessment of the medium’s importance,
the conversational turn is associated with a trivialising and demeaning of
photography linked to its popularisation. Photography theorists empha-
sise the simple and ‘light’ emotional character of digital photo-sharing.
It is understood as all felt response and no rational, logical analysis. At
the same time, there remain the traces of that view of photography’s
huge significance, insofar as the mass circulation of images is frequently
treated as a disaster of epic proportions (a ‘flood’, a ‘tsunami’), and the
images themselves are identified as a principal means by which emotions
and mood are made alarmingly contagious. In an echo of much older
debates about images, social media photographs seem to be regarded as
both deeply attractive and deeply dangerous.

Universal Language, Rationalisation and Emotional

Capitalism
In the mid-twentieth century, it became commonplace to argue that
photography was the one ‘language’ able to transcend national and
cultural boundaries, matched only by the presumed universality of
human facial expressions. As Steichen wrote, ‘It is the only universal
language we have, the only one requiring no translation’ (Steichen 1958:
 Feeling Photos   79

160). In such ‘universal language’ arguments, pre- and post-war inter­

nationalist ambitions – to communicate across nations in the service of
world peace – are translated into universalist ones. The Family of Man
relied on the notion that photographs are recognisable to all people: that
everyone can easily, and without prior acculturation, identify objects
depicted in a photograph (and this despite the fact that photographs rely
on a tradition of perspectival representation developed in Europe).
Steichen clearly believed that audiences throughout the world identified
with the images in The Family of Man, dismissing the fact that the exhi-
bition was adapted for the different political and cultural contexts of
different countries. As Allan Sekula notes, one figure that repeatedly
appears in the discourse about the universal language of photography is
that of the ‘bushman’ or the uncivilised ‘savage’ to whom it will speak ‘in
civilizing tones’. Photography appears as both the advocate of a ‘techno-
logically derived egalitarianism’ and the perfect colonial instrument, its
images a means to seduce the colonised, while taking control of their
grasp on reality (Sekula 1981: 17).
Proponents of photography as a universal language assumed that, to a
very large extent, context does not matter and that the photograph stands
alone, meaningful in itself. Even complex symbolic meanings are believed
to be self-evident in a photograph: thus Sander could say that an image
of an infant in a gas mask ‘would express the whole brutal, inhuman
spirit of the time in universally comprehensible form’ (Sander 1978:
676).2 The universal language discourse drew on the thinking behind
other picture languages such as Isotype, the visual statistics method that
was briefly promoted as an international language by its inventor, Otto
Neurath, during the 1930s. Yet while Neurath insisted on the limitations
of Isotype, seeing it as an ‘auxiliary language’ that had to be adapted for
different contexts, and that could not communicate emotion or affective
states, photography was simultaneously presented as a purveyor of
objective facts and conveyor of fellow-feeling.3 Sekula writes that the
universal language claim linked together two contrasting ideas: first, that
‘photography would seem to be a way of knowing the world directly’;
second that ‘photography would also seem to be a way of feeling the
world directly’ (Sekula 1981: 21).
Sander’s The Face of our Time, and his larger Citizens project to
which it belonged, is essentially an inventory. Indeed, the idea of
photography as a language is closely tied to its use in the production
of inventories, record systems and archives, which is to say that it is
conceived in bureaucratic terms. Steichen wrote:

As a result of a survey that was made there are said to be forty million
homes in the United States that have at least one camera. In that light,
80  MICHELLE HENNING

consider the potentialities and possibilities of this medium. That means

there are at least forty million photographers, forty million potential
historians. And there lies a responsibility: What to do about this? How to
direct this? (Steichen 1958: 159)

These are odd questions to ask of a so-called language, if by language

we understand a creative, expressive and collective means of communi-
cation. Faced with the rise of amateur photography, Steichen’s concern
was about the governance of the means of communication and of the
public record. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the universal language
argument was most powerfully put forward at the moment of the emer-
gence and rise of the commercial picture libraries and photo agencies,
in the mid-twentieth century. These organisations expand with the
‘accelerated development’ of photography in the 1920s and 1930s, turn-
ing photographs into standardised and bankable commodities (Frosh
2003; Tagg 2009: 15; Blaschke 2016: 11, 40). Sekula notes that the iden-
tification of photography ‘with the dream language’ went hand in hand
with ‘the establishment of global archives and repositories’ rooted in
‘an aggress­ive empiricism’ and manifesting ‘a compulsive desire for
completeness’ that was ultimately bureaucratic (Sekula 1983: 197). To
make pictures language-like also seems to be to make them calculable,
quantifiable  – it is a rationalisation of both pictures and human
feeling.
In other words, the claim that photography is a universal language
takes the capacity of this technological medium to express and commu-
nicate emotion, and ties it to attempts to ‘direct’ and organise an archive
or inventory. This appears at first glance as serving a dream of a unified
humanity and of world peace, and, at second glance, as a kind of male
fantasy: a fantasy in which capacities and behaviours historically attrib-
uted or delegated to women, such as the maintenance of sociable
connections, the expression of collective feeling and the nuanced reading
of emotional expression, are treated as raw material subjected to a
process of rationalisation and systematisation.
This rationalisation of emotion is characteristic of the new emotional
regime that Eva Illouz identifies as emerging between the 1930s and the
1970s in the United States, during which time, freedom and equality
increased at the price of ‘a vast process of rationalization of intimate
relations’ (Illouz 2007: 30). As Illouz says, rationalisation formalises and
intellectualises everyday life, making emotions into ‘measurable and
calculable objects’ through processes of commensuration (that is, making
qualitative differences into quantifiable ones) and textualisation (that is,
‘locking’ emotions into texts or language). This process clearly benefits
certain kinds of institutions and commercial entities, but, she argues, it
 Feeling Photos   81

also enables people to navigate social relationships in late modernity

(Illouz 2007: 32, 71).
Linked to the development of service economies, this new regime
transformed the divisions of private and public that were characteristic
of an earlier stage of capitalism. Historically, as Sue Campbell argues,
gender had provided the justification for the hierarchical distribution of
emotions or sentiments and their expression, with the overt expression
of the feminine ‘tender emotions’ (such as compassion, love and sadness)
simultaneously encouraged as ‘limiting virtues’ and dismissed as senti-
mental and conservative (Campbell 1994: 56, 61–2). Anger, meanwhile,
remained largely the prerogative of men. Crucially, Illouz argues that this
gendered division of emotion changed with the rise of a therapeutic
model organised around self-reflection, soft communication skills and
‘emotional intelligence’. The new ‘emotional capitalism’, as Illouz defines
it, prioritised empathy, compassion, cooperation and an orientation
towards others, and yet was simultaneously organised towards strategic
self-interest and maximisation of productivity and efficiency. According
to Illouz’s diagnosis, then, emotional capitalism has unravelled the
gender identities and private–public opposition on which capitalism was
originally based, with sentimentality and emotionality now spreading to
the public and economic sphere (Illouz 2007). In the United States, she
argues, the rationalisation of emotions happens in the name of femi-
nism, and is closely connected to the post-war rise of a language of rights
(Illouz 2007: 36–8).
The Family of Man, and the extensive academic discussion of it,
shows how the notion of photography as a universal language, the
humanist discourse of rights, and an almost kitsch sentimentalism are
connected. It was born in the context of the post-war promotion of social
equality and the extension of rights, and while they disagree on its polit-
ical orientation, most writers on the exhibition recognise that it was
shaped by the new rhetoric of human rights.4 Though he recognised this,
Roland Barthes’s early critique argued that the exhibition undermined
any sense of people as political agents through its trite sentimentalism.
For, though Steichen favoured straight photography and new objectivity,
the exhibition was peppered with sayings and quotations that Barthes
viewed as platitudes – phrases such as ‘the land is a mother that never
dies’. Barthes also pointed out the ‘purely tautological’ nature of the
exhibition’s message: if birth and death are universals, as they evidently
are, then nothing remains to be said about them. Stripped of their histo-
ricity and their difference, anything that is said is meaningless (Barthes
1973: 101). Barthes’s discussion recalls critiques of kitsch, from Clement
Greenberg’s description of kitsch as inauthentic and formulaic, to Milan
Kundera’s characterisation of kitsch as tautological  – the ‘idiotic
82  MICHELLE HENNING

tautology’ epitomised for Kundera by the communist slogan ‘long live

life’ (Didi-Huberman 2012; Greenberg 1961; Kundera 1985: 249; Binck-
ley 2000: 142).
Barthes’s analysis succeeds in articulating a direct link between the
universal language claim and this kitsch sentimentality, because he finds
that the exhibition’s attempt to make photographs transparent and
language-like produces a literalism which places emotion at a distance
even while the exhibition declares its ‘feeling for feeling’.5 This literalism,
according to Barthes, is not able to ‘disorganise’ us, but merely to evoke
the sensation of being moved: ‘The literal photograph introduces us to
the scandal of horror, not to horror itself’ (Barthes 1973: 73). It is a
second-hand experience, emotion at one remove; as Clement Greenberg
says of kitsch, it is ‘vicarious experience and faked sensations’ (Green-
berg 1961: 10). Yet, Barthes’s ‘contempt for pathos’, as Georges
Didi-Huberman describes it, marks one of the limits of this analysis. At
the very moment when the gendering of emotions is reconfigured by a
therapeutic culture which values emotionality, the critique of kitsch senti-
mentality depends on a contrast between political agency and pathos
understood in terms of feminised passivity and inauthenticity.6
It is not evident that therapeutic culture is as emotionally ‘androgy-
nous’ as Illouz argues (Illouz 2007: 37), since certain disparaged forms of
emotional expression continue to be associated with women. If, in the
past, women’s emotions were dismissed as indiscriminate and uncon-
trolled, in therapeutic culture, those forms of emotional expression used
by young women are denigrated as not ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ (Campbell
1994: 56, 61–2). In the context of therapeutic culture, the demand is not
just to smile, but to smile as if you really mean it. Emotional labour, as
Arlie Hochschild famously characterised it, is accompanied by an attempt
to rout out phoniness, and the carriers of this responsibility are dispro-
portionately women (Hochschild 2012: ix). In work contexts, authentic
emotional expression becomes ever harder to achieve, since emotions are
entangled with involuntary bodily responses: the rationalisation and
instrumentalisation of emotion that Illouz describes militates against the
experience of emotions as authentic, even while authenticity is raised up
as a value.

Picture Languages, Sentiment Analysis and Mood Tracking

For Sam Binkley, the epitome of the ‘idiotic tautology’ is the smiley
face:

[I]ts basic form, two points over a semi circle against a yellow disk, calls
out ‘have a nice day’ from T shirts and lapel pins in a language that is at
 Feeling Photos   83

once the most fundamental, trivial and universal of languages  – simple

human love of joy. This ‘idiotic tautology’ is nonetheless captivating in its
ability to elevate the unique charm of the commonplace to a value of
universal significance. (Binkley 2000: 146)

The ubiquitous yellow smiley face both illustrates a feeling and tells
us how to feel by proposing we mimic it. It promotes a universal
humanism predicated on happiness, a shared joy in being happy. This
message is ironically undercut in Paul Connors’ photograph of the
designer of the smiley face, Harvey Ball, at his desk, wearing a wonder-
fully dour expression (Ball was hurt by not having received recognition
or royalties for his design, Fig. 5.1). The graphic designer was commis-
sioned by a US insurance company in 1964 to produce a badge intended
to be worn by workers. The corporate merger of the State Mutual Life
Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, and Ohio’s Guar-
antee Mutual Company had damaged staff morale, prompting an
internal PR campaign. The badges accompanied new policies requir-
ing staff to smile, and the icon proliferated along with the phrases
‘have a happy day’ or ‘have a nice day’. That is to say, it expanded with
the rise of emotional labour: a corporate service culture in which
employees are expected to convey a certain happy and helpful persona
to customers.

Figure 5.1  Smiley face creator Harvey Ball in his office, Worcester, Massachusetts,
USA, 6 July 1998. Photograph by Paul Connors/AP/Shutterstock.
84  MICHELLE HENNING

Though Ball did not make money from the spread of his design, others
did, and the smiley face became subject to competing intellectual
property and copyright claims. The symbol became a proprietorial
means of expression. As such, it marks a turning point in the growing
reification and objectification of emotions. In human encounters,
expressing emotion is a combination of involuntary physical response
(blushing, for example) and highly coded cultural gesture. The icon that
stands in for an emotion disembodies it, simplifies it, fixes it and renders
it uniform, while harnessing it to a market via trademark and copyright
legislation. The smiley face as workplace badge represents a rationalis­
ation of emotion and the triumph of kitsch sentimentality.
This is more explicit in emoji, originally invented in 1999 by Shigetaka
Kurita, a designer for Japanese telecom carrier NTT DoCoMo (‘emoji’
is a Japanese term meaning picture-character or pictogram). Emoji
followed the expansion of computer-mediated communication which
required abrupt and abbreviated language, and the growing use of emoti-
cons – little faces contrived out of punctuation marks. Unlike emoticons,
emoji belongs specifically to the world of mobile media. It marks a shift
from analogue graphic symbols (Isotype, the smiley face) to code, since
the symbols are part of Unicode – the term is a condensing of ‘universal
code’, a universal language system delegated to computers. Some writers
have claimed of emoji that ‘we are on the threshold of a universal
symbolic language, where pictures replace words as the basic unit of
communication’.7 Like the modernist advocates of universal languages,
they seem to be hoping for a pure system, unpolluted by local variation,
ambiguity and the invasion of other systems and scripts. However, like
Isotype, emoji has a great deal of cultural specificity, and bears the traces
of its own cultural origins.8 Like social media photographs, it works, not
in isolation, but in league with moving and still images and text, part of
an increasingly ‘blended’ writing system.
This picture language, emoji, is designed for the opposite purpose to
Neurath’s Isotype – to convey feeling, not facts. Emoji is distinguished
from all earlier picture languages in being fully embedded in proprieto-
rial, automated systems, accessible via keyboards and menus, and
trackable as data. Emoji operates as a shortcut for the expression of feel-
ing, since it is quicker to select an emoji than to type out words, especially
on a mobile phone. Emoji symbols participate in the rationalisation of
emotions, not only because emotions become objects to be ‘observed’
and ‘manipulated’, but because they are simplified, quantified, rendered
commensurate (Illouz 2007: 33). They also positively encourage the
expression of feeling: like kitsch, emoji stands for a certain commitment
to feeling, a valuing of emotional communication, and a claim to the
universality of certain sentiments. With emoji, as with kitsch, a need for
 Feeling Photos   85

immediacy favours a particular kind of imagery, with easy recognisabil-

ity, a tendency to trigger sentiment quickly, and an ability to flatter the
beholder.9
Emoji communications are typically phatic, used for sociable (rather
than functional or business-like) purposes (Danesi 2016, 19).10 They
originate in an attempt to capture and monetise the improvisational use
of mobile media among young people, especially women, in Japan (Stark
and Crawford 2015: 3). Traditionally, women bear the greater weight of
the burden of sociability, holding families and social groups together,
and emoji are currently more widely used by women than men. Ethno-
graphic studies suggest that young women use emoji to lighten their tone,
to create a sense of informality and playfulness, and some suggest that
young Japanese men are less likely to use emoji than women because of
their kawaii or cute associations.11 Notwithstanding Illouz’s argument
that the rise of a culture of communication has rendered the gendered
division of emotions less clear, in Japan these emphatic and explicitly
emotional forms are viewed as largely feminine. Elsewhere, they are often
dismissed as largely inauthentic, in line with a long history of forms of
feminine communication being repeatedly denigrated as trivial, super­
ficial and inauthentic (see Rakow 1988; Miller 2011).
As emoji have been adopted across social media platforms, the symbols
have been subjected to proprietorial modifications which de-standardise
and de-universalise the system in order to monetise it – so the emoji-style
symbols used by Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms
are not unicode. William Davies describes their purpose on these plat-
forms as ‘emotional signalling’ (Davies 2017: 34). For example, Facebook
replaced its ‘like’ button with a range of six pop-up icons which have
clearly defined or restricted meanings (unlike emoji). Additionally, the
status update function offers users a ‘feeling/activity’ menu from which
one can select from 200 emoji-like icons with precise meanings. These
limited, pseudo-emojis offered to us on social media platforms are far
more formulaic than actual emoji, intended to enable the platform to
translate emotional responses into data. Luke Stark and Kate Crawford
regard these icons as functioning to ‘lure consumers to a platform, to
extract data from them more efficiently, and to express a normative,
consumerist and predominately cheery world-view’ (Stark and Crawford
2015: 8; see also Stark 2018: 218). As Mark Andrejevic summarises, affect
and emotion are increasingly recognised as ‘decision-making drivers’,
and the valuable (sellable) data being captured is a ‘trove’ of ‘affective
response’ (Andrejevic 2013: 31). Emoji-like symbols become a means to
make desires, tastes, inclinations, moods and feelings  – all things we
might assume to be transient and difficult to articulate or quantify – into
things that can be systematically classified. While gestures and
86  MICHELLE HENNING

behaviours can be used for mood tracking, and are registered on smart-
phones via sensors (such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and proximity
sensors), the major ways in which emotional expression becomes analysa-
ble and quantifiable is via trackable elements such as hashtags and icons
(Stark 2018: 216). Thus kitsch and kawaii become efficient means to trig-
ger and track sentiment.12
This is a live mood-capture process that is not about recording so
much as intervention, aiming not only to capture shifts in mood but to
produce mood and emotional states: to manipulate users’ emotions.13
Online networks spread heightened feelings – such as outrage, fear and
anger – but less noticeably, they also distribute more subtle or low-level
‘ambient sentiments’ such as boredom, detachment or emotional ‘flat-
ness’.14 Emoji-style icons are often used as a means to gain instant
feedback and for real-time tracking. In the context of social media, this
allows changes in the flow or feed of images and text, on the basis of
quick and even unconscious responses. Emoji-style icons facilitate
‘instant, gut-fired, emotional, positive evaluations’, as does the use of a
touchscreen (Van Dijck 2013: 46). Simple icons such as the smiley face are
effective enough for feeding back an emotional response, a good or bad
experience, a good or bad mood. Indeed, we are constantly and increas-
ingly asked to feed back, and not only online: Davies gives the example
of a push button satisfaction rating system at the exit to a workplace,
where attempts by employees to disrupt the system (pressing a button
repeatedly, for example) still ‘count’ since they still contribute to metrics
of overall workplace mood (Davies 2017: 41). A coffee machine has a
screen which asks me to rate my experience using a star rating system;
other feedback machines are located in toilets, in stores and at airports.
Here, emotional labour takes on a new meaning as the felt responses of
consumers, or users of a facility, impacts on the labour of cleaners, sales-
people and airport staff (Figure 5.2).
The analytic techniques used on our data can quantify both spontane-
ous emotional outbursts and systematic performances of emotional
states, but what is really being commodified and automated here is our
sociability, our willingness to connect with one another using the techni-
cal means at our disposal. We feed emotional expressions into the system,
not in dialogue with it, but with one another. Concepts like ‘friendship’,
‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ have shifted in meaning as technology and media
corporations have adopted them to describe activities and connections
between users, platforms and third parties. Affective relationships
between humans have been appropriated and monetised. In social media,
the objective of generating data is concealed beneath an allure of ‘connec-
tivity’ and community, buried in a language of ‘sharing’ and caring (John
2013: 125; Van Dijck 2013; Chambers 2017: 29).
 Feeling Photos   87

Figure 5.2  Customer feedback terminals. These performance measurement devices (in this case at
various airports) made by companies such as the American market research company Forrester and
the Finnish company HappyOrNot use various trademarked ‘Smiley’ devices to collect ‘real-time’
feedback data for immediate performance management. Photographs by Michelle Henning.

The Feedback Loop, Contagion and Flood

A click on a social media icon is not an expression of mood so much as
what Paul Frosh calls the ‘showing of sharedness’: a gesture that is visible
not just to the direct recipient but to others in the network (Frosh 2012).
Like the service worker wearing a smiley badge, this involves an element
of public performance, and it is this performed emotional expression and
reaction that social media platforms depend upon. If photography in the
mid-twentieth century aimed not only to capture essential human moods
and collective feelings but to provoke certain feelings in the viewers of
the photograph, contemporary social media takes this further, harness-
ing those feelings back into the circuit. The history of this feedback
loop is the history of the algorithm, but it is also the history of the data-
base, of market research, consumer behaviour research, psychometrics,
88  MICHELLE HENNING

sociological surveys, and focus groups. As early as 1985, Vilém Flusser

anticipated the way in which such feedback loops do not merely respond
to desires but produce them, in such a way that it begins to be the tech-
nology itself that is desiring. As the technical images and market research
techniques become increasingly integrated, this feedback, according to
Flusser:

[E]nables the images to change, to become better and better, and more like
the receivers want them to be; that is, the images become more and more
like the receivers want them to be so that the receivers can become
more and more like the images want them to be. (Flusser 2011: 55)

Flusser describes the self-perpetuating and growing feedback loop of

media as centrally reliant on images. But it is also clearly reliant on
language, both as audio recordings and as text. This raises the question
of why images have become the central focus of critique, why images
are attributed an ability to arouse feeling that has historically been
attributed to literature, music and the other arts. One of the most curi-
ous aspects of this is that photography, long associated with an
objective, affectless recording of the real, is now understood as almost
exclusively affective and expressive. Yet, among the many reasons we
might post images is one very traditional one – we post images to say:
‘See, it’s true, here is the evidence’. As studies of the family album in
the 1980s and 1990s argued, popular image-making and viewing
involves a lot of: ‘Look! Here I am’, or ‘I was here’, or ‘Look at that!’
(the photograph is deictic). In the sometimes heightened emotional and
confrontational context of social media, one reason photographs and
videos are widely shared is that they appear to be unemotional, objec-
tive confirmations of our existing prejudices. People with very different
political perspectives will share the same or very similar video clips,
each believing that the video shows evidence that proves their own
understanding of events. Ironically, it is possible that one reason why
certain images circulate so widely is not that they express a specific
sentiment, but that they are ambiguous and this allows for the projec-
tion of any sentiment.
In the scenario envisaged both by social media platforms and by crit-
ics, images replace words because they are fun, light-hearted and simple,
but also because they are primitive, shocking, sensual. The use of images
is promoted by media and technology companies because they seem to
promise total marketisation, facilitating the tracking of everyday social
interactions and making it easier to transform these interactions into
commercial exchange. Yet while algorithms can identify objects in photo-
graphs, their ability to analyse images in terms of emotion is very
 Feeling Photos   89

limited – not least because images don’t ‘express’ emotion in any straight-
forward way.15 Nevertheless, alongside emoji and emoji-like icons,
photographs and video have become a powerful social currency. It is now
received wisdom that sharing ‘visual content’ online will increase the
number of clicks, retweets, and broaden and hasten the circulation of posts.
Certainly, some kinds of images might circulate more effectively as part of
a gathering mood, enhancing the possibility of the un-thought-through
response and swift feedback. For these reasons, perhaps, photographic
and video images are associated with the addictive and emotive character
of contemporary media.
As images, both moving and still, photographic and graphic, circulate
rapidly in this environment, they are described using familiar metaphors.
The discourse of the flood, in particular, recurs alongside a common
lament that there are just too many photographs, that the sheer volume
of images is a kind of cultural crisis. Both Joanna Zylinska and Anne-
bella Pollen have commented on the repeated references to a ‘flood of
information’, a ‘torrent’ of images, a ‘tsunami’, a ‘deluge’, in journalistic
and critical writing on our new image culture (Zylinska 2017: 170; Pollen
2019). Some of the best writing on new media indulges in such meta-
phors: Lister writes ‘we are drowning in images’; Andrejevic postulates
that we are ‘a populace enjoined to rely on their emotions, their gut
instinct, and their thoughtless thoughts, to anchor themselves in a flood
of information’ (Andrejevic 2013: 47; Lister 2014: 15).16
This discourse of the flood is also about the masses and about women.
Klaus Theweleit’s (1987) study of the diaries of German Freikorps
soldiers showed how repeatedly fears and anxieties about women were
expressed in terms of fear of floods, fear of being dissolved, of losing
boundaries. Commenting on this and Gustave Le Bon’s influential The
Crowd (1895), Andreas Huyssen writes: ‘The fear of the masses
[was] . . . always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a
fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego
boundaries . . .’ (Huyssen 1986: 52). A fear of being overwhelmed, an
anxiety relating to population, a notion of the mass as a threat to be
harnessed or controlled, merges with fear of the inchoate, of the
unformed or formless, of ambiguity and unboundedness. The vision of
the feminised mass versus the masculine individual has historically
permeated thinking about mass culture, about the mass media and the
growing information society. Underpinning it is a politics of population
which distinguishes between valuable and disposable lives (Murphy 2018:
145). Metaphors of glut and flooding are also used in the media and by
right-wing politicians to talk about immigration, but at the same time
crowds and ‘the people’ are appealed to as the justification for political
action.17 These different ways of describing the ‘mass’ – as a populace
90  MICHELLE HENNING

with a ‘will’ that must be obeyed, or as a flood – are two sides of the same
coin. They suggest the fundamental ambiguity of the ‘mass’, a collective
with no necessary shared cause or coherent identity, which can be
summoned and invoked to claim legitimacy or arouse fear.
Emotional contagion is also largely associated with women and
crowds through the concept of hysteria, and this term also recurs in the
debates about social media images. Davies, for example, claims that:

Contagions are in fact less a matter of verbal communication than of

graphical and physical communication. When ideas are converted into
images, and those images change the way we feel, then they start to travel
through the crowd in the form of ‘sentiments’ passing from person to
person. The role of brands and logos today, which manage to commun­
icate an idea or mood without using words, is testimony to the power of
visual icons in influencing behaviour. (Davies 2018: 13–14)

The choice of words related to flood and contagion is not just unfor-
tunate but revealing of a position from which a ‘problem’ is identified.
The terms of the debate recall Steichen’s question ‘How to direct this?’,
a question that can only be asked from the position of an individual
who believes himself faced with the task of putting rational shape to
disorderly, uncontrolled feelings and/or disorderly uncontrolled images
(Steichen 1958: 159).
Like the figure of woman and of the mass, the image itself also seems
dubious and enigmatic. W. J. T. Mitchell, in his book What Do Pictures
Want? (2005), addresses the pervasive sense that images are both deeply
attractive and deeply dangerous, that their inherent attractiveness
(‘eye-candy’) is what makes them contagious and out of control. Mitchell
points out that in psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, woman is
image. The threat that images pose is aligned with the threat of women
(as castrated/castrator) and ‘the power of pictures and of women is
modeled on one another’ (Mitchell 2005: 36). He characterises the icon-
oclastic aspects of contemporary culture as new manifestations of
‘ancient superstitions about images’, new forms whose ‘deep structure
remains the same’; this is ‘a social structure grounded in the experience
of otherness and especially in the collective representation of others as
idolaters . . . the first law of iconoclasm is that the idolater is always
someone else’ (Mitchell 2005: 19). So, too, is the emotionally manipu-
lated social media user, the other seduced by images.
The literal photograph is one response to this: literalness need not be
a property of the individual photograph but a means of contextualising
the image, marshalling it into sense, ‘directing’ it, rationalising it. This
was the aim of the proponents of photography as universal language,
 Feeling Photos   91

and could be said to be the aim of social media platforms which render
images dependent on captions or narration, and linked to one another by
hashtags. Nevertheless, the speech-like aspect of social media photo­
graphy also ties the pleasure in images to the pleasures of sociability,
with the anticipation of a response and the enjoyment of looking, making
and composing images keeping us ‘posting’ and ‘sharing’. The sensual,
attractive aspect of images becomes conflated with an emotional quality
that belongs not to the photograph itself but to the interaction.

Conclusion
In a sense, the male fantasy of the domination of masculine rationality
over feminine emotionality was also always a vision of technology as
saviour. The universal language discourse was premised on a great deal
of faith in technology. Technologically advanced warfare was represented
in The Family of Man by a large backlit transparency of an atomic bomb
explosion. Viewed in the United States, the atomic bomb could be read
ambiguously, both as the ultimate symbol of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’
and as its end point and the guarantor of a new world peace. Countering
a faith in technology is the critical viewpoint which suggests that men
have created a technology that is out of their control. Today this takes the
form of an anxiety about ‘machines that think’ more rationally or logi-
cally than people, and as reason is outsourced to this apparatus, humans
are conceived of as primarily emotional, feeling creatures. Theorists fret
about being left ‘out of the loop’ as ever more images are produced to be
seen only by machines, as machines communicate with one another,
without ever translating it back to us, and as we seem to become mere
feeling-fodder for an economy that trades in attention, experience, and
raw emotion. They worry about the loss of individuality in the face of a
mass of indifferent imagery. Photography is understood as a practice
oriented purely to the expression of moods and feelings in the moment,
all the better to harness us to this machinic circuit. The assumption of
the image’s primarily sentimental and seductive character – an assump-
tion made both by cultural critics and by social media platforms – means
that photographs are being reimagined as feeling images, even while that
feeling is treated as something superficial, truncated and hackneyed. The
response to the expansion of photography into a mass, daily practice is
often to blame photographs for emotional contagion, to assert that
through popularisation photographs have lost their cultural value, to
treat the practices of taking and sharing photographs as akin to a
devalued speech form – that of ‘chattering’ women. Thought to be too
crude, too literal or too disposable to be ‘authentic’ emotional express­
ion, the kinds of photographic images that circulate on social media are
92  MICHELLE HENNING

at the same time, and paradoxically, thought to be too emotional, too

seductive, too contagious. Against this, I would argue that what is at
stake here is not the degradation of photography through its reduction to
simplified emotional expression, but the fact that photography is flour-
ishing as part of the rich and complex practices of human sociability,
even while it is being harnessed to manipulate and commodify those
practices.

Notes
1. The term, and my understanding of it, comes from Peters (1999).
2. And yet, Steichen and Sander both made use of montage and sequencing to
construct narratives that no individual photograph could convey.
3. Otto Neurath’s Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture
Education) originated in the 1920s as the Vienna Method of pictorial statistics,
a pioneering attempt to make statistical information legible to non-­expert
and semi-literate audiences. During the 1930s, Neurath increasingly began
to think of it as an auxiliary language, and to compare it to Esperanto and
Basic English (Neurath 1936; Neurath 2010).
4. While Sekula argues that The Family of Man operated as a piece of cold
war propaganda (Sekula 1981: 19), Georges Didi-Huberman reads it as a
‘photographic response to the introduction, in the Nuremberg trials – which
some of the images chosen by Steichen evoked – of the legal concept of the
‘crime against humanity’ (Didi-Huberman 2012: 15, my translation). Ariella
Azoulay reads it as almost a visual embodiment of the United Nations’ 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, prescribing, rather than describ-
ing, the universality of rights (Azoulay 2013, 20). Tom Allbeson situates it
in relation to UNESCO’s promotional imagery, which, like the Declaration,
was underpinned by the notion of one human ‘family’ which tended to
occlude cultural difference (Allbeson 2015: 399).
5. The phrase is Binkley’s (Binkley 2000: 142).
6. See Didi-Huberman for details of the gendering of this opposition in
Barthes. He considers Barthes’s analysis not only of The Family of Man but
also of another exhibition Shock Photos, of Eisenstein’s film Battleship
Potemkin. He writes that Barthes’s ‘contempt for pathos in the political
field is akin to the rejection of kitsch – the ‘bad genre’, the ‘lack of taste’ – in
the aesthetic field’ (Didi-Huberman 2012: 20, my translation).
7. Gn (2018), referring to claims made by Azuma (2012).
8. Isotype draws on the German language, with its tendency to aggregate
words, while emoji arose easily in a culture used to mixed scripts – Japanese
brings together the Chinese logographic script (kanji) with syllable scripts
(kana), and does not use an alphabet as such. Neurath drew on existing
precedents, such as cave paintings, Chinese writing, ancient Egyptian
 Feeling Photos   93

wall-paintings and hieroglyphics, ‘shinies’ (scrapbook materials), and maps

and diagrams. See Neurath (2010) From Hieroglyphics to Isotype. Kurita
also drew on the resources surrounding him: from Chinese characters to
manga, to street signs (see Negishi, 2014).
9. Unsurprisingly, therefore, emoji draw on aspects of kawaii, and share its
broad aesthetic, deploying rounded, soft shapes and neutralising or sanitis-
ing any threatening or negative connotations. However, Joel Gn argues that
emoji constitute a language of ‘cuteness’ that goes beyond the cultural
specificity of kawaii (Gn 2018: np).
10. On the role of phatic communion in contemporary media see Frosh (2012:
133).
11. For example, see Sugiyama (2015). Usually translated as ‘cute’, kawaii can
signify the small, the loveable and the pitiable, the whimsical, and that
which rouses sympathy or is adorable. It is generally, though not exclusively,
associated with femininity and with infantility. It has been critiqued for
propagating submissive femininity and encouraging paedophilia, and has
been linked to organisational and national ‘soft power’ (Macpherson and
Bryant 2018: 42, 49).
12. On the role of hashtags in mediating sociability and in regulating, extend-
ing but also ‘disintegrating’ the self, see Frosh (2019: 93–113).
13. See Stark on the Facebook emotional contagion study (Stark 2018: 206). As
Shoshana Zuboff argues, this is a trade not just in data but in human
futures, behavioural ‘prediction products’ that are a derivative of data assets
(Zuboff 2019).
14. The term ‘ambient sentiment’ is from Andrejevic, but I am also thinking of
other writing on collective mood and banality here, such as Highmore
(2017).
15. Nevertheless, while algorithms struggle with detecting sarcasm or irony and
recognising metaphor in texts, facial recognition techniques are intended
not just to recognise faces in images but also to distinguish and predict
emotion, producing ‘emotion metrics’. See Zuboff (2019).
16. Andrejevic’s resort to such terminology is odd since elsewhere he recognises
the potency of the metaphors used to describe the mass of images and data,
noting that, ‘[i]t is telling that the advent of “big data” is figured as a force
of nature: a wave, a flood, a gusher  – a found resource that miners are
tapping and harnessing’ (Andrejevic 2013: 44).
17. A report published by the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory
looked at the language used to describe migrants and migration in Britain’s
twenty national newspapers in the period 2010 to 2012. It found that terms
such as flood, influx, and wave were regularly used (Migration Observatory
2013). On the contemporary mobilisation of the crowd, see Davies (2018),
Chapter 1.
94  MICHELLE HENNING

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6 Online Weak and Poor
Images: On Contemporary
Feminist Visual Politics
Tereza Stejskalová

Bubble Vision Paradoxes

In HeR ContRIButIon to The Serpentine Galleries’ Marathon in
October 2017, Hito Steyerl discussed what she called the paradox of the
‘bubble vision’ created by immersive technologies, such as virtual reality
technology or 360° videos (Steyerl 2017). In ‘bubble vision’, Steyerl notes,
we are at the centre of an image from which we are simultaneously absent,
as we do not see ourselves in it: we remain disembodied. The strange logic
of the orb-based vision embracing an empty centre, that is, the subject,
corresponds to the paradox of the two major challenges faced by the
human species. In the so-called Anthropocene, the immensity of our
power to influence the climate and other environmental processes is
acknowledged while we threaten ourselves with our own extinction.
Analogously, while we are able to develop sophisticated systems of AI,
these systems simultaneously threaten to take our agency away from us.
These two processes are not mutually exclusive: the profit-oriented
development of technology and the Anthropocene are interlinked as capi-
talism is confronted with the limits of growth on a finite planet. If we
treat bubble vision as a crystal ball, as Steyerl suggests, the future it
predicts is one from which we are missing. Bubble vision, then, could be
seen as a preparatory course to adapt humans to a humanless world.
As a metaphor, bubble vision invites us to consider the various complex
social, economic and ecological repercussions of how the visual is impli-
cated in the current technologised condition. It also hints at the ubiquity
of digital images: their proliferation plays a significant role at the inter-
section of the Anthropocene and new technologies by setting the human
98  TEREZA STEJSKALOVÁ

subject aside. Sean Cubitt names this condition – the immense amount
of images uploaded online all the time – as the ‘mass image’. Instead of
the immersive characteristics of digital images in which the subject
becomes literally lost, here it is a humanly inconceivable quantity that
marks the displacement of the human agent from the subjective centre of
operations. This is due to the fact that the mass image, in its totality, is
perceptible solely by the system of networked profit-driven digital plat-
forms which host it (Cubitt 2017).
As a consequence, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation, over-
whelmed by both our power to influence and shape the planetary
processes and the threat that technological development poses to us.
Interestingly, Steyerl hints at the ways in which it is possible to resist by
proposing that we use bubble vision as ammunition for resistance: she
compares bubble vision to the crystal balls of the Harry Potter series,
which were used less for prediction and more as weapons in battle,
dropped by characters on the heads of their enemies. Is it possible to
make use of online digital images in a way that presents any challenge
to the mass-image, profit-driven networked platforms? For instance, can
images on social platforms such as Instagram claim any oppositional
agency?
In what follows, I would like to start with a particular example – US
Congressional Representative of the Democratic Party Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortez – as a point of departure to elaborate on feminist visual
politics that makes a breakdown of technology (software or hardware)
and human bodies its message and its medium. To do this, I will focus
less on her political message and more on her strategies of visual commu-
nication; namely, her use of Instagram streaming. During a live session
on 3 April 2019 at 10:00 p.m., Ocasio-Cortez (@ocasio-cortez2018) tried
to assemble newly bought IKEA furniture while eating popcorn, drinking
wine and discussing politics with her followers. As Ocasio-Cortez
focused on activities other than talking to and with her followers,
everything seemed unorchestrated and incidental. At the time, Ocasio-
Cortez did not have internet installed at her apartment, and so her image
occasionally turned blurry, the audio was far from perfect, the phone
with which she was streaming was placed on the ground. Moreover,
Ocasio-Cortez was clearly tired and unprepared: there were silences,
unfinished sentences, awkward moments and unanswered questions like
in any conversation with a fatigued person. Even if the casual character
of the conversation drew one in, one might wonder why anyone would
watch (what could be described by most) a failed performance of a poli-
tician at all. Of course, Instagram Live Videos vanish from the site – by
default – after 24 hours and thus, afterwards, only selected moments and
quotes from her video and image stream circulate online. As she is one of
 Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics   99

the most-watched American politicians (her presence on social platforms

is watched and shared by millions of individuals as well as media outlets
disrupting power hierarchies through more traditional communication
channels), the ‘fear of missing out’ could, at least partially, account for
the popularity of her Instagram streaming. In what follows, however, I
will try to delve deeper in order to understand the power of encounter
between Ocasio-Cortez and her mostly anonymous Instagram followers
against the conditions of algorithmic manipulation, and explain why
Ocasio-Cortez’s amateurish Instagram stream should be considered as
the realisation of Steyerl’s ‘bubble vision’ used as munition. I will show
how weak images and the vernacular worlds of algorithmic social media
visuality contribute to the analysis of ‘photography off the scale’: it is a
way in which the algorithmic, mass image can become a meaningful,
political image.

Between Expertise and Incompetence

Let us first seek clarification in another contribution by Steyerl from
almost ten years earlier. In her 2009 article ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’,
the subversive potential of digital images is understood precisely in their
‘poverty’: they are low resolution and therefore accessible, easy to find
and share. As by-products of global, digital networks, results of failed
technologies and amateur production, poor images are defined not so
much by what they depict as by their ‘velocity, intensity, spread’. Instead
of quality, quantity and speed are at stake. That is also why poor images
are difficult to contain or control and why they often violate principles
and values that govern the prevailing production and circulation of
images in the contemporary media environment. They often refer to
what is too weird, abject, degraded, dejected. Their political power is,
however, ambivalent. Steyerl describes them as collaborative documents
of shared affect and, as such, they can be used for emancipatory purposes
but may, perhaps as easily, incite hatred. We should then understand them
as potentially powerful tools that can be used in either an emancipatory
or exploitative manner.
Importantly, as testaments to their own circulation, poor images refer
less to their own content (their subject matter) and more to their own
nature as a medium, underlining their own conditions of existence, that
is, the increasingly machinic conditions of image production. What is
more, poor images not only highlight network circumstances but ‘mock
the promise of digital technology’ (Steyerl 2009). Through their glitches
and blurs, they make visible the limitations of the networks of which
they are the consequence, and they highlight the breaking points of
machine and human interactions. Sean Cubitt notes how human bodies
100  TEREZA STEJSKALOVÁ

become mediators between the mass-image network and the physical

world at the brink of collapse and subjectivities are torn between the
virtual and physical realm (see Chapter 2 by Cubitt in this volume).
Consequently, more and more people carry the burden of mental illness.
The psychological toll of being increasingly connected to contemporary
digital and networked media is also highlighted by Steyerl, who notes
how bubble vision offers nothing but isolation (and narcissism) (Steyerl
2019). As the poor image is more transparent with regard to the condi-
tions of its existence, it could be understood as one referring not only to
the fragility of breakable machines but also the damage done to humans.
While the developers of the newest devices focus on hardware and
computing power to make the devices as immersive and interactive as
possible, the immersive and interactive qualities of poor images are of a
different nature. These qualities depend precisely on the image being
imperfect, amateur, compromised. It is, after all, these qualities that
enable its distribution, appropriation and participation across a larger
group of producers. Yet when we think of Ocasio-Cortez’s video stream-
ing, more is at stake. Involved is the power of what Boris Groys defines as
‘weak image’, a kind of representation which does not require any special
skills, expertise or technology and can be made literally by anyone (Groys
2010). This notion is based on his understanding of the Avant-Garde as
a movement involved in the radical deprofessionalisation of art-making,
reducing art to the most simple and essential components, for example,
Malevich’s black square. What is essential is the power that Groys sees in
this refusal of mastery and self-erasure, wherein he sees the reason for the
Avant-Garde’s universal success. These weak images are intimately
related to what Groys calls ‘everyday life’, with which they share incon-
spicuousness, ordinariness, low visibility and endurance. The Polish
feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska has noted how Groys’s avant-garde
lacks gender, class or race, and how it is strangely disembodied (Majew-
ska 2016). The same critique can be applied to the vagueness of his
notion of ‘everyday life’: if seen through a feminist perspective, as the
sphere of social reproduction, it gains more specificity in terms of class
and gender. Social reproduction can then be understood as the histori-
cally unacknowledged and systemically undervalued bulk of activities,
behaviours, emotions and relationships involved in maintaining life
usually undertaken by women (Fraser 2017: 21). If today ‘everyday life
begins to exhibit itself  – to communicate itself as such – . . . through
contemporary networks of communication’ (Groys 2010), then digital
images uploaded onto social networks are testaments and media of social
reproduction, that is, how people, mentally or physically, sustain their
own lives and the lives of others. Feminists understand capitalism as a
system characterised by the contradiction between social production and
 Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics   101

reproduction (Fraser 2017: 22), which today we experience as a severe

crisis in social reproduction, defined by inadequate public provision,
reduced real wages, transfer of social reproduction work to insufficiently
paid migrant workers, and so on (Fraser 2017: 34): this is what many of
these digital images mediate. Today’s true artist, understood here as a
producer of poor and weak images, is one who understands well that she
is not anyone special nor is she doing anything special but is, in principle,
like any other social network user who makes manifest the (crisis of)
emotions, relations and labour which sustain life itself.
Perhaps this is why we find poor images in the work of artists who
appropriate images uploaded to social media as a means by which to
critically comment on the crisis of social reproduction. In Love Is The
Message (2016), for example, Arthur Jafa draws his images from multiple
sources, with some images still wearing a Getty Images watermark, some
coming from YouTube, and others still coming from various social media,
in order to compile a lexicon capable of communicating the African-­
American experience that includes the killings of African-­American men
captured on mobile phones. Penny Lane’s film The Pain of Others (2018)
is composed entirely of amateur YouTube videos of women who by shar-
ing their conditions, unrecognised by doctors, thus empower themselves;
what they feel is real pain, and we are left wondering what the causes of
that pain really are. This type of image production, however, is charac-
terised by a tension between expertise and incompetence: knowledge and
mastery, on the one hand; and amateurism, on the other.
This tension is explored by Majewska, who draws on Groys’s concept
of the weak image while trying to construct a feminist aesthetics coming
from global peripheries and a sense of identity based on failure. Majew-
ska discusses performances of vulnerability by the feminist artist Ewa
Partum who, in her performance Stupid Woman, appeared naked as a
frivolous ‘party girl’ likely to be abused while entirely in control as an
artist (Majewska 2016). A similar combination of weakness, vulnerabil-
ity and self-esteem also characterises Ocasio-Cortez, not only when she
speaks about her own insecurities and fear in a self-assured manner, but
even when she is ostensibly unconcerned about a bad internet connection
and lack of technical equipment. Groys emphasises how weak images
question and undermine the authority of images of mastery by pointing
out their repressed ephemerality (Groys 2010) but Majewska is more
politically grounded when she describes how Ewa Partum’s performances
work ‘as a tool to destroy masculine hegemony, without ever presenting
itself as authority or expertise’ (Majewska 2016). In unspectacular resist-
ance, there is political force and power, she argues, which can be used as
an effective strategy for politicisation. She writes: ‘It is in our weakness,
not in our strength that we all meet as oppressed groups . . . It is
102  TEREZA STEJSKALOVÁ

therefore the weakness, not the strength that should be investigated as a

possible beginning for universalising our struggles’ (Majewska 2018). We
all have a phone and an internet connection such that we can post
low-quality images online and we are all exploited by Silicon Valley
corporations. It is the weak and poor images that, in their poor quality,
carry the potential to make visible the conditions of our communication
and may thus constitute what Steyerl calls a ‘visual bond’ among the
oppressed; an insight into existing social and economic relations that is
able to organise individuals as politicised subjects. At the same time, of
course, such images continue to be ‘permeated by the most advanced
commodification techniques’ (Steyerl 2009). The artist of weak and poor
images – the professional unprofessional – is the one who is not afraid to
dwell in that space of ambivalence.

The Power of Affect

Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram live stream has been hailed as a breakthrough
in the way politicians communicate with their potential electorate, and
as such anticipating the future of politics. It has been described as
evidence of how much technology impacts the portrayal, seizure and
exercise of political power (Martínez 2019). It has been depicted as a sign
that current politics have shifted and are now more and more about inti-
macy and authenticity (Perry 2018) or about the performance of honesty
(Thompson 2019). While such strategies have already been employed for
some time in popular culture and the entertainment industry, only
recently have they entered the world of mainstream politics (Perry 2018;
Cauterucci 2018). However, what exactly is that intimacy, authenticity or
honesty that journalists speak about? What kind of performance is at
stake? And, in what sense can we speak of bubble vision?
In virtual reality, we can become immersed in outside space without
the consequences that could follow in real-life situations. VR enables
observation that invokes a sense of realism, yet the immersive character-
istics of Ocasio-Cortez’s stream are defined by something other than
reality-simulating technology. When Steyerl notes how poor image ‘builds
alliances as it travels’, and how it ‘creates new publics’ (Steyerl 2009), it is
a particular public that is at stake. When Ocasio-Cortez invites us to her
private space, her own apartment, without the presence of any other
mediator, the scene is both public and intimate: it takes place under the
auspices of the market and has thousands of participants while at the
same time the host’s feelings and bodily states are discussed. Lauren
Berlant’s concept of ‘intimate publics’ is a place that strangers embrace
because they expect to ‘share a worldview and emotional knowledge that
they have derived from a broadly common historical experience’ (Berlant
 Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics   103

2008: viii). There is a promise of belonging and emotional contact as well

as confirmation, consolation and revelation that makes subjects willing
to participate in such ‘intimate publics’. It is a space that makes it possi-
ble to understand more clearly and critically one’s situation and how to
endure, resist or overcome it (Berlant 2008: viii).
Such emotional contact with Ocasio-Cortez also involves the ‘perfor-
mance’ mentioned by Thompson, which describes the stance adopted by
that particular kind of politician and which characterises her weak and
poor images. Ocasio-Cortez manifests a total lack of regard for the
amateur and imperfect visuality which blurs the distinction between
consumer and producer. With nonchalance, she shows how her apart-
ment has been only recently rented and has been left unfurnished so far;
she repeatedly complains of failure, lack of time and fatigue. Such an
openness towards and acceptance of failure, fatigue or weakness in both
medium and message is not usually evidenced in communications by
mainstream politicians. This does not only make her more relatable, as
journalists claim (Cauterucci 2018), but could actually be said to do the
job of ‘intimate publics’ which, as Berlant argues, ‘legitimate qualities,
ways of being, and entire lives that have otherwise been deemed puny or
discarded. It creates situations where those qualities can appear as lumi-
nous’ (Berlant 2008: 3). Thus, Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram streaming
makes manifest the breakability of both the human body and technology
as a point of departure for consciousness-raising, community building
and, ultimately, for collective resistance: it features a human body inter-
acting with machines while both the human and the machine are seen as
failing or dysfunctional. Thus, in weak and poor images, what is really at
stake is an alliance of machine and human, wherein it becomes difficult
to differentiate the broken machine from the broken human.
Ocasio-Cortez’s stream can be considered a twenty-first-century rein-
vention of Donna Haraway’s cyborg, an example of what Sarah Sharma
calls ‘feminism of the broken machine’ in which feminists literally learn
from machines. Sharma analyses how the conservative political discourse
points to feminists or non-compliant women in general, as ‘machines
which do not work well’, which are, as a consequence, discarded and
replaced by more smoothly functioning technology (most obviously
sex-robots) (Sharma 2019). Sharma invites us to subversively affirm
such perspective and follow its machinic logic. Referring to Marshall
McLuhan and his understanding of the relationship between man and
technology as mutually satisfactory sexual intercourse, she asks what
happens when machines can no longer be relied upon to cooperate in
that ‘intercourse’. What can feminists learn from this? While Sharma is
interested more in the shift in discourse than in particular political praxis,
Ocasio-Cortez’s stream might be an example of the latter inspired by the
104  TEREZA STEJSKALOVÁ

former. Unwilling to exit the situation she finds herself in, reluctant to be
fixed, recharged, plugged back in, through her stream Ocasio-Cortez
becomes a broken machine.
Clearly, communicating her fatigue and brokenness, the cyborg of
intimate publics is engaged in intense emotional and affective labour: her
emotions and affects are both exploited by the market and involved in
generating social connections and their political possibilities. Berlant
discusses the concept of intimate publics mainly in relation to popular
literature for women readers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
yet we could also consider how social networks are involved in ‘digital
intimacy publics’ (Dobson et al. 2019: 4–5). The social media platforms
are ‘training grounds in the development of platforms algorithms, proto-
cols, and interfaces’ (Dobson et al. 2019: xii) and a place where users’
attention, time and affects are privatised; clearly, more is at stake. Recall-
ing Groys, we have already seen how images on social networks are media
of social reproduction. Kylie Jarrett, indebted to the work of Marxist
feminists, considers our overall activity on social networks as following
the contradictory logic of social reproduction activities, namely domes-
tic labour. While our user activity is essential for corporations to generate
surplus value, at the same time, it can involve something inalienable:
what escapes it. The key is that social reproduction entails affective
embodied activity (Jarrett 2017: 3–4). Our activity on social networks is
both exploited and potentially emancipatory specifically because it
involves affect1 (Jarrett 2017: 117–18). At stake are affective acts such as
liking other users’ posts that contribute to user data but simultaneously
can be constitutive of relations irreducible to exchange value. As Jarrett
puts it: ‘[T]he Internet is a site for physical arousal, heightened emotions
and the cultivation and maintenance of rich social relationships’ (Jarrett
2017: 121). It is the affect that makes bubble vision a powerful weapon.
The tension between social reproduction and production takes differ-
ent forms at different moments in the history of capitalist societies.
Today, for many of us, it is most palpable in the digital realm. Here is
where we can actually experience its ‘dual character’ (Federici 1975: 3–4;
Jarrett 2017: 3), that is, how it simultaneously produces relationships to
capital and our relationships to each other. It is a site of exploitation, but
it is also where we can ‘change the purpose of reproduction and work on
our capacity for resistance and self-determination’ (Stejskalová and
Kleinhamplová 2015: 52). When Ocasio-Cortez cooks macaroni and
cheese in an Instant Pot during another of her live streams on 9 Novem-
ber 2018, responding to questions and comments from her followers, be
they personal or political, users are affectively and emotionally involved.
It is precisely those interactions involving emotional labour that are the
most profitable, where expectations are disproportionately placed on
 Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics   105

women, who are more likely to like and comment on social sites (Cirucci
2018). When we watch on our screens the amateur images of a fatigued
and slightly confused Ocasio-Cortez who, instead of resting, continues
her work of political organising online; or when we watch her mention
that she quit Facebook and will not use social media on weekends because
it is detrimental to mental health (Isikoff and Klaidman 2019), the ambiv-
alence between her embrace and refusal of social network sites is apparent.
Of course, this kind of confusion is more than familiar to many users:
through such ambivalences communicated by fatigue or confusion, the
tension between exploitation and marketisation of relationships formed
on social platforms and their potential, between production and repro-
duction, is felt quite distinctly. The bubble vision as poor and weak image
emerges as a space where it is possible to collectively experience the
tension which, in turn, constitutes its political potential.

Empathy Machines
The kinship of Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram stream and virtual reality is
related to the fact that both can be understood as devices to generate
empathy for (class, gender, race) difference. At least this is how virtual
reality is generally understood. In Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram posts and
live stream we experience racial and class identity by being invited to the
space occupied by the body of a woman of colour from an immigrant
background engaged in a specific way of speaking and writing that is
conscious of differences. While we have shown that it is the affective and
emotional experience that makes her video stream enticing and immer-
sive (and also open to exploitation), this is also expressed in written and
spoken language when Ocasio-Cortez speaks and writes about emotions
as important guides in navigating alien spaces, such as when she writes
about how as a woman of colour from a family of immigrants she felt
intimidated entering the US Congress and how she was able to grow
through such fear.2 Her posts speak of the bodily experiences of the lives
of oppressed subjects, and they make manifest self-awareness being born
out of their physical realities.
Through her focus on embodied engagement and affective and
emotional experience related to the experience of difference, Ocasio-
Cortez can be described as a follower of women of colour feminism from
the 1980s.3 This is a tradition that Lisa Nakamura, a feminist theoret­
ician of digital culture, finds uncannily related to virtual reality
technologies (Nakamura 2018). Nakamura discusses how virtual reali-
ty’s immersive and enticing characteristics are, for instance, used by
corporations, namely Google, to allow its users to ‘walk in other people’s
shoes’. In ‘Exploring Race’, a 60° virtual reality video format, Google
106  TEREZA STEJSKALOVÁ

invites users (presumably white) to immerse themselves in the traumatic

experience of one of their employees – Dizzie, a woman of colour – in
order to understand how Google is a safe space for everybody, including
marginalised and oppressed subjects. Nakamura, however, makes clear
that communication platforms are interwoven with systems of oppress­
ion: most technological devices are invented and designed by white,
privileged men for white, privileged men (Nakamura).4
In response to this situation, Nakamura stresses the need for women
of colour experts to appropriate the newest technology for their own
goals. She gives the example of the Hyphen-Labs collective who combine
their expertise in new technology and afro-futurist and feminist aesthet-
ics. Their project, NeuroSpeculative Afrofeminism, aims to create an
empathetic digital environment focusing on the experiences of black
women: ‘It makes you experience racial identity’, Nakamura notes, ‘by
occupying some black space’ (Nakamura 2018). Nevertheless, she laments
the delay with which women of colour come to appropriate new techno­
logy. This is clearly not the case of Ocasio-Cortez, however, who, as a
woman of colour, is among the few politicians who use social platforms
in new, innovative ways, paving the path for others to follow. This is
because bubble vision, composed of poor and weak images, involves a
different strategy: the images do not require expert knowledge of the
particular technology and instead question the very notion of expertise,
as well as make visible the limits of access to that expertise. Their aim, in
fact, is to express Ocasio-Cortez’s status as an outsider – a woman of
colour from an immigrant, working-class background with limited
access to institutions of power – to the established political regime. This
expression makes manifest and criticises, in both form and content, the
unequal distribution of resources and privilege in American society. If
virtual reality via advanced technology creates an inauthentic sense of
realism without provoking any sense of social responsibility, the Insta-
gram live stream as poor and weak image entices one to affectively
experience a broken-down image as a representation of a reality that can
be physically and mentally damaging, impacting more and more of us,
and in which we are all implicated.
Perhaps never before have media technologies been so commodified
and so interwoven with our intimate lives. As a result, private space has
become an arena of uncompensated work, domination and surveillance.
Feminist theoreticians speak about how the conditions that previously
concerned only marginalised subjects such as women, people of colour
and lgbtq+, now affect the majority of us (Nakamura 2018; Jarrett 2019:
105). Jarrett even defines the new paradigm of ‘digital housewife’ to
underline how the conditions of our digital lives relate to the historical
oppression of particular subjects (2017: 2). In the past, politicians have
 Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics   107

tried to master new media technologies in order to push for various kinds
of causes and positions; those who were successful and who, like Ocasio-
Cortez, were quick to learn how to make use of these new technologies
for more effective communication with potential followers and voters,
gained advantages over their rivals (Thompson 2019). It is worth noting
that it is an activist, familiar with the history of feminism, who has
emerged as the chief inventor of the political uses of social media in
contemporary mainstream politics.
The lesson of Ocasio-Cortez, then, is that the history of resistance of
the oppressed can play a significant role in finding ways to navigate the
ambiguous landscape of online platforms. Her political intervention into
the social media landscape in which poor and weak images of shared
affect play a central role is informed by the history of such struggles, of
weak resistance of artists and housewives, of women of colour feminism
survival strategies: she is making them relevant again. Her visual politics,
centred around the imperfect, flawed and breakable, creates the condi-
tions for a shared affective experience of the fragility of our bodies, their
social reproduction, and the ways in which the technologised condition is
implicated. Immersed and enticed into the intimate space of another
person, we participate in poor and weak images as imperfect machines
become involved with imperfect bodies. As a result, we collectively expe-
rience the exhaustion of humans, machines and the environment. If
bubble vision as virtual reality or 360° video anticipates the future of
perfect technology and the humanless world, bubble vision as weak and
poor image focuses on the damaged present as a call to arms for an alter-
native future. This is how photography off the scale, proliferating on
social networks, finds its potential as a political force. We should under-
stand that failure and weakness is a tool for politicisation; if we stop
considering exhaustion – in any of its forms; technological, physical or
mental – as something to overcome or fix, perhaps there is still hope for
the exhausted world we occupy.

Notes
1. When defining affect, Jarrett relies on the concepts as put forth by Brian
Massumi and Sara Ahmed. Jarrett understands affect as a sensory, bodily
and, importantly, relational experience that refers to non-signifying
processes which take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and
meaning but are part of the social, cultural and psychological experience of
subjects. Emotions, however, can be verbalised and consciously grasped
(Jarrett 2017: 121–2).
2. Let’s take, for example, the image from late January 2019, in which Ocasio-
Cortez is leaning towards Ayanna Pressley, another woman of colour and
108  TEREZA STEJSKALOVÁ

US Congressional Representative, who appears to whisper something in

Ocasio-Cortez’s ear. The image is chosen to signal a sense of alliance and
sisterhood between women of colour in what is for them the unfamiliar and
alien territory of the US Congress. The image is accompanied by the follow-
ing text describing how Ocasio-Cortez struggled with the intimidating
atmosphere of Congress: ‘So yes, speaking up for the first time in this envi-
ronment can be scary. Here’s my trick: for a long time, I’ve used fear as a
guiding light 💡 instead of a reason to turn off. Emotions are information
and data too, and fear is telling us something. For me, fear isn’t saying “go
away”, fear tells me “this is new, and it *could* be dangerous. There are
stakes here.” But I’ve very frequently interpreted fear as a growth cusp.
Aside from some concrete fears, we often don’t know what we’re afraid of
until we get there, and feel it. Fear tells us how to grow. Fear, like many
discomforts, forces us to choose: ‘Do I do this, or not?’ Without fear, there
is no courage. Without fear, we don’t have the opportunity to prove ourselves
in ways we never thought possible.’ Ocasio-Cortez writes in her own words,
yet her situation is described in a language that echoes the writing of women
of colour feminists. Audre Lorde, the black lesbian poet, saw herself as a
storyteller and a warrior; language was her weapon. Lester C. Olson
observes how Lorde’s speeches ‘have an aphoristic, expansive quality result-
ing from her extensive use of metaphors, maxims, proverbs and stories’
(Olson 1997: 49). Hers is an emotionally resonant language that mixes
genres and codes, co-opting styles and weaving together the personal and
the political. Like Ocasio-Cortez, Lorde appeals to the reader using polem-
ical language: her arguments similarly centre around personal experience
and research of emotions such as anger, guilt, fear. In The Uses of Anger:
Women Responding to Racism, she speaks about anger as a legitimate
response to racism and as a way towards social change and growth. Else-
where, in The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, she
discusses the fear of visibility and the necessity to overcome it so that she
could speak up in the context of her own fear of disease – in her case, breast
cancer  – that was a taboo topic at the time. As a result, Lorde’s writing
strikes one as situated and embodied, just like that of Ocasio-Cortez.
3. We can choose to understand Ocasio-Cortez’s visual politics as part of a
wave of activism (Black Lives Matter, #Metoo) or popular culture (Beyoncé)
that makes this particular kind of feminist practice relevant again.
4. For instance, in the case of virtual reality, women are more likely to exper­
ience motion sickness than men because of how the design of virtual reality
technology affects their specific hormonal and perception systems (boyd
2014).
 Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics   109

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II Metapictures and
Remediations
7 Photography’s Mise en Abyme:
Metapictures of Scale in
Repurposed Slide Libraries
Annebella Pollen

LonG ABunDAnt, PHotoGRAPHy ’s ubiquity and multiplicity has

undoubtedly intensified in recent years. Photographs proliferate in the
digital domain at an unprecedented scale, offering the partial realisation
of many longstanding desires from a global encyclopaedic mapping of
the visual world to a museum without walls. Photographic multitudes,
however, also embody multifarious fears: of visual noise and mindless
repetition, of metaphorical promiscuity and overpopulation. To engage
with the apparently unmanageable excess of images is, it seems, to gaze
into the abyss.
This chapter considers the photographic abyss through an examin-
ation of the visual and literary device of ‘mise en abyme’ and through
W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept of the metapicture, that is, self-referential
images that ‘might be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of
providing a second-order discourse that tells us – or at least shows us –
something about pictures’ (Mitchell 1994: 38). Through an exploration
of the recent work of contemporary artists who explore photographic
enormity as their subject matter, particularly in relation to works that
utilise obsolete photographic materials  – in the form of 35mm slides
from deaccessioned art history slide libraries  – this chapter examines
how such works and such materials employ and embody metapictorial
strategies. In their oscillation between the tiny and singular and the
massive and multiple, as reinterpreted by artists, the form and content of
slide libraries necessarily expands and contracts to offer micro and macro
views, confirming scale as a central photographic characteristic. As the
works constitute images of images of images, I argue that they offer a
productive metapictorial site for surveying desires and anxieties about
image abundance and excess.
114  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

Size Matters
It has become a commonplace of twenty-first century discussions of
photography to observe the form’s enormously expanding quantities and
to use this characteristic to communicate anxieties of a parallel scale (for
summaries see Pollen 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020 and the Introduction to this
volume). Amid apocalyptic claims, recent reflective publications have
taken a more sober view, not least to put such claims into historical
perspective. Philosopher of photography Andrew Fisher (2012), for
example, has persuasively argued for scale as a central aspect of all
photographic thinking, from minor to major. Visual communication
scholars Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (2016) propose, in
order to shift the tone of the debate, that anxieties about photographic
‘excess’ should be positively repositioned as photographic ‘abundance’.
Photographic historian Michelle Henning (2018: 134) also argues that
photography must always be considered in multiple, and not only because
of our networked times. She notes, ‘the singularity of an individual image
was always a useful fiction’, even in art history, which is based on repro-
ductions of artworks, and in analogue forms, where still images were
never properly still and never existed in isolation. With these touchstones
in mind – that photographic expansion characterises current discussions
of the form; that thinking about scale and multiplicity is essential to all
thinking about photography; and that hierarchies and anxieties structure
the debate – this chapter examines case studies of artistic practice that
test how this thinking and doing plays out in empirical example.

The Art of Excess

As authors of recent surveys have observed, there is a tendency in contem-
porary practice for artists to work with photographic abundance as both
medium and message. Robert Shore, for example, in Post-Photography:
The Artist with a Camera, observed the tendency for photographers to
‘conclude that the world-out-there is so hyper-documented there’s no
point taking your own pictures anymore’. He identified ‘a leading post-­
photographic strategy’ among artists who glean from the abundant
resources of the online environment in the guise of curator and editor
(Shore 2014: 7). Similarly, Joan Fontcuberta’s exhibition and publication,
The Post-photographic Condition, similarly noted a ‘post-photographic
readiness’ among artists ‘to make use of the overwhelming quantities of
scale’ made available by the expansion in photographic practice (2015: 40).

Figure 7.1 (next page)  Oriol Vilanova: To Be Precise, 2015. Exhibition view: The Green
Parrot, Barcelona. Photograph by Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy of the artist.
116  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

Examples of this self-referential tendency are numerous. Dutch artist

and collector Erik Kessels, for example, has long worked with large-scale
collections of so-called vernacular photographs. Size and quantity have
been a key part of his practice, with his 2012 exhibition Album Beauty,
for example, scaling up individual mid-century personal photographs of
anonymous sitters to monumental wall-sized portraits to enable a shift in
perspective and thus in status and value. Kessels’s 24 Hrs in Photos,
shown since 2011 in a series of site-specific locations, also works with
scale as its subject matter (see Figure 1.1 in this volume).
Approximately 950,000 photographs are printed from those uploaded
to Flickr in a single day as a means of materialising the dizzying scale of
photographic practice. Kessels’s display strategy – piling the photographs
high as if washed up flotsam and jetsam on the gallery floor – embodies the
deluge metaphor in its suggestion of photographic excess, and indeed,
Kessels regularly expresses sadness at digital photography’s current prolif-
eration. From a younger generation, Catalan artist Oriol Vilanova also
uses mass found photographic material  – in his case, picture postcards
from flea markets – to make similar points about the superlative scale of
the visual world (Figure 7.1). In gridded display formations and stacked
and bundled piles, postcards with or without their images on show, demon-
strate patterning and repetition, density and intensity. In both artists’
exhibition strategies – wholly filling gallery walls and floors – immersive
displays are designed to visualise the overpowering drama of scale; over-
whelming visual effects speak of an overwhelming visual culture.

Art about Art History

A related body of artistic practice has adapted similar materials and
display strategies using very particular materials: the 35mm slides
recently deaccessioned from institutional library collections. Over the
last decade or so, former slide libraries serving art history departments in
higher education institutions across Europe and North America have
been undertaking collection management exercises, from streamlining to
entirely disposing of their pedagogical slides, now viewed as obsolete
with the coming of commercial digital image collections and digital
display mechanisms. Once the mainstay of art historical instruction and
a central feature of art library collections, changes in technology  –
including the cessation of film stock, processing services and projection
mechanisms – have led to widespread reconsiderations of slide libraries’
utility (Parsons 2005; Caraffa 2011; Godfrey 2014a; Godfrey 2014b;
Bouchard 2015; Schoen 2017).
The ramifications of these discussions have led to a range of different
outcomes in practice, from digitisation of collections (for example, at the
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   117

Metropolitan Museum of Art), to a move from functional visual resource

to archival special collection (at Manchester School of Art), from strate-
gic ‘weeding’ (at Oxford University) to their complete disposal (at Ithaca
College). A 1989 survey of slide collections in the UK identified that by
far the largest collections of slides resided in higher education institu-
tions (McKeown and Otter 1989; Stojković et al. 2015). A 2014 survey of
112 slide collections in Britain and North America revealed that more
than 75% were no longer intact; the vast majority were undergoing cull-
ing, had been disseminated or had been put into storage (Visual Resources
Association 2014).
Given that the discussions about reducing or disposing of collections
were based in part on a dramatic reduction in usage by the art historians
whose needs the collections were meant to serve, the question of what to
do with unused slides showed the scale of the problem, not least as collec-
tions typically ranged in size from 80,000 to 550,000 slides (Visual
Resources Association 2014). Indeed, slide libraries’ expansive quantities
were a key aspect of their form. Photographic historian Constanza
Caraffa has argued that the accumulation of photographs has long
characterised the discipline of art history; she quotes art historian
Bernard Berenson on this point from the 1930s: ‘Photographs! Photo-
graphs! In our work one can never have enough.’ Similarly, art historian
Erwin Panofsky is said to have claimed that he who has the most photo-
graphs wins (Caraffa 2011: 21). After enormities have been accumulated,
but the institutions and their users no longer want them, where should
they go? The answer has been, in many cases, to artists.
A ‘Slide and Transitional Media Task Force’ assembled by the inter­
national Visual Resources Association provided a 2014 overview of slide
libraries’ dissolution strategies. Nearly half (47%) the institutions
surveyed had donated their slides to artists; this had resulted in the crea-
tion of artistic projects from the modes to the major (Visual Resources
Association 2014). Ithaca’s Turn up the Transparency project, for exam-
ple, invited students and faculty to submit creative projects, which
resulted in the creation of slide lampshades and jewellery. Visual
Resources staff at Brown University explained that they distributed
unwanted slides to artists as a means of avoiding ‘the ignominy of
disposal’ (Bouchard 2015). The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in
New York gave their entire collection to Materials for the Arts, a scrap
store organised by the Department of Cultural Affairs to repurpose

Figure 7.2 (next pages)  Philipp Goldbach: Sturm/Iconoclasm, 2013. 200,000 small-
image format slides from the former archives of Cologne University’s Institute of Art
History, 900 cm x 1600 cm. Installation view: Museum Wiesbaden, Project Space,
2013. Photograph by Wolfgang Günzel, Offenbach. © DACS 2019.
Figure 7.3 Philipp Goldbach: Via Lucis, 2015. 200,000 small-image format slides from
the former archives of Cologne University’s Institute of Art History, 270 cm x 800
cm. Installation view: Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery, London, 2016. Photograph by
Philipp Goldbach. © DACS 2019.
122  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

Figure 7.4  Philipp Goldbach: Deaccession/Reaccession, 2016. 15,000 small-image

format slides from the archives of Bochum University’s Institute of Art History, 1855
cm x 70 cm. Installation view: RUB art collections, 2016. Photograph by Paul
Schöpfer, Cologne. © DACS 2019.

surplus items to arts organisations and schools (Barron 2017). These

brief examples show a desire to keep the material out of landfill, and
make the unwanted wanted, but also reveal the increasingly structured
systems whereby artists acquire so-called found materials.
To link deaccessioned slide collections to debates about photographic
scale, I will describe three substantial examples in further detail, each of
which, I argue, demonstrates a metapictorial art practice that sheds light
on photographic quantities. The first is the work of German artist Philipp
Goldbach, who has used the 200,000 deaccessioned slides from the
Institute of Art History, Cologne, in several different ways. In his 2013
installation Sturm/Iconoclasm, the entire collection was displayed, as if
unceremonially dumped, across the floor of a whole gallery in Wiesbaden
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   123

Museum (Figure 7.2). Taken at face value, Sturm suggests the fallen leaves
of slides shaken from the tree of their institution after a period of dramatic
turbulence; Iconoclasm seems to refer to their radical removal from
­storage and classification systems. Shaken down in this way, they become
a floor-based sculpture, borrowing from the aesthetics of minimalism but
utilising a form of maximalism in their overwhelming spread. Goldbach
created Via Lucis in 2015 (Figure 7.3), using the same material, this time
with only their black, grey or white edges visible in what the artist calls ‘a
kind of mural’. Stacked in a display of 2.7 by 8 metres, he explains, ‘[t]hey
create a buzzing random pattern, almost like white noise on a TV screen,
each slide adding a mark and collectively holding the imagery of art
history in chaotic order’ (Goldbach 2019). In 2016’s Deaccession/­
Reaccession (Figure 7.4), Goldbach reorganised slides disposed of by
Ruhr University Bochum’s Institute of Art History into a single horizon-
tal densely packed table-based display. As the artist stated, this reflects on
and makes visible ‘the systematology of the archive’ (Goldbach 2019).
Figure 7.5 Susan Dobson: Photographers A–Z. C-print from digital file, 2018, 40 in x
65.5 in (101.6 cm x 166.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
126  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

Figure 7.6  Susan Dobson: Antiquarian Avant-Garde. Archival pigment print, 2018,
35 in x 35 in (89 cm x 89 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

In Canada, photographer Susan Dobson has been working with

similar material in her photographic series Slide Library. Dobson’s
photo­graphs of projection apparatus as well as slides enable views of an
imaging system as well as its results. In her 2017 Slide Trays installation
at the Santa Cruz library in Tenerife, Spain, she created a 12 by 50-foot
mural of side-on slides, organised by geographical subject matter, again
using scaling up as a means to draw attention to material considered
obsolete, as well as to its emphases and lacunae. Scale is key to the work’s
meaning; as Alison Nordström has put it of Dobson’s work, ‘as innumer-
able small fragments of knowledge, almost overwhelming in quantity
and uniformity’, it is in their number that slides matter (Nordström
2018). Dobson plays with scale in her final prints, where proportions are
inverted; the architectural scale of slide drawers and slide carousels tower
over the viewer in acts of estrangement (Figure 7.5 and Figure 7.6).
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   127

In the final example, Canadian multimedia artist Annie MacDonell

describes her work as questioning ‘the constitution, function, and circu-
lation of images in the twenty-first century’. In an artistic commission
for the National Media Museum-funded project Either/And, later refor-
mulated as a photographic spread for Photography Reframed (Burbridge
and Pollen 2018; Knelman and MacDonell 2018), the artist described
how she found the slides ‘next to the trash’ at a higher education institu-
tion that asked not to be identified when the work was published. They
were ‘unlabeled, undated, and unsourced’ (MacDonell 2012). Each slide
image had been produced on a copy stand, variously from art mono-
graph, fashion magazine or technical manual sources, and MacDonell
highlighted the multiple transformations the images had undertaken in
their journey from, say, paintings on walls to reproductions in print, to
copying as slides, to viewing as a digital artwork. Showing edges and
folds, reflections and loss of focus, the seeming errors in the slide repro-
ductions – unselfconsciously betraying their status as copies – also reveal
their multiply-reproduced genealogies (Figure 7.7 and Figure 7.8). As
MacDonell puts it, ‘the spine’s interruption of the image reminds us
of where they came from in the first place, and how our ways of

Figure 7.7  Annie MacDonell: digital photographs of deaccessioned slides from the
series Split Screen, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
128  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

Figure 7.8  Annie MacDonell: digital photographs of deaccessioned slides from the
series Split Screen, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

encountering them continue to shift along with the technology that deliv-
ers them to us’ (2012).

Slides as a Medium of Scale

While the recent artists’ projects outlined above show a marked tendency
to explore slides as a newly available source, they are not the first to work
with slides as source material. An earlier moment took place in the 1960s
and 1970s when conceptual artists increasingly turned to the projected
image and its associated apparatus as a relatively innocent technological
form capable of communicating information and imagery and, in the
process, drawing attention to its own medium and materiality. As can be
seen in the works gathered for the 2005 exhibition Slide Show: The
Projected Image in Contemporary Art, scale mattered to the conceptual
artists working with slides in this period, as did abundance (Alexander
2005). Slides were selected for their adaptability, cheapness and lack of
material object in their immersive, impermanent displays. They combined
forms (elements of photography, cinema, theatre, information technol-
ogy) and their links to documentation/record/science/objectivity were
also attractive; they were humble in dimension but could be scaled up to
be cinematic. Now that slides are near-obsolete, as an artistic medium
they provide a different commentary on their form; their material
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   129

qualities and especially fallibilities remain part of their charm, but

whereas they were once the means of ‘preserving and projecting history’
in the art classroom, now they record their own historical status (Alexan-
der 2005).
The artists who work with slides today are in some ways in dialogue
with earlier practitioners. Although their work expands artistic engage-
ment with concepts of ‘the archive’ as a subject and a form in
contemporary practice of more recent decades (Foster 2004), each work
using art historical slides performs a metapictorial aesthetic. New work
continues to provide ways of thinking about photography as mediation
and remediation, but it also provides reflection on contemporary anxie-
ties about scale. If scale is inherent to all photographic thinking, it also,
by extension, becomes the subject matter for metapictorial photo­
graphy about photography and art about art history. Scale in photography
is not just about the too-large or the excessive; it is about the push-
pull contrasts of the individual image, potentially full of detail and
powerful in meaning, in juxtaposition with its enormous quantities. As
such, art from slide collections moves from micro to macro view in a
microscoping-­ telescoping oscillation, from piles, stacks, grids and
multiple filing cabinets to single views of tiny details writ large. The
large and small become the warp and weft of meaning; the individual
element in the mass becomes a pictorial device to understand the mean-
ing of the whole.

Metapictures and the Mise en Abyme

In my use of the term metapictorial, I draw on W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept­
ualisations of metapictures. In Picture Theory, Mitchell delineated
several categories of the form: 1) one that is self-referential, in which the
picture represents itself as a kind of mise en abyme (a picture within a
picture); 2) pictures that speak of pictures as a class, and are thus pictures
about pictures; 3) pictures that are inherently about the nature of visual
representation. In the end, however, his three-part schema  – already
showing some bleed between types – is overwritten by his broad asser-
tion: ‘Any picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures is a
metapicture’ (Mitchell 1994: 56.) Despite the metapictorial capacity of
‘any picture or visible mark no matter how simple’, Mitchell acknow­
ledges their potential complexity of meaning: ‘They don’t just illustrate
theories of picturing and vision: they show us what vision is, and picture
theory’ (1994: 57). In conclusion, Mitchell reflects:

The metapicture is not a subgenre within the fine arts but a fundamental
potentiality inherent in pictorial representation as such; it is the place
130  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

where pictures reveal and ‘know’ themselves, and where they reflect on the
intersections of visuality, language, and similitude, where they engage in
speculation and theorizing on their own nature and history. (1994: 82)

The idea of an image within an image, or a story within a story, was first
encapsulated as a formal narrative device by novelist André Gide in 1893.
He stated: ‘In a work of art I rather like to find transposed, on the scale
of the characters, the very subject of that work. Nothing throws a clearer
light upon it or more surely establishes the proportions of the whole’
(Gide 1984: 30–1). Proportion is the telling term here; the scaling up and
down shows the innermost centre and its outside parameters. In the
extended passage, Gide draws parallels with mirrors in painting and
plays-within-plays but states that the most useful parallel is the shield
within a shield in heraldry, ‘that involves putting a second representation
of the original shield “en abyme” within it’ (1984: 30–1).
The concept of the ‘mise en abyme’, identified as an idea by Gide but
coined as a term by Claude Magny in 1950, has been used extensively in
literary criticism and has itself been the subject of intense scrutiny, not
least by Lucien Dällenbach. In The Mirror in the Text Dällenbach
explores the terms’ origins, uses and misunderstandings. In heraldic
terms, abyme/abyss has particular meaning, as Dällenbach explores.
‘Semantically’, he explains, ‘the word “abyme” (abyss) evokes ideas of
depth, of infinity, of vertigo and of falling, in that order’ (1989: 189). Art
critic Craig Owens explored the concept of mise en abyme in relation to
photography in an influential article for October; here he used the
concept to read photographs by Brassai, Lady Clementina Hawarden
and Walker Evans that used mirrors, doubling and duplication centrally,
and thus pictured photography’s own condition as a mirror form and as
a site of potentially endless reduplication (Owens 1978).

Regression and Expansion

In dialogue with these conceptualisations, then, I suggest that an applica-
tion of the mise en abyme as a metapictorial device might illuminate
some aspects of photographic excess as seen in the artistic methods of
hundreds of thousands of slides tumbled across gallery floors, piled up
by dustbins, and scaled up into monumental photographic portrayals.
These are inherently pictures about pictures. Photographic historian
Steffen Siegel has noted that Goldbach’s Sturm display encapsulates both
‘the big picture’ of its overall effect and another perspective. The instal-
lation is made up of ‘lots of little pictures’; these are also ‘countless
pictures of other pictures’ (2014: 81). In Sturm, ‘the viewer is confronted
with the sheer and, in fact, astounding volume of such a collection’.
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   131

Despite this volume, Siegel notes that digital image repositories have
‘amassed to proportions far greater than any of the largest collections
imaginable in slide format’ (2014: 83). We are looking at an enormity of
slides but the edges that we can see signal a larger scale of images whose
outer limits are so large as to stretch out of view.
Susan Dobson describes her own artistic strategy in Slide Library as
an attempt ‘to draw attention to my role in the cycle of material repro­
duction’ (Dobson 2019). The work also invites this interpretation; as
Nordström has put it, ‘Dobson is a photographer photographing
­photographs of photographs’ (Nordström 2018). In Sara Knelman’s
acc­
om­paniment to MacDonell’s slide presentation, entitled ‘On
Images of Images of Images’, the curator provides a set of frames that
show if not infinite regress then a set of nesting practices that scale up
and down:

On sculpture
On photographs of sculpture
(On photographs of people posed after sculpture
On photographs of photographs of people posed after sculpture)
On books of photographs of sculpture
On slides of images in books of photographs of sculpture
(On books of images of slides, including photographs of photographs
and photographs of sculpture)
(On slideshows of images of sculpture and other arts, of family life and
travel and everything else)
On digital scans of slides of images in books and magazines of photo­
graphs of sculpture
On essays on digital scans of slides of images in books and magazines of
photographs of sculpture.  (Knelman and MacDonell 2018)

The expansion and contraction of these points of view are meditations

on the manifold versions of images that exist in a reproductive form of
technology; the layers show excess in multiple.
MacDonell’s examples also show another way in which excess has
been discussed in relation to photography, in the context of the camera’s
capacity to record too much. Visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards
has explored this aspect – what she describes as the ‘random inclusivity
of photographic inscription’ as an important site of affect (2015: 237).
The debate relates to the work of anthropologist Deborah Poole, who
explored the way in which early anthropological photography was
marked by a need to manage the medium’s inherent informational
‘excess’ (Poole 2005). Photography’s ability to record more than that
which was required for the purposes of ‘evidence’ has been characterised
132  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

by Poole as offering potential alternative readings; as a site of presence,

‘it offers a space in which other histories might emerge’ (Edwards 2015:
237). Edwards, like Hariman and Lucaites, shifts the language of scale
from ‘excess’ to ‘abundance’ to open up possibilities that are not couched
in problem and risk but grounded in ‘plentifulness, plenitude and poten-
tial’ (Edwards 2015: 237). As can be seen with MacDonell’s slide choices,
the places where the slide production has potentially ‘gone wrong’ – the
too-wide framing, the reflected light, the edges of the page, the intruding
folds – are the places that show peopled histories of labour and material
practices of production.
Thus, ‘where there is presence and affect, there remains abundance,
excess and the possibility of recoding’ (247), according to Edwards.
Although she is speaking of alternative readings of historic photographs
taken as part of anthropological endeavour, as artists rework art histori-
cal materials these excesses and abundances are the productive points of
departure. For nineteenth-century anthropologists seeking scientific
records, photography’s excess was controlled through regulated framing
and plain backdrops. Although the production of art historical informa-
tion was not quite in pursuit of scientific objectivity, there were still
exacting instructions provided by librarians about correct procedures for
presenting image records that show fixed categories of right and wrong.
The slides were meant to convey controlled and detailed information. If
one was reading the hand of the librarian or the affordances of the
medium (its crackling, discolouration or the materiality of its mounting)
then one was missing its proper meaning. In the artists’ practices I have
foregrounded, missing the proper meaning is the pursuit. Slides’ excess,
in more ways than one, is what is wanted.

A Personal Mirror
The thoughts in this chapter have been prompted by a longstanding
interest in mass photography and photography en masse, developed
through a range of case studies (Pollen 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020). They are
also specifically prompted by my own relationship to an institutional
slide library and its deaccession, although this polite term implies a
formality of disposal that did not exist in practice. Here, dialectics of the
miniscule and the unmanageably large, the wanted and the unwanted,
and of institutions and individuals played out in scaled relations. The
Slide Library at the University of Brighton, comprising some 600,000
slides at its peak in 2009, was one of the very largest institutional collec-
tions. Numbers mattered. In one typical day in 1977, for example, to give
a snapshot of usage, 411 Brighton slides were loaned to staff. In an audit
conducted in 2011, when the slide library closed, only 255 slides had been
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   133

loaned in the whole previous year; these were the quantities on which
jobs and collections depended. In discussions about the slide library’s
closure, scale was often at the forefront of debates, which necessarily
carried other values.
In a 2013 interview with former Brighton slide librarians Monica
Brewis and Belinda Greenhalgh they noted the qualities of the slides as
tiny, beautiful and brightly coloured; this was contrasted to the immers­
ive scale of their theatrical projection, vast and luminous in a darkened
space. An abundance of images in contemporary culture was negatively
likened to white noise; contemporary looking was characterised as a
distracted ‘flitting’ between multiples. This was contrasted with the
rewarding hardships of looking deeply at one image for an hour, a day, a
week; looking as a painter would look; looking so hard that it hurt
(Goody 2013). These manoeuvres, from the tiny precious singular object
to the howling mass, from the slow to the speedy, evoke values from depth
to distraction and from care to carelessness; they reveal the affordances
embodied in the slide.
In considering how to dispose of the Brighton slide library, it was
initially argued that the slides could not be repurposed; their licensing
related only to academic instruction in one specific institutional context.
To be disposed of safely, as objects composed of glass, all 600,000 would
have to be ground to powder. This violent image of destruction evoked
an ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust demise as glass would be returned to
sand. This prompted a series of passionate local efforts to ‘rescue’ the
slides from this fate. As with other collections, including a rare few which
have been preserved in toto, claims were made that they represented a
history of the discipline and of the institution; they record changing
histories of labour, material and technology; many of their images were
unique productions (Davis 2012; Goody 2013). These points were force-
fully made to no avail; the Brighton collection was disposed of in 2011. It
was too big a problem; it took up too much room in a building under
pressure to create further study space; individually the items were tiny
transparent slivers; together they were a bulky burden that must be
broken up. Under the guidance of slide librarians, art historians invested
in the collection furtively filled crates when library managers were not
looking. I took the entirety of the photography collection: tens of thou-
sands of photographs of photographs of photographs, through which I
learned my trade as a student and through which I taught my subject, in
turn, as a tutor in the same lecture halls. What remained was taken as a
whole, by artist Mary Goody, in a hundred banana boxes, with the inten-
tion of creative repurposing.
The slides of the Brighton photography collection, now sticky in their
decomposing plastic sleeves, take up two filing cabinets in my office and
134  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

Figure 7.9  John Hilliard, ‘Camera

recording its own Position’ [sic], 35 mm
slide, 1971, as labelled in the former
University of Brighton slide library.
Photograph by Richard Boll, 2019.

Figure 7.10  ‘Kodaslide 40’ slide

projector, 35 mm slide, 1961, as
labelled in the former University
of Brighton slide library. Photo­
graph by Annebella Pollen, 2011.

are a potent metaphor for histories of photography. These slides were

always to some extent metapictorial, as photographic means for telling
photographic stories, but their status has become intensified as they
stand outside immediate utility and take on a symbolic form. As
Geoffrey Batchen has observed of snapshots, ‘the advent of digital tech-
nologies means that this kind of photography has now taken on an extra
memorial role, not of the subjects it depicts, but of its own operation as
a system of representation’ (2008: 130). In their form and quantity they
embody fear and desire about loss and rescue, about the unwieldiness of
analogue technologies and the unfathomable scale of what replaces it;
they show dramatic shifts in medium and message and the scale and the
speed at which these changes take place. As Henning has argued, ‘specific
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   135

techniques developed to make images available, searchable, viewable,

such as the slideshow . . . can also be understood as ways of attempting
to control or programme what might otherwise be experienced as an
unmanageable and inassimilable onslaught or flood of images’ (2018:
138). As their metapictorial qualities are enhanced, the slides provide
multiple mises en abyme.
We might look, for example, to those conceptual artists of the 1960s
and 1970s who embraced visual representation as their subject. John
Hilliard’s ‘Camera Recording its own Condition’ (7 Apertures, 10
Speeds, 2 Mirrors) appears several times as a slide in the Brighton collec-
tion, in various states of age, repair and format, and with labelling
systems varying according to age, including some carrying incorrect
information (Figure 7.9). As Hilliard’s piece was constructed as a
sequence where a camera considered itself, seventy times over, in seventy
different settings, it already comprised scales and mirrors in both its
subject and form; it is already fading out of view. For another example,
we might consider an earlier slide, from when the slides belonged to
what was then Brighton School of Art. This example (Figure 7.10) shows
historic audiovisual technologies; a 1961 Kodak slide projector is
recorded with slide film to illustrate changing times for a changing audi-
ence. Perhaps most poignant of all, however, is the slide labelled ‘Wm.
Henry Fox Talbot, Study of Leaves. 1839’ (Figure 7.11). Under its full
title of ‘Two Hawthorn Leaves and a Fig Leaf, photogenic drawing
negative, 1939’, it is now part of a freely downloadable online digital
resource provided by the J. Paul Getty Museum; it is high quality, easily
accessible and fully contextualised, everything that the slide is not (Getty
Art Collection 2019).

Figure 7.11  William Henry Fox

Talbot, ‘Study of Leaves’, 35 mm
slide, 1839, as labelled in the
former University of Brighton
slide library. Photograph by
Richard Boll, 2019.
136  ANNEBELLA POLLEN

As photographic historian Larry Shaaf observes in the narrative

provided by Getty, issues of scale were involved in the production of the
photograph from the outset:

One of Talbot’s largest difficulties throughout 1839 remained the produc-

tion and distribution of enough examples so that people could more
readily understand what he had invented. The exceptionally poor weather
that year limited the number of pictures that could be produced, and those
that were accomplished passed through many hands and were repeatedly
exposed to daylight. In spite of all his efforts in that first public year of
photography, surviving examples made those first twelve months are
relatively scarce. (Schaaf 2002: 24)

The example in the Brighton collection is a ‘pinkie’. Its sepia tint has
faded to the characteristic puce that marks failing slides, whose func-
tional life only averages 5–8 years. The glass that surrounds it is smashed.
Its information is too vague and its framing too cropped; it is simultan­
eously too little and too much to handle. From scarcity to excess, the
image and its form speak of larger antagonisms and dialectics. ‘Photo-
graphs are but one link in a potentially endless chain of reduplication’,
Owens has noted; ‘themselves duplicates (of both their objects and, in a
sense, their negatives), they are also subject to further duplication’ (1978:
85). They ever were copies of copies of copies, and yet each transposition
is never quite the same; its material matters.

Conclusion: 600,000 Problems and their Potential

Slides are fungible, fragile, and friable. They fade, break and get stuck in
the fallible machinery. They come with requirements of etiquette and
effort: they mustn’t be shown for too long; they must be created, stored
and loaned in structured systems; they require specialist equipment and
particular personalities to produce and maintain them (Goody 2013).
They take up space and they get in the way; they are hard work and their
rewards are hard earned. They embody enormous quantities of invest-
ment; their tiny mounts will not contain the level of detail they are
required to carry. The photographic abyss and its associations of depth,
infinity, vertigo and falling play out in various ways in slide collections
and their artistic reinterpretations. It is materialised in their vast scale,
where they communicate their own unwieldiness, the scale of the prob-
lem of how to dispose of them, and the scale of the new media that
replaces them. It is seen in photography’s endless reproducibility and
endless copies as an inherently mirrored multiple media form. It is also
seen in the individual images’ excesses as tiny fragments of abundant
 Photography’s Mise en Abyme   137

potential always implicated in interrelations of scale, of order and disor-

der. As such, as metapictorial pictures about pictures, the micro view of
the individual slides and the macro view of artworks made with them
speak of parts and wholes, of failure and promise, of the desires and the
anxieties about photographic multiples and masses.

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8 The Failed Photographs
of Photography:
On the Analogue and Slow
Photography Movement
Michal Šimůnek

tHe CuRRent exCess of photography is linked to the networked digi-

tal image, recognised as a critical determinant of the changes sweeping
contemporary photography. In this respect, most accounts on the multi-
plicity and ubiquity of photography have addressed widespread practices
of camera-phone photography and the networked digital image itself.1 It
is in this context that when considering the contemporary mass image,
we must also address the ‘mass-amateurization of photography’ (Berge
2011: 177; Rubinstein and Sluis 2008: 11) – that is, the shift to a valoris-
ation of amateur photography stimulated by online photo-sharing
platforms and easy-to-handle photography tools – that has enabled so
many not only to make photographs but also to make these photographs
public. This chapter focuses on contemporary amateur photography,
though instead of concentrating on dominant ‘digital’ practices it will
centre on Lomography, which is often claimed to be a subversive
‘analogue’ variation directed against the masses of trivialised images
flooding mainstream digital photographic culture.
Taking as a case study contemporary communities of analogue and
slow photography enthusiasts, and in particular so-called Lomographers,
this chapter examines mainstream photography through the perspective
of practices and discourses which aim to slow down the pace of networked
visual culture and ‘leave the digital grind behind’ (Lomography 2010).
Questions raised have their origins in my experiences from my early
research into the Lomography community. As I was becoming familiar
with the online Lomography hub, I reached a moment at which I needed
to decide how to cope with the 14,153,656 photographs shared by
 Analogue and Slow Photography Movement   141

Lomographers on their photo-sharing site.2 In order to eliminate the

epistemological limits of compressing multiple images in one ‘statistical’
image (see, for example, Hochman and Manovich 2013), and instead
hoping to understand at least some of the photographs as unique images
with their own histories and meanings, I engaged in auto-netnographic
(Kozinets 2015; Villegas 2018) participant observation in the life of the
Lomography community.3
The chapter proceeds in two moves. The first step presents and
discusses core theories and concepts that have been employed for the
interpretation of counter-practices in conceptual art and experimental
photography, while the subsequent sections describe, interpret and
conceptualise Lomography’s discourses and practices in order to demon-
strate that the frequent Lomography tactic against the digital image is
based on producing photographs of photography, that is ‘metaphoto-
graphs’. Nevertheless, as it is further argued, the subversive potential of
this tactic fails to be realised; entangled in the branding strategies of the
Lomographic Society International (LSI) and dwelling on the inter­
section between analogue and digital photography practices, the
‘metapictoriality’ (Mitchell 1994) of Lomography does not succeed in its
quest to offer a consistent subversion of mainstream networked image
culture.

Counter-practices of Photography
To engage critically and reflexively with the transformations of photo­
graphy is commonly the domain of scholars and artists, who question
and problematise the routine ways we use photography for our everyday
purposes, often proposing new categories that address emerging
socio-cultural and technological constellations. Hence, counter-practices
in experimental photography should be part of a discussion of photo­
graphy in digital culture, even if going against the grain of discourses of
quantity and scale and the mass image. In my work, I draw mainly on the
writings of Marc Lenot (2017a, 2017b) and Ernst van Alphen (2018),
both of whom recently contributed significantly to the debate on
photography and its counter-practices.
Lenot (2017b, see also 2017a) offers a comprehensive account of exper-
imental photography practices in his book Jouer contre les appareils,
which is part encyclopaedia of artists experimenting with the medium
since the 1950s, part typology of experimental practices themselves, and
part theoretical consideration attempting to define and evaluate experi-
mental photography’s position with regard to mainstream photography
practices. Although Lenot does not attempt to define mainstream
photography practices, he identifies the mainstream with realistic
142  MICHAL ŠIMŮNEK

conception and uses of photography as the record of the real: ‘Photo­

graphy is for most of us, primarily an image, a representation. To describe
a photograph, we can talk perhaps about its colours, composition, style
or veracity, but we always describe its subject, that what is shown and
represented’ (Lenot 2017b: 15).
Lenot describes experimental photography as a heterogeneous set of
photographic practices which question and oppose claims that photo­
graphy is about realistic depiction and indexical preservation of the real:
‘Experimental photography does not pretend to be an accurate represent­
ation of reality, but rather an exploration of photography’s nature and
the photographic process itself’ (Lenot 2017b: 204–5). In this sense exper-
imental photography is critical towards mainstream photography: it is ‘a
deliberate act of critical rejection of the rules of the apparatus of photo-
graphic production, whereby the photographer calls into question one or
more established parameters of the photographic process’ (Lenot 2017a:
16). In so doing, experimental photography ‘reveals the medium to
itself . . . and destabilises the usual spectator’s relationship to photo­
graphy’ (Lenot 2017b: 9). It forces us to ask, ‘is this still photography’
(Lenot 2017b: 10)?
In order to question conventions and parameters of dominant
photographic practices and the representative power of photography,
experimental photographers employ diverse techniques. Lenot’s typol-
ogy distinguishes several types of these techniques that he categorises
according to which aspect of photography-as-realistic-depiction is being
questioned. Experimental photographers intervene in the relationship of
photography to light in the sense that they push photography to the verge
of the visible,4 and they problematise photography’s temporality using
extremely long expositions lasting for months or even years; through this
slow photography approach, they question the instantaneousness of the
snapshot.5 Other experimentations focus on photography’s materiality,
mainly in the form of interventions into the developing and printing
processes, using expired photo-materials, under-developed or over-­
developed negatives, double or multiple expositions, unfixed, and thus,
when exposed to the light, slowly degrading and disappearing photo-
graphs.6 In addition, photography can be countered through a diverse
range of hacks, re- and de-constructions of cameras – including camera­
less photography  – which are usually considered as one of the most
contra-mainstream photography techniques (see Batchen 2016). These
techniques are often mixed on the surface of a single photograph, and
deliberately supplemented with a variety of errors and initiated acts of
chance in order to stress aesthetics of imperfection as opposition to
conventionalised expectations of what a good photograph should
look like.
 Analogue and Slow Photography Movement   143

Similarly to Lenot, van Alphen (2018) understands counter-­

photography practices as those that ‘challenge our everyday experience
of the perceptual’ (van Alphen 2018: 10) and ‘deviate from the practice of
the snapshot’ (29). Van Alphen calls these kinds of images ‘failed images’
as they ‘fail to comply with the dominant notion of photography’ (van
Alphen 2018: 56). Tracing historical and contemporary works of artist–
photographers, he considers deliberately staged, blurred, under- or
over-exposed photographs and archival images-as-inventories as deviat-
ing from the dominant photographic approach (on questions of poor
images and social media, see Stejskalova’s chapter in this volume). To
take one example, in a section on staged photography, van Alphen inter-
prets photographs by Cindy Sherman, arguing that ‘one of the problems
of staged photography is . . . the fact that the photographic image is
supposed to continue outside the frame. A staged photograph only exists
within it’ (van Alphen 2018: 57). According to van Alphen, photographs
of Cindy Sherman are, in this sense, illustrative, as she ‘does not only
stage her image, but also draws attention to the act of staging itself’ (62).
Although these forms of imperfection are also common in popular
photography (see Chéroux 2003), they are most often the result of unin-
tended mistakes, errors and acts of chance that occur during the
picture-taking or photography process.
Both Lenot and van Alphen draw on Vilém Flusser (2000) in their
theorisation of experimental photography, underlining how experimen-
tal photographers play against the programme of the apparatus, and in
so doing may free us from the totality of the apparatus itself (see Flusser
2000: 81).7 Reading Lenot and Flusser’s accounts, one is able to elaborate
on the statement that experimental photographs make visible ‘the inside
of the black box and the processes that occur within it’ (Lenot 2017a: 4).
The prominent approach of experimental photographers could also be
considered by applying W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept of ‘metapictures’ (on
questions of artistic metapictorial strategies, see Pollen’s chapter in this
volume). Metapictures, as defined by Mitchell, are pictures that ‘might
be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of providing a second-­
order discourse that tells us  – or at least shows us  – something about
pictures’ (Mitchell 1994: 38). They are also understood as ‘pictures that
refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show
what a picture is’ (35). In this self-reflection lies the capacity of an image
to reveal and question the processes and conventions of its production,
‘its institutional setting, its historical positionally, its address to behold-
ers’ (Mitchell 1994: 36). Metapictures disrupt and expose to light those
oppressive powers usually hidden behind the automated conventions and
apparatuses that determine our media uses and practices. One of the
most promising ways to answer Flusser’s call for play against the
144  MICHAL ŠIMŮNEK

programme of the apparatus thus remains in the production of meta­

pictures; these images that record their own conditions of existence.
Nevertheless, this tactic is not always successful, as ‘the apparatuses
themselves automatically assimilate . . . attempts at liberation and enrich
their programs with them’ (Flusser 2000: 75). Forces of resistance can be
incorporated into the programme of the apparatuses, thereby becoming
deprived of their subversive potential. Practices of Lomography, as
demonstrated below, are an example of this dynamic between subversive
contra-mainstream practices and the power of dominant apparatuses to
incorporate these practices into their programmes.

Situating Lomography as Analogue and Slow

Photography Movement
In a contemporary digital and online photo-culture in which most photo-
graphs are taken with smartphones, making analogue photographs has
undoubtedly become a peripheral photographic practice. However, this
does not seem to apply to Lomography, as it has evolved from the 1990s
artistic endeavour of select Vienna-based artists into a commercially
successful and prosperous brand involving a vast global community of
enthusiasts.
What follows is a conceptually developed report of my auto-­netnographic
(Kozinetz 2015; Villegas 2018) encounters with Lomographers, part of
my investigative journey based on doing, living and researching Lomo­
graphy. To my surprise, becoming a double-agent Lomographer-researcher
(Šimůnek 2018a) and trying to understand the narratives and Lomo­graphy
practices of other Lomographers, I discovered that the Lomography
community is almost exclusively composed of ‘meta­ photo­ graphers’.
Lomographers do not make and share their photographs in an attempt to
represent the real, but instead, continuously produce and share a vast
amount of Lomographs of Lomography, still-growing mounds of
metapictures shared online. Hence, besides reporting, I want to under-
stand these practices in relation to Flusser’s conception of play against
the programme of apparatus and Mitchell’s notion of metapictures as a
useful reference point.
The Lomography movement began with the foundation of the Lomo-
graphic Society International (LSI) in the early 1990s in Vienna.
Nowadays, there are approximately 350 Lomography Embassies (Lomo­
graphy Gallery Stores) around the world, and members of the LSI have,
to date, uploaded almost 15 million photos on Lomography photo-­
sharing site.8 The Lomography brand has survived the digital revolution:
it has been able to stimulate the analogue photography market with the
incessant introduction of new photography equipment and materials,
 Analogue and Slow Photography Movement   145

maintaining a large community of enthusiasts through elaborate brand

communication strategies.
However, the commercial and community success of Lomography is
also supported by the broader situation in the photography industry –
visual culture transformed by the networked digital image. In this regard,
both Lenot (2017a, 2017b) and van Alphen (2018) argue that the boom of
analogue experimental photography in the last thirty years can be
explained as a consequence of the arrival of digital photography. Lenot
compares the contemporary relationship between analogue and digital
photography to the relationship between photography and painting in
the nineteenth century, demonstrating that ‘the development of digital
photography in the late twentieth century freed analogue photography
from its role of representing the real, allowing it to refocus on the photo-
graphic material, and thus on its essence’ (Lenot 2017a: 11).
Van Alphen, drawing on Krauss’s (1999) and Baker’s (2005) idea of the
‘expanded field’, and what could be considered as photography, writes
that the field of photography that first began to expand in the 1960s
within postmodern art practices has undergone a further expansion
since the 1990s, brought about by technological transformations of the
digital revolution. However, at the same time, the expansion of photo­
graphy also started to move in the opposite direction, expanding
photography’s ‘inner field’; a revival of those photographic practices that
were performed since the inception of the medium but were later margin-
alised by the dominant photographic approach (van Alphen 2018: 33). In
a similar vein, for example, Margaret Iversen argues that ‘it is only now,
with the rise of digitalisation and the near-obsolescence of traditional
technology, that we are becoming fully aware of the distinctive character
of analogue photography’ (Iversen 2012: 797). And in the words of Jussi
Parikka (2012: 3), ‘retro cultures seem to be as natural a part of the
digital-­culture landscape as high-definition screen technology and super-
fast broadband’.
An essential aspect of the analogue revival is found in the rhetoric of
slowness. In the case of Lomography, analogue cameras and materials
are celebrated as means that ‘slow your photography way down, giving
you time to think, compose, and shoot with patience’ (Neanderthalis
2012). These references to slowness and slow photography should be
recognised as a part of a broader trend of slow lifestyles and slow media
practices celebrating manual, crafted and contemplative approaches to
media production and consumption, all promising to fill one’s life with
authentic experiences (Koepnick 2014). It is especially against the
presumed fast pace of the digital that the analogue is claimed to be ‘slow’.
It is thus widely acknowledged that the arrival of the digital has condi-
tioned the analogue revival, which in turn is driven by nostalgia about
146  MICHAL ŠIMŮNEK

what is being lost in the digital revolution, and by laments over the
malaises of the digital visual culture (acceleration of changes, increased
automation, multiplicity and triviality of decontextualised photo-
graphs – Frosh 2001, 2002, 2003; Rubinstein and Sluis 2008; Rubenstein,
Golding and Fisher 2013). In this sense, Lomography is, at least rhetori-
cally, placed in opposition to the digital. The LSI, recalling this analogue/
digital opposition, recently launched a microsite with ten digital prophe-
cies declaring, in an expressive style, that ‘The Digital Present is Over’
and ‘The Future is Analogue’ (Lomography 2010). Similar statements
about the ‘Analogue Revolution’ are further dispersed across most of the
Lomography platforms and publications, where digital photography is
labelled as inauthentic, glossy, perfect, superficial and trivial, while
analogue photography is celebrated as authentically imperfect, meaning-
ful and deeply contextualised in the given experience.
This Lomographic call for the analogue revolution is not at all meant
radically – or even seriously. It is instead part of a broader, oppositional,
‘against-any-rules’ rhetoric of the Lomography brand lifestyle, which is
expressed in condensed form by the ‘Lomography prophecies’ (Lomo­
graphy 2018) and more broadly by ‘The 10 Golden Rules of Lomography’
(Lomography 2018). These rules are far from being practical advice on
how to make Lomographs: instead, they reproduce abstract lifestyle
values associated with Lomography, such as spontaneity, freedom,
authenticity, entertainment, rebellion against any conventions – all values
symbolised by the tenth golden rule: ‘Don’t worry about any rules’
(Lomography 2010). However, it is critical to note that the analogue revo-
lution could only be realised via digital means, which becomes apparent
from LSI’s ‘Analogue vs Digital Survey’ (Lomography 2012a) that
confirmed a deep engagement of Lomographers with digital media. In
this sense, the tenth Lomography prophecy is telling: ‘[L]iving analogue
is sexy, contagious, tantalising . . . Yet, a little helping of digital technol-
ogy is not a crime. Live offline but share online’ (Lomography 2010).
Lomography’s success could not be possible without Lomography
photo-sharing sites and, for example, the Lomography SmartPhone
Scanner (Lomography 2019a) that enables Lomographers to transform
their analogue images as fast as possible into an online shareable digital
image. The Lomography’s analogue revolution is significantly supported
by digital technologies, and as such, it loses its potential to oppose the
malaises of the digital visual culture.
However, as Kim Knowles (2016) argues, the recent association of
analogue technology with slowness should be understood in relation
to the materiality of analogue media and in opposition to material
infinitude and speediness of digital media. In this sense, contemporary
analogue media practices have a counter-cultural potential as they
 Analogue and Slow Photography Movement   147

‘outwardly reject the forward drive of capitalist progress and its obsess­
ion with the relentlessly new’ (Knowles 2016: 147). Artists working
with analogue media have to ‘enter into a temporal contract with its
physical materials that is at odds with modern society’s benchmark of
speed, efficiency, and instantaneity’ (147). The materiality of analogue
photography is also essential in Lomography practices, at least until the
moment when the analogue is transformed into the digital, as it is critical
for metapictorial Lomography practices, which seem to have a counter-­
digital-photography potential.

Lomography’s Metapictoriality
Academic literature on the Lomography movement is limited (Albers
and Nowak 1999) but, in considering the practices of Lomography
enthus­iasts, one can find a telling description in Italo Calvino’s (1984)
short story ‘The Adventure of a Photographer’. Antonino Paraggi, the
protagonist of this story, is in search of true photography once he real-
ises ‘that photographing photographs was the only course that he had
left – or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this
time’ (Calvino 1984: 235). Paraggi recognises that the total photograph
is a photograph of photography and that therefore ‘antiphotographic
polemic could be fought only from within the black box, setting one
kind of photography against another’ (Calvino 1984: 226). In this
sense, Calvino’s character is not just a fictional generalisation of an
experimental photographer, but also of a Lomographer, who aims to
oppose mainstream digital photography practices and whose prom­
inent  – and only  – tactic of resistance against the digital is based on
making photographs of photography. Still, Lomographic metapractices
are not so much a result of critical reflection on photography and a
deliberate decision to break with conventions and powers of the
contemporary dominant photographic approach but rather should be
understood as a consequence of the complex self-referential branding
system of the LSI.
When considering Lomography’s metapictoriality, it is essential to
bear in mind that Lomography could not be understood only by looking
at Lomographs themselves. Lomography is, as is the case of any other
photographic practice (and after all, Lomographs are photographs), a
network woven of diverse nodes: photographs, their users and uses,
cameras, apparatuses, photographic materials and other material objects,
rules and conventions, communications and interactions between
community members, and marketing and branding appeals. My primary
focus is thus to consider what is outside of the frame of images them-
selves. Since an inventory of all nodes from which a Lomography network
148  MICHAL ŠIMŮNEK

is composed could be almost endless, I am focusing on those nodes that

are important in considering Lomography’s metapictorial practices.

LomoWalls: All Lomographs Are Equal in their Triviality

The branding and marketing strategies of the LSI are frequently praised
by scholars from the fields of consumer culture studies (Schiavone 2013:
51–70) and marketing management (Hsu 2011). The LSI is considered an
exemplar of building a brand identity through intensive engagement
of brand consumers and users (Muñiz and Schau 2011); an essential
part of the Lomography network is made up of Lomography exhibitions
and an overall strategy of showing exhibited Lomographs almost exclu-
sively in the form of so-called ‘LomoWalls’. The aesthetics of LomoWalls
also determines the graphic design of Lomography books (Lomography
2012b, 2012c) and other promotional materials. Similarly, LomoWalls are
an inevitable part of each Lomography store. From the promotional
perspective, the most visible and spectacular examples are the Lomo­
Walls created as a part of festivals and trade fairs: for instance, at the first
Lomographic World Congress in Madrid, in 1997, the LomoWall was
composed of 35,000 Lomographs. At the Photokina trade fair in 2008,
there was a LomoWall made of 100,000 Lomographs, and in Manchester
in 2012, an open-air LomoWall consisted of 14,000 images.
LomoWalls are series, or more precisely, they are mosaics made of
photographs. There are always several images made from a single frame
of a negative, pictures are usually sorted by colour, hue and saturation,
and are placed side by side into the mosaic layout. Individual images
communicate with each other, but differently to conventional photo-­
stories and photo-sequences, in which ‘the signifier of connotation is no
longer to be found at the level of any one of the fragments of the sequence
but at that . . . of the concatenation’ (Barthes 1977: 24). In the case of
LomoWalls, the connotation procedures are not based on concatenation,
but on swarming. The meaning of individual images is reduced to colour
and hue; the individual image has no meaning; what it depicts and repre-
sents is not important; it is irrelevant. LomoWalls communicate in their
entirety, as a single image, not as a series of individual images.
The LSI explains this display strategy as an act of democratisation,
solidarity and egalitarianism of all Lomographers and all Lomographs.
Of course, it is always possible to look at individual images, but this is
meaningless, as they are deliberately deprived of their connection with
their referent. They become tiles in a mosaic; similar to pixels that make
up the digital image. Furthermore, since it makes no sense to look at
individual pixels in an image, it makes no sense to look at individual
Lomographs in a LomoWall as all of them are de- and recontextualised
 Analogue and Slow Photography Movement   149

in order to deliver a single message: this is a LomoWall composed of

Lomographs. Lomographs are thus only able to whisper shyly: ‘Hey, I am
Lomography too’.
The LomoWall aesthetic is reproduced by the layout of the Lomo­
graphy PhotoSharing site and the LomoHomes of Lomographers, where
users can sort images into albums, and label them with captions and tags.
Interestingly, Lomographers rarely anchor the meaning of their images
with captions, limiting their textual description mostly to tagging. It is
also noteworthy that all tags almost exclusively describe the technical
qualities of Lomographs: type of a camera, film, lenses. Descriptions of
depicted objects or of where the image was taken are seldom found. If
there are captions, they almost always describe the process through which
the images were created, or they deliver commentaries on errors and
imperfections of the given image. In this sense, images shared on Lomog-
raphy photo-sharing site are ripped from their referent, similar to images
in LomoWalls; their meaning is anchored by tags and rarely used captions,
but in both cases the message is again tautological, that is, Lomographs
are Lomographs. Rubinstein and Sluis (2008) argue that metadata
provides ‘a new paradigm to “interface reality” providing a means for the
image to escape its original context. Stripped of their interfaces, photo-­
sharing sites function as vast databases of indexed photographs which
can be remixed and remapped online as mashups’ (2008: 20). It is not
surprising that this process of decontextualisation also applies to Lomog-
raphy photo-sharing site. The LSI, with its LomoWalls, anticipated this
decontextualisation long before photo-sharing site as its metadata struc-
ture became a dominant way of showing, archiving, searching and
looking at images.
LomoWalls may have anticipated the contemporary intensification of
photography’s multiplicity, but they also play significantly on photo­
graphy’s scalability. As argued by Olivier Lugon, photography is ‘an
image without any specific scale’ (2015: 388), but the actual size of a
photograph has significant consequences affecting its cultural and social
status. Lugon argues that large, even gigantic, enlargements are histo­
rically associated with photography-as-art, while miniaturisation of
photography is associated mostly with the documentary function of
photography-as-record, as in snapshot photography and family albums.
In this respect, LomoWalls could be understood as a specific union of
these two associations as they are large, art-like images composed of
thousands of small photographs. LomoWalls thus bring together both
elitist and populist responses; they are both private (single images) and
public (mosaic); they have the status of both the industrial mass image
and the artistic singular large print valued for its rarity and exclusivity.
However, most importantly, they are an apotheosis of multiplication,
150  MICHAL ŠIMŮNEK

industrial logic of quantity, mass production and mass consumption.

LomoWalls, just like 1930s photomurals, are ‘pictures of the crowd’
(Lugon 2015: 394), which never survive their original display and, in this
sense, symbolise the contemporary throwaway nature of the networked
digital image, emphasising accelerated obsolescence, permanent renewal,
multiplicity, ubiquity and triviality of a single photograph.

Aesthetic of Imperfection
Photography has always been prone to chance. Imperfections of the
image  – mainly in the form of material accidents of the photographic
process – have always been an intrinsic feature of photography. However,
it does not seem to be the case in contemporary popular photography
dominated by digital images, camera-phone apparatuses and easy-to-use
editing software. As mentioned by many commentators (Chesher 2012;
Cruz and Meyer 2012), the easiness of creating impressive images is
the result of the increased technological control by camera operators
over picture-taking and editing processes. From this techno-industrial
perspective, chance seems to be superseded by control, and accidental
imperfections seem to disappear under a glut of flawless digital images.
In this respect, imperfections serve Lomography in enabling it to distin-
guish itself from the perfect digital image – and this is a significant part
of the rhetoric of Lomography’s analogue revolution.
The LSI manufactures and sells only plastic toy cameras which guaran-
tee the quality of imperfection to every image: vibrant colours, deep
saturation, vignettes framing the shot, light leaks, over- or under exposi-
tions, mechanical damages of film, multiple exposures. A diverse array of
interventions into the particular phases of image production further
intensifies these camera-based imperfections: actions deliberately damage
negatives, positive prints, or influence the process of digitisation of Lomo-
graphs for their sharing. In this regard, Lomographers use a similar set of
‘intervening’ and ‘damaging’ strategies as experimental photographers.
Lomographers only very rarely hack cameras: it is not necessary since the
LSI sells plastic toy cameras, pre-damaged photographic materials (for
example, Revolog and Redscale films  – Lomography 2019b, 2019c), as
well as a wide range of conversion lenses and other tools intended to
disrupt the parameters of the dominant photographic approach.
Because all Lomographs are equal, Lomographers usually scan all
frames on the negative and share all of the exposed (or even unexposed)
images without making any selections. Among the most popular are first
frames on the film which were partly exposed when the film was loaded
into the camera. Lomographers enjoy using expired film; negatives are
often developed in alternative homemade developers; other times they
 Analogue and Slow Photography Movement   151

are heated or frozen, washed in a dishwasher, boiled in diverse solutions,

drawn or scratched on. There is no attempt to remove dust prior to digi-
tisation in scanners, and sometimes old, low-resolution or deliberately
damaged scanners are used.
As I have mentioned earlier, imperfect images are common in family
snapshot photography, but in such cases they are not deprived of their
relation to the referent. As Gillian Rose argues, ‘a photo that is a blur of
flesh and shadow is kept by a mother because it was the first time her
daughter wanted to use the camera, not because it actually shows
anything much at all . . .’ (Rose 2014: 71). On the contrary, Lomo­
graphers keep the image precisely because it is imperfect: all imperfections
are considered to be authentic as they are the result of unexpected or
deliberately initiated acts of chance. As such, they are celebrated and
appreciated.
Imperfections play a crucial role in experimental photography because
of their metapictorial quality in questioning the photography itself.
However, in the case of Lomography, the metapictoriality of imperfec-
tions is tautological, as the meaning of most of the Lomographs is limited
to the single message: this imperfect photograph is Lomography. In this
sense, the imperfections of Lomographs – and all Lomographs are imper-
fect with regard to breaking the rules of the conventional notion of what
constitutes a good photograph – do not imply an oppositional or even
revolutionary stance against the digital, but rather an affirmation of the
contemporary flood of banal images. As such, every single Lomograph
shares its fate with the poor, low-resolution digital image that is

[N]o longer about the real thing  – the originary original. Instead, it is
about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation,
digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance
and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. (Steyerl
2009)

Recently I created an album composed of photographs that were almost

entirely black or grey, showing only white spots of dust and light streaks
due to the automatic exposure failure of my LOMO LC-A camera
(Šimůnek 2018b). The commentary of one Lomographer illustrates the
fact that Lomographers never play against apparatus, but instead play
with it or even let apparatuses play with images and, in addition, with
Lomographers: ‘Only autonomous machines are the true artists!’
(Šimůnek 2018c). Depicted objects, if they are at all recognisable, are
overlaid with imperfections in Lomography, which leaves the Lomo-
graphs with only one meaning; that is, that they are Lomographs. A
triviality, taken to its absurd extreme.
152  MICHAL ŠIMŮNEK

Conclusion: Failed Images that Fail in their Failing

Technical images have always been prone to growth and spreading: as
such, they also awaken disturbing feelings of image overload and urgent
calls for the ecology of images. As Susan Sontag famously remarked, ‘if
there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images,
it will require an ecology not of real things but of images as well’ (Sontag
2005: 141). But her call for an ecology of images, even as it is obvious at
the present moment, remains unheard and unanswered.
This chapter has argued that metapictorial questioning of photo­graphy,
as experimental photographers practise it, might be a way to cope with
the contemporary triviality of the mass image, a way to play against the
networked digital image apparatus. However, instead of following artists
experimenting and working with the medium, the potential of meta­
pictoriality to question and oppose contemporary image overload was
investigated through the example of the Lomography movement that
calls for an analogue revolution against the digital.
Focusing on selected metapictorial practices of Lomography, specifi-
cally the LomoWall exhibition strategy and the metapictoriality of
Lomography’s imperfections, this chapter has argued that the potential
of resistance in metapictorial tactic has failed to be realised. The Lomog-
raphy community dwells in a brilliantly crafted and self-referential
environment curated by LSI, including its politics of consumption and
brand community practices. To be a Lomographer means to find oneself
in a space where everything and everybody inevitably follows the course,
culminating in taking masses of Lomographs of Lomography, where
every particular Lomography can represent only the tautological fact
that it is itself a Lomography. The Lomography prophecies (Lomography
2010) blame digital media for being ever present and automated, but
Lomography itself turns analogue photography into an ever-present and
automated practice, resulting in the production of a growing mass of
tautological and trivial metapictures.
Van Alphen considers failed images as images that are deviant, which
fail to meet generally accepted and socially determined expectations of
what is a photograph and what are the ‘good’ ways and means of their
production, editing, dissemination and use. Lomography has been
rhetorically designed as a sort of failed image, but Lomography practices
have never been intended to become oppositional and contra-­mainstream.
It is in this sense that Lomography is just another contemporary practice
reproducing the dominant photographic approach, and as such suffering
the malaises of digital visual culture. More than 15 million Lomographs
shared on the Lomography photo-sharing site are thus failed images that
fail in their failing – insofar as it was meant to be a subversive gesture.
 Analogue and Slow Photography Movement   153

However, despite this failure – or perhaps for this very reason – Lomo­
graphy, being both analogue and digital, could help us understand the
nebulous and ever-changing identity of the contemporary photograph,
and maybe also comprehend the multiplicity and triviality of photo­
graphy itself.

Notes
1. Please see, for example, Ritchin 2009; Golding and Fisher 2013; Cruz and
Meyer 2012; Lister 2013; Larsen and Sandbye 2014; Cruz and Lehmuskallio
2016; Kuc and Zylinska 2016; Manovich 2017; Rubinstein et al. 2013.
2. Available at: <https://www.lomography.com/photos> (last accessed 4
­January 2018).
3. Netnography, being a compound word comprised of ‘ethnography’,
‘network’ and ‘Internet’, could be defined as ethnography adapted to the
study of online social networks and communities. Auto-netnography is a
form of nethnographic research that highlights the role of reflexive self-ob-
servation of the researcher’s experiences with his/her engagement in the life
of an online community. My research was focused mainly on the commu-
nity gathered around the Lomography official online hub (lomography.
com) that has more than 1 million users. Large communities of Lomogra-
phers are also on Flickr, Instagram and Facebook. See, for example, Flickr
group Lomo. Available at: <https://www.flickr.com/groups/lomo> (last
accessed 4 January 2018).
4. It is, for example, the case of American artist Lisa Oppenheim, who super-
poses negatives and positives of a single photograph in order to nullify and
destroy the image itself. Available at: <https://lisaopp.net/hl-2009> (last
accessed 28 October 2019).
5. As illustrative examples of such slow photography practices Japanese
photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and German photographer Michael
Wesely are usually mentioned. Sugimoto photographed interiors of movie
theatres during the entire screening time of a movie, thus producing photo-
graphs of projection screens mysteriously glowing in the middle of the
darkened interior of cinemas. Wesely photographed railway stations with
exposure times lasting from the moment of departure of a train until its
scheduled arrival at its destination, or streets and squares in Berlin and
other cities with exposure times lasting months or even years (Koepnick
2014).
6. As an example of slowly disappearing photographs we could mention
Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey’s Chlorophyll Prints. See, for example,
Benandi and Antonini 2015: 184­–9 or Ackroyd and Harvey’s webpage:
Available at <https://www.ackroydandharvey.com/category/works> (last
accessed 28 October 2019).
154  MICHAL ŠIMŮNEK

7. In this regard, particularly Lenot (2017a, 2017b) uses Flusser’s philosophy

when interpreting works of conceptual and experimental photographers.
For the similar use of Flusser’s theory see, e.g., Fuller 2007; Berti 2010;
Sandbye 2018.
8. Available at: <https://www.lomography.com/photos> (last accessed 28
October 2018).

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9 Strangely Unique:
Pictorial Aesthetics in the
Age of Image Abundance
Josef Ledvina

Introduction
one DAy In 1922 László Moholy-Nagy picked up the phone and called
an enamel sign factory in the small German town of Tannroda:

I had the factory’s colour chart before me, and I sketched my painting on
graph paper. At the other end of the telephone, the factory supervisor had
the same kind of paper, divided into squares. He took down the dictated
shapes in the correct position. (It was like playing chess by correspond-
ence.) One of these pictures was delivered in three different sizes so that I
could study the subtle difference in the colour relations caused by the
enlargement and reduction. (Moholy-Nagy 1947: 79–80)

That is how Moholy-Nagy himself described the origin of Telephone

Pictures some twenty years later. Yet subsequently this version of the
events was challenged by photographer and Moholy-Nagy’s first wife
Lucia Moholy. According to her, the famous telephone story was a prank:
‘I distinctly remember the timbre of his voice on this occasion – “I might
even have done it over the telephone”’ (Moholy 1972: 79).
Whatever the true course of events, the three Telephone Pictures are
still with us (Figure 9.1). Or should we instead speak of just one image
‘ordered in different sizes’? These three treasured artefacts share some
aspects characteristic of the environment of the contemporary image,
while at the same time conspicuously deviating from others. At first, the
story (or prank) about the graph paper procedure bears a striking simi-
larity to the digital ‘identity’ of contemporary images: having the same
Figure 9.1  László Moholy-Nagy: EM 1 Telefonbild, 1923. Porcelain enamel on steel,
95.2 cm x 60.3 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2019. Digital
image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.
160  JOSEF LEDVINA

image, not just in three, but a myriad of different, algorithmically

recounted and mechanically inscribed formats is something we live out
every day. We share an image between devices; we display the image on a
smartphone, then on a computer screen – once in a small window and
another instance on a full screen – and then another time we project the
same image onto a wall. There are also some stylistic similarities:1 except
for their size, in their mechanic industrial execution Moholy-Nagy’s
Telephone Pictures look almost exactly the same. And what is, after all,
more ‘identical’ in such precise execution than different instances of the
same image mechanically ‘produced’ from one dataset? Algorithmically
screened images are as precise as they can be.
Here comes the difference, though; even if we treat Telephone Pictures
as three instances of one and the same image, coded through the graph
paper’s units and the factory colour chart’s set of colour values, they are,
in stark contrast to the weightless circulation of digital images, ‘heavy’.
Set in tin and porcelain enamel, they insist on their lasting, material pres-
ence. The materiality of Telephone Pictures invites close scrutiny: in
practice, they defy Moholy-Nagy’s own formalist theory of ‘absolute
painting’, that is, painting that carries its subject ‘within itself, in its
colour’ and so consists of purely optical sensuous configurations (Moholy-­
Nagy 1969: 14). There is much more to see in Telephone Pictures than
merely shapes and colours, beginning with the conspicuous fact that they
are made from tin plates covered with a layer of porcelain enamel; a highly
unusual material for art production at that time. This was, of course, a
matter of special interest for Moholy-Nagy. It was he, after all, who
further dramatised the relationship of this already industrial material to
the field of factory mass production through the careful juxtaposition of
three pictures in a 1924 presentation in the Sturm Gallery in Berlin. The
precision, bordering on a pure notionality of geometrically defined lines
and surfaces, is a stylistic feature of machine-made things (in contrast to
more individuated artisan production);2 it is also a feature that Moholy-­
Nagy – as a connoisseur of industrial and technological modernity – was
very much attracted to. Another question is how he felt about the fact that
closer scrutiny reveals imprecisions and inevitable deviations from the
(apparently) sought after notionality of pure geometry. For example,
along the edges, the porcelain layer recedes and thins, revealing the metal
support of the configuration; in contrast, the narrower enamel bars are
almost bulging from the notionally defined picture plane. In these and
other similar ways, there are marked differences between the three Tele­
phone Pictures; the subtle enamel relief of the thin bars is, for example,
more pronounced in the case of the smaller versions.
In contrast, there is something strongly counter-intuitive to the conver-
sation about different and unique artefacts when it comes to viewing the
 the Age of Image Abundance   161

same image file on different devices; even more so if this happens on the
same device. It is here that the popular discourse of ‘dematerialisation’,
‘ephemerality’ and ‘fluidity’ finds its breeding ground.3 In the vast major-
ity of non-art contexts, we treat images as transparent. We do not
consider them as singular materialisations of the same image, as we,
especially today, do in the case of old-fashioned enamel-on-tin ‘hard-
ware’. But, does it make sense to treat two different instances of opening
the same image file as two distinct artefacts?
My answer to this question is an emphatic yes.4 In what follows, I
demonstrate a selection of specific ways for overcoming, countering or
getting behind the ephemerality and interchangeability that governs the
contemporary image environment. In other words, I explore ways to
attend to what is continuously appearing and disappearing on our screens
with the same sort of care and attention we usually reserve for the old
and treasured. Many things have changed, but some truths still hold:
despite their ephemerality, images are still artefacts, or, as I will argue,
pieces of design, which means particular pieces of technology made from
particular ‘matter’ in a particular way for a (more or less) particular
purpose. That is, they are tools, and as such they can go ‘strange’. Some-
times, when they are broken, they go strange by themselves, and other
times, when they are works of art, for example, they are made strange on
purpose. Images can thus be rescued from the flood of pictorial data and
seen as strangely unique. What this all means will be developed in detail,
after one more demonstrative jump located right in the middle of an
aesthetically striking encounter with a set of non-depictive images that
are identical yet different. In this case, they will be contemporary, digital
and quite mundane.

Broken Pictures
Does it make any sense to treat two cases of the opening of the identical
image file as two distinct artefacts? There unquestionably are occasions
when it does. A digital image, when it is being viewed, is necessarily
‘screened’, and thus the screening device can make a difference – a
difference that does not always go unnoticed. There is a considerable
field of professional expertise, as well as popular connoisseurship, that
makes subtle distinctions in this regard. The screen device market runs
partially on comparing respective qualities of displays (for more infor-
mation on ‘flat panel display’ technologies see Lee, Liu and Wu 2009),
where pixel density is scrutinised as well as the advantages and disadvan-
tages of newly introduced display technologies. One of the earlier
examples is in-plane-switching (IPS) screen technology, implemented
into marketed devices since the 1990s to compensate for strong viewing
164  JOSEF LEDVINA

angle dependence, previously one of the main limitations of Liquid

Crystal Displays (LCDs). A more recent example is the introduction of
Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLED) as an alternative to traditional
LCDs, where the key advantage is the OLED screen’s thinness and flexi-
bility. For connoisseurs of the immaculate image, there is a price to pay
for this: the view in bright light can be more difficult because of lower
maximum brightness, and, more importantly, OLEDs are prone to image
degradation over a relatively short period of time. This results in colour
shifts as one colour fades faster than another, image persistence, and in
extreme cases, image burn-in. Such effects are usually subtle, visible only
to a trained eye, but can be disruptive and disturbing.
There is an image of striking beauty circulating on the web, depicting
six identical LG OLED TV sets, with an identical red slide on their
respective screens Even though the code of the embedded monochrome
images is, no doubt, identical – as is the model of the TVs – it is difficult
to see them as just the repetition of the same. This is because all of them
are, to some degree, ‘spoiled’ with visible image burn-in traces or, as the
popular metaphor goes, with ‘ghosts’. On one of the TVs, even the ghost
of the CNN channel logo can be recognised (Figure 9.2). As much as my
interest in this unusual image constellation is an aesthetic one, the origin
of my concerns stems from a practical interest: it is with regard to the
result of the test which demonstrated that the life-span of the new LG
OLED TV line is significantly shorter than the 30,000 hours promised by
the manufacturer (O’Keeffe 2019). In general, the story of LG OLED TV
sets leads to the fascinating realisation that, at least on the molecular
level, no two screenings of what we usually see and handle as perfectly
identical images are entirely the same pictures. Over time and through
use, these screens are undergoing subtle changes, and so are, as a conse-
quence, the images screened on them. Of course, it can be argued that
these minute changes are almost imperceptible and thus aesthetically
void. But where is the line separating what counts aesthetically and what
doesn’t? Perceptibility is a highly context-dependent quality; an expert or
connoisseur can see more than an amateur. Are magnifying glasses to be
prohibited? And if so, why not dioptric glasses too? The point is that that
the very fact of degradation can create a horizon determining how we
watch images on displays. We can always search for ghosts, burns and
retention; there will always be some to be found.
I suggest that the aesthetic interest I find in unique image constella-
tions comes, at least partially, from the relation between two aspects.
First, there is the relish of the luminescent monochrome image plane.5

Figure 9.2 (previous page)  Real Life OLED Burn-In Test on 6 TVs, week 94. Courtesy
RTINGS.com
 the Age of Image Abundance   165

Second, what makes the set of red monochromes particularly aestheti-

cally interesting, at a deeper level so to speak, is the fact that this image
of the purest form is at the same time ‘tainted’. In a way, the image splits
into two folds: on the one hand, there is in the image a notionally uniform
red colour; on the other hand, picture qua picture, it is an artefact or
piece of technology. This experience of mine is a case of a particular
attitude to images that has been discussed recently in philosophical
aesthetics, usually under the rubric ‘inflected seeing-in’ (for varying
conceptions of image inflexion see Podro 1998: 26; McIver Lopes 2005:
40, 128–9; Hopkins 2010: 151–80; Nanay 2010: 181–207; Nanay 2016).
Malcolm Budd had already argued in 1995 that ‘the interrelationship
between the marks on the surface and what is depicted in them’ is ‘the
crucial characteristic of pictorial art’ (Budd 1995: 58). More recently,
Bence Nanay proposed ‘design-scene property’ as the term for this pecu-
liar ‘characteristic’, a ‘relational property that cannot be fully
characterized without reference to both the picture’s design and to the
depicted object’ (Nanay 2010: 194). For Nanay, the aesthetic experience
of images differs from how we experience them in non-aesthetic contexts,
in that we consciously attend not just to what is ‘in the image,’ but at the
same time to the ‘picture surface’. I am particularly fond of Nanay’s
choice of terms as it helps to avoid some potential misconceptions. Phil-
osophical aesthetics often say very little about the material ‘fold’ of
inflected imagery, instead focusing on image surfaces and planes; this can
easily lead to a Greenbergian idea that what shall be attended to – and
what artists should put on display – are the purely optical qualities of
shapes and colours or the optically active field.6 But materialist interpre-
tations of surface can lead to a different kind of popular misconception,
namely, that what we explore in the ‘second fold’ is only ‘matter’ in some
physicalist sense or, in Heideggerian terms as merely present-at-hand
(Vorhandensein). What we often explore when we get behind image
transparency is an artefact qua artefact, or a piece of design, which
means a particular piece of technology made from a particular matter in
a particular way for a (more or less) particular purpose, that is, as ready-
to-hand (Zuhandensein) (Heidegger 1996).
I propose here to think about images, on a general level, as tools
designed for delivering pictorial content or, in other terms, tools for
seeing-in.7 Inflected digital images are just one example of what Alva
Nöe calls ‘strange tools’. In his book of the same name, Nöe compares
images to doorknobs: ‘When you walk up to a door, you don’t stop to
inspect the doorknob. Doorknobs don’t puzzle us’ (Nöe 2016: 100). Yet
this does not mean that those doorknobs are, in the true sense of the
word, natural: ‘Doorknobs exist in a context of a whole form of life, a
whole biology – the existence of doors, and buildings, and passages, the
166  JOSEF LEDVINA

human body, the hand and so on’ (Nöe 2016: 100). The reason they seem
natural to us is that we take all of these complex and interrelated presup-
positions for granted. The same can be said about images. ‘The pictures
in the daily newspaper or family album’ – and here we can add to Nöe’s
examples our smartphones, computer screens and TV sets – ‘strike us as
self-evident and natural’ (100). This is what constitutes their trans­
parency: ‘It seems to us as if they are transparencies through which we
see the world’ (100). But all of this works just because they are part of a
very familiar ‘communication game’, a game in which we are ‘at home’
(100). As with the doorknobs, images are natural to us in the way good
design is natural. Art starts, according to Nöe, ‘when we lose the possi-
bility of taking the background of our technologies for granted, when we
can no longer take for granted what is, in fact, the precondition for our
very natural-seeming intelligibility of such things as doorknobs and
pictures’ (Nöe 2016: 100).
Image burn-in and retention can also be seen as a case of the break-
down or malfunction of electronic image-tools that makes their
inconspicuous presence visible or, speaking of images, makes transparen-
cies opaque. While we are usually experiencing these breakdowns as
disturbances, frictions, annoyances or hiccups, they can be mined for
aesthetic and artistic purposes. Heideggerian underpinnings of Alva
 the Age of Image Abundance   167

Figure 9.3  Penelope Umbrico: Sun/Screen/Scan, 2018. 185 archival pigment prints,
variable: 17 in x 24 in; 17 in x 12 in; 12 in x 8.4 in; 6 in x 4.25 in. Courtesy of the
artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Nöe’s aesthetics are obvious, and it was, in fact, Heidegger who explic-
itly reflected how ‘broken tools’ could complicate the transparent
presence-at-hand of Zuhandene and make their own ‘worldliness’ appar-
ent: ‘When we discover its unusability, the thing becomes conspicuous’
(Heidegger 1996: 68). This does not mean that what was previously
ready-at-hand is now objectively something that ‘just lies there’. Instead,
the horizon of purpose is still determining our experiencing of a damaged
tool: ‘Pure objective presence makes itself known in the known thing
only to withdraw again in the handiness of what is taken care of, that is,
what is being put back into repair’ (Heidegger 1996: 68). The tool does
not change its objectively present properties, but it is lacking with regard
to what it was originally designed for.

Opaque Images
There are many artistically and aesthetically productive ways that things
can go wrong with digital images.8 Some of the resulting ‘strange pictures’
are even more mundane than the degradation of organic compounds on
which the OLED technology is based. As I write this chapter, I open a
168  JOSEF LEDVINA

random image from the web: light falling through the window of the café
I am working in reflects off the surface of my laptop screen. As a conse-
quence, the image gets ‘spoiled’ with a unique and highly personalised
pattern of specks, smudges and stains (reflecting, for example, my bad
habit of eating and drinking over the computer).
Penelope Umbrico’s artistic projects often and precisely draw our
attention to this unique, individualised diversity of what is usually
considered the interchangeable and transparent support of the mediums
that deliver to us identical images, regardless of time and space. A prime
example is her work Sun/Screen/Scan, exhibited for the first time in 2018
in the New York City Library (Figure 9.3). It consists of a cluster of over
one hundred printed scans of screens extracted from disused computer
monitors, laptops, tablets and smartphones. All of the devices that we, in
Umbrico’s words, ‘touch, that we are intimate with, and that replace
natural sunlight in our lives’ (Umbrico n.d.). While not captured in the
moment of screening an image, the screens are nevertheless transparent.
Placed on the uniform module of scanning glass, they reveal undifferen-
tiated greyish ‘nothing’ as if ready for an image to be put on display.
However, it is the screens themselves that are being put on display; each
of the pictured screens is, of course, unique. They differ significantly
through their formats, and here the systematic differentiation of differ-
ent categories of screen devices comes to fore, especially with regard to
smartphones, being significantly smaller. More importantly, though,
each of the screens has a unique pattern of indices from the routines of
their past uses, seen through scratches, smudges, and sometimes clearly
visible fingerprints. This incredible richness in the opacity of transparen-
cies was achieved through a peculiar scanning procedure deployed by the
artist. While making the scans, Umbrico placed the scanner in sunlight
with the lid removed, thereby producing an effect analogous to what we
sometimes experience with functioning screens, at those annoying
moments when the artificial luminescence is overcome by the Sun.

Poor Resolution
The reflections, dirt, scratches and burns of the computer or smartphone
screens may still feel somewhat external to the ‘image itself’.9 In the end
‘the same image’ can be opened on a different, ‘unspoiled’ device. But
what is closer to the image ‘as such’? Or, more precisely, what constitutes
the identity of a digital image in its different inscriptions? The seemingly
straightforward answer is at hand: ‘the code’. If the data are identical, so
is the image, regardless of contingencies such as scratches, burns or
reflections of ambient light. This means that digital images are, in
contrast to their analogous predecessors, in Nelson Goodman’s terms
 the Age of Image Abundance   169

‘notational’. One of the reasons why Goodman gives so much space to a

detailed discussion of notational ‘symbol schemes’ in his Languages of
Art is to explain why there are some artforms where forgery is logically
impossible (Goodman 1976: 177–221). For Goodman, there can be fake
Rembrandts, but no fake Finnegans Wake, and no fake Fifth Symphonies,
though there can be fake first editions of Finnegans Wake and fake
performances of the Fifth. Goodman explains that while painting is
‘autographic’, literature, as well as classical music based on musical
notation, is ‘allographic’, which means that authorship consists in
designing the notation, and ‘performance of the piece’ is provided by
some other agency. A novel is set in definite notation; namely, the charac-
ters of a given script. Goodman states that

[T]he fact that a literary work is in a definite notation, consisting of

certain signs or characters that are to be combined in concatenation
provides the means for distinguishing the properties constitutive of the
work from all contingent properties, that is for fixing the required features
and the limits for permissible variation in each. (Goodman 1976: 116)

In classical music, we have a composition set in a musical score and a

variety of performances which all, if correct, are of the same piece and
the same piece. They are, in Goodman’s useful terminology, ‘inscrip-
tions’ of the same ‘character’. But this is obviously also the case for
digital images: the ‘author’ provides the bits of bites – or concatenation
of nulls and ones  – and this ‘definite notation’ provides the means of
distinguishing the constitutive properties of an image.10 All the different
screenings of the same image, however they may vary in multiple aspects,
are merely different inscriptions (screenings) of the same character
(image): they are performances of an identical piece.
Things are, to be sure, technically much more complicated than
implied above. The move between the pattern of magnetised and
non-magnetised electric particles on a hard drive and an image appearing
on a computer screen is far from straightforward. The code changes all
the time, often without us noticing; one version is in the storage capacity
of the phone, another post on Facebook, yet another stored in Google
Photos. Image standards, compression formats and device-specific
screening algorithmic procedures make the identity of code a complex
and, for our daily lives with images, a mostly irrelevant issue (for an
introduction to compression formats see the ‘Codecs’ entry in Fuller
2008: 48–55). For most users, this is all a black-box. However, what is of
interest for us here is what role the notation of digital images plays on an
experiential or phenomenal level. The visible counterpart of the image
data and its hidden process of the inscription are, of course, ‘pixels’.
170  JOSEF LEDVINA

When opening an image file, the image is mechanically ‘performed’

through a matrix of a vast number of lit LEDs or OLEDs. Nevertheless,
at present, we don’t usually see these native pixels as something out of
which the image is made; the image on the screen typically pictorialises
as a homogenous whole. There are some exceptions, one of which was
explored above; the OLED screens with their image burn-in draw our
attention to this otherwise invisible or transparent screen design, as do
many projects by Umbrico and the vast field of popular aesthetic preoc-
cupation otherwise known as glitch art. But sometimes we see another
and different meaning of the ambiguous term ‘pixels’; when a stored
image does not contain enough data to match the native resolution of
the screen, it usually becomes pixelated.11 These clearly visible pixels
inscribed on the screen are, of course, materially composed of many
native pixels lit in the same colour, and can thus be, for example, spoiled
by burn-in degradation of the hardware pixelation. What is of impor-
tance for us is that when the pixels suddenly emerge, we are encountering
another variety of image inflexion. In non-art contexts, pixelated images
usually count as, to some degree, dysfunctional: they are poor images or
images of low quality. These dysfunctional or lacking image-tools can
perform well as strange tools of art.
Needless to say, this was not always the case. In the not-so-distant
past, all digital images – even the best ones – were conspicuously pixel­
ated, especially in comparison to finely grained analogue print. Returning
to Goodman’s analysis of digitality, the key difference between analogue
and digital symbol schemes is based on the fact that the first symbol
scheme is ‘syntactically dense’, meaning that it ‘provides for infinitely
many characters so ordered that between each two there is a third’
(Goodman 1976: 136). This property of analogue imagery can be illus-
trated in one of Goodman’s examples, Katsushika Hokusai’s Mount Fuji
in Clear Weather. In the case of Mount Fuji, every variation and modu-
lation in the rising, falling, undulating, thickening and thinning line
potentially depicts something of the volcanic mountain’s silhouette,
where even the slightest projection can represent a piece of rock or vege-
tation. In between any two points, there is some other semantically
significant ‘character’ inscribed. Of course, if we magnify Mount Fuji,
we arrive at some threshold of depiction; when we start to see discrete,
spatially separated pieces of ink-dyed paper fibres. No one is likely to
claim that these depict something of the mountain, but the density
constitutes, in Whitney Davis’s succinct terms, a ‘horizon’ of our perceiv-
ing and exploring of the picture (see the discussion of Goodman’s
Hokusai example in Davis 2006: 73–7). In contrast, digital images are
notational and thus disjointed: there is an arbitrary and strictly set
boundary of discrimination. When coloured square blocks of pixelation
 the Age of Image Abundance   171

appear we do not see them as depictive, and no one, we can assume,

would see a visibly pixelated digital silhouette of Mount Fuji and think
that the mountain was formed from some seemingly odd cubic stone
blocks; the pixels are of the inscription (of its design) and not of its
character.
Today we do not very often see digital images as ‘digital’; disjoint
pixels as the constituent part of digital imagery notation have largely
disappeared from our horizons. This way of describing the difference
between digital and analogue images worked not just on a logical level
but also on a phenomenological level in 1968, at the time of Goodman’s
Languages of Art first publication, and to a great degree until at least the
1990s. With the exponential rise of cheap computing power and data
storage capacities coupled with the development of still higher and
higher resolution screening devices, the situation has changed dramati-
cally. In many contexts, we simply handle digital images analogically: we
search in them for more and more detail, in between what we have already
noticed. We even zoom in, assuming that there is always more to see. We
open the same image on different devices with varying resolutions, unre-
strained by the fear that the image will fail and the distracting noise of
pixelation will come into view. All of this runs smoothly and without
notice until it doesn’t, and this is when things get strange.
The idea of an image that is stored somewhere, or rather nowhere or
everywhere ‘in clouds’ and can be put at any time to any use, fails most
often, or at least leads to unsatisfactory results, because of ‘poor resolu-
tion’. The fluidity and flexibility of always-ready-at-handedness are the
distinguishing characteristics of digital imagery, and indeed, what makes
digitally notated images – compared to analogue ones – an immensely
efficient tool from the point of view of storing and distribution. This is
also where we can witness the breakdown of the digital image. Let us
turn to a telling example, Four Photographs of Rays of Sunlight in Grand
Central, Penelope Umbrico’s beautiful project installed in 2016 in Grand
Central Terminal in New York and at Bruce Silverstein Gallery. Four
Photographs was based on her signature technique of appropriating a
vast number of images from the web, in this case, hundreds of iconic
pictures capturing fleeting moments when sunlight fell through the
windows of the Manhattan station hall (see Umbrico, n.d.) (Figure 9.4).
Presented also as a single-channel digital projection, all of the projected
images are digital versions of what had previously been four analogue
pictures, meaning that the viewers, in some respects, witness countless
iterations of the original four. Yet the images are not seen only as repeti-
tion of the same; the digital versions vary widely due to cropping,
flipping, filtering and colour calibration (some versions are in black and
white scale, others capture tonal qualities of analogue prints in colours).
Figure 9.4 Penelope Umbrico: Four
photographs of Rays of Sunlight in Grand
Central, Grand Central Terminal,
1903–1913, 1920, 1926, 1928, 1929,
1934, 1937, 1940, 1930–1940, 1935–
1941, 1947, or 2010, by John Collier,
Philip Gendreau Herbert, Edward Hulton,
Kurt Hulton, Edward Lunch, Maxi, Hal
Morey, Henry Silberman, Warren and
Wetmore Trowbridge, Underwood &
Underwood, Unknown, or Anonymous
(Courtesy: Associated Press, the author,
Bettmann/Corbis, Hal Morey/Getty
Images, Getty Images, Hulton Collection,
Hulton-Getty, Hutton Collection, New
York City Municipal Archives, New York
Transit Museum, New York City Parks
and Landmarks, Royal Geographical
Society, SuperStock/Corbis, Underwood
& Underwood, Warren and Wetmore,
or Image in Public Domain), 2013–2016,
single-channel digital video, colour,
6:29 min. Courtesy of the artist and
Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.
174  JOSEF LEDVINA

Most importantly for our purposes, all of them are, to some degree,
‘bad’. Conspicuous pixelation gets between the image user and the
depicted scene and also between what was already, before digitalisation,
to some degree opaque: the aged and treasured analogue prints on paper.
Here, a clash between the analogue richness of the finely grained pictures
and the disjoint, gap-ridden digital ‘reproductions’ is being performed.
But this is something that can be avoided; first, there are better versions
available, somewhere in the non-space of the internet, and second, these
images are not bad in and of themselves. They are just small, and when
inscribed on an adequately small screen, such as in the small window of
a computer’s GUI or as thumbnails, they serve their purpose perfectly
well. The breakdown occurs when we try to use them for something for
which they are not good enough, or for which they were not designed.
This breakdown is device- and use-dependent, and it happens right here,
in front of us in an exhibition space, during projection.
In her Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl names thumbnails
among the examples of ‘poor images’ (Steyerl 2009). But thumbnails are,
in fact, rich enough as thumbnails. At the same time, from another point
of view, Steyerl is right: they are bad in general because they are single-­
purpose tools, pragmatically rigid and thus lacking what we are tacitly
counting on; the flexibility of use. When this flexibility fails, we can begin
to learn how many notationally different images – with different stories
and histories of editing, compressing and supplementing, serving differ-
ent and sometimes highly specialised purposes  – there are. However,
until the moment of revelation, we treat these different ‘characters’
simply as identical, homogenous, dense, analogue wholes.

Resolution Overkill
Even in the age of high resolution, things with pixels can get strange in
the opposite direction  – in the arguably rare moments when we face
analogue density, where some arbitrarily set threshold of discrimination
is to be expected. The best example of this kind of strangeness is provided
by Seth Price’s recent work. In 2018, Price presented a series of large-­
format photographs in MoMA: printed on fabric and stretched on
commercial lightboxes, they emanated a cloud of cold glow, similar to
the projected-light-based images on computer screens. Titled Danny,
Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad, the photographs depict sections of
legs and arms of six different sitters, friends of the artist, identified infor-
mally by their first names (Figure 9.5). To say that these images are rich
in detail is a gross understatement: the artist first took thousands of
images with the aid of a special robotic camera, normally reserved for
scientific research or forensic study. These images were then ‘stitched’
 the Age of Image Abundance   175

together using satellite-image software, retouched by professional

retouchers, and then run through 3D modelling software.
The resulting effect is captivating; the viewer is drawn closer and
closer, carefully scrutinising the details, searching in vain for the limit.
Seth Price explains his original motivation as a search for a method to
create ‘large format print at extremely high resolution’. Interestingly, he
also speaks about familiarity: ‘We are familiar with seeing huge prints on
the side of buildings or buses, but there is almost no data there, it’s very
low-res. Or you see super high-res images, but they are quite small’
(Mellin 2019). Those who have had the opportunity to see a billboard
print from up close know that digital printing also has its arbitrary set
limit, even if the technology of subtractive CMYK colour representation
is different from the additive RGB used in screen devices.
Translation between RGB and CMYK is an exciting topic in and of
itself; strange things happen, and ample space for hiccups and failures
appears in the process.12 But let us not get involved in that lengthy discus-
sion here: intricacies of halftoning and dithering aside, when we get
closer to a large print, we expect, at some point, to see a raster of cyan,
magenta, yellow and black dots on a white surface. Seth Price’s bodily
portraits are thus strange not because of a lack of transparency but
because of transparency overkill. We simply see too much. Yes, Price’s
images are strange also for other reasons: we are not quite sure what they
depict, the bodily surfaces are cropped details lacking context; they are
simply too big; and it is strange to see a bit of hand three metres high. But
here, too, the size and unusually high resolution for the format work
together. There are, of course, many large images of bodily surfaces on
billboards, but they are supposed to be seen from a distance, and when
we get closer to them the raster quickly tells us to back away. Under the
specific decorum governing the way we look at pictures in art museums,
the situation is somewhat different – close-up viewing and backing-off is
part of the game. The usual reason for this is to explore the design-scene
properties, to see how the image is designed from marks on the surface,
whether these are brush strokes, the grain of analogue photography, a
bulging enamel layer, or the raster of a digital print. But Danny, Mila,
Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad defies this attitude. Instead of exploring the
border between the becoming of an image and its dissolution into a
non-depictive configuration of marks – and the relation between both –
we delve deeper and deeper into the hidden microcosms of skin anatomy.
It is indeed a strange idea to have one image that depicts a hand, and at
the same time, when viewed close enough, also shows something of the

Figure 9.5 (next page)  Seth Price: Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad, installation
view, MoMA PS1, New York, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York,
Photograph by Ron Amstutz.
176  JOSEF LEDVINA
the Age of Image Abundance   177
178  JOSEF LEDVINA

physiognomy of the hand at the almost cellular level. Usually, for each of
these two things, we reserve images of different registers.
About the strangeness of Price’s image-tools there is likely to be no
disagreement, but are they in some sense ‘broken’? It depends upon the
interpretation. As I have tried to demonstrate, they fail to depict what
their titles suggest they are: it is hard, if not impossible, to see Danny,
Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob or Brad in them. From a more general
perspective, imagine if this kind of image took the place of the ready-at-
hand images we so often choose from the web when we want to see what
someone or something or someplace looks like, or to show something to
someone else, to use a picture in a lecture or yet another as wallpaper for
your computer. With most standard devices you would not be able to
open them, and in some, it would take an exhaustively long time; you
would physically experience something more commonly experienced in
the recent past – time. And though it still takes time for the machine to
take the stored data and process them into an image on the screen, this
time is usually counted in measures beyond the reach of human experi-
ence. The sought-after flexibility of the tool, that is, the idea of one
image for every occasion, would be lost. We would not necessarily say
that this tool is broken, but rather that it has become useless, inconven-
ient and, in most contexts, extremely wasteful.

Conclusions
Digitalisation brought, without doubt, a fundamental change in how we
handle and experience images. They are produced and reproduced,
displayed and discarded, inscribed and reinscribed at scales that were
unimaginable some twenty years ago. This also means that we care much
less about them, simply because it is easier to have them or to get them;
they have lost the value they used to enjoy. This also means that we are
much less prone to look at them as attentively as we do, for example, at
Moholy-Nagy’s Telephone Pictures.
Nevertheless, here I have proposed a way to rescue such images from
the never-ceasing flux of visual information, applying to them the same
amount of careful study that we usually reserve for the old and the treas-
ured. Does this imply that I am disregarding what is new about images,
what makes them different, and in effect, arguing that the change is not
as fundamental as it would seem? The answer is both yes and no. Yes,
images are still images and they are still tools for seeing in, but no, if it
should imply that the aesthetic experience of contemporary imagery is
or should be the same as in the age of relative image scarcity. The very
idea that every single image inscription is unique and that we should
treat it as such is strange indeed. But this is precisely why its realisation
 the Age of Image Abundance   179

in practice is aesthetically so rewarding: it helps us reflect upon contem-

porary conditions when particular images are seemingly nowhere and
everywhere.

Notes
1. It is important here to distinguish between stylistic analysis and formalism
in the vein of Whitney Davis: ‘Unlike formalism, however, stylistic analysis
investigates the causes of an apparent configuration’ (Davis 2011: 46).
2. Here, I borrow a useful concept of notionality from Summers, closely
related to the abstraction from size. For Summers, ‘notional refers to gener-
alized dimensional relations, usually ratios’ (Summers 2003: 685). This
generalisation is based on abstraction from facture, that is, from the aspects
of how the artefact has been made.
3. Compare Geoffrey Batchen’s characterisation of the present condition: ‘The
old, familiar distinctions between reality and its representation, original and
reproduction, nature and culture  – the very infrastructure of our modern
worldview – seem to have collapsed in on each other. More specifically, the
substance of an image, the matter of its identity, no longer has to do with
paper or particles of silver or pictorial appearance or place of origin; it
instead comprises a pliable sequence of digital codes and electrical impulses’
(Batchen 2001: 155). Though Batchen, at the same time, argues that these
conditions were already present with the ‘invention’ of photography.
4. I am, of course, not the only one who thinks that it makes sense to study
singular articulations of identical digital images. For an inspiring and, in
some respects, related discussion of what the author calls ‘apparitions of
images’ see Batchen 2018.
5. This predilection can be partially based on my intimate art-historical
acquittance with modernist monochrome painting tradition in general and
dematerialising luminescent opticality of monochromes made in the 1960s
by Yves Klein in his signature ‘International Ives Klein’s blue’ in particular.
6. According to Clement Greenberg, this pure opticality is the only legitimate
‘subject’ for modernist painting, which means that, at least in theory, the
true aesthetic experience must be un-inflected. Compare (Greenberg 1995:
89): ‘With Manet and the Impressionists, the question ceased to be defined
as one of color versus drawing, and became instead a question of purely
optical experience as against optical experience modified or revised by
tactile associations. It was in the name of the purely and literally optical,
not in that of color, that the Impressionists set themselves to undermining
shading and modelling and everything else that seemed to connote the
sculptural.’
7. This is, of course, simplification; we use images for a great variety of
purposes, and some of their properties are determined by these widely
180  JOSEF LEDVINA

differing uses. Nevertheless, what makes imagehood of an image is that it

is pictorially contentful. This is the property on which all uses of images
in widely differing communication games to some degree depend, at least
in the cases where they are used as images (and not for example as charac-
ters of script or ironing boards). So, any general theory of pictures needs
to explain first the phenomenon of pictorial contentfulness. For one such
inspiring attempt at a general theory of images see McIver Lopes 2004.
This line of argument for the explanatory priority of phenomenon of
pictorial contentfulness is somewhat similar to Robert Brandom’s criti-
cism of the pragmatist conception of language that rests on the level of
pointing at the ‘plurality of language games’. And it is for Brandom also
a starting point for a monumental attempt at a pragmatic explanation of
the phenomenon of representational contentfulness of language (Brandom
1994: 89–91).
8. What follows is not meant to be, in any respect, an exhaustive typology. The
whole field of vernacular ‘glitch art’ would be, for example, relevant here.
For a basic orientation, see ‘Glitch’ by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin
(Fuller 2008: 110–19).
9. The question of what constitutes the identity of an image is a complex one
and has been formulated in a variety of ways. Following a discussion of
Goodman’s ideas about digital representations will not provide any answers
in this regard. Inspirational ideas as to the question of identity can be, for
example, found in Hans Belting, who distinguishes image and medium,
latter defined as a ‘carrier of representation’ (Belting 2011: 9–13). But this
‘carrier’ is for Belting not just the material support of representation; it is
constituted in the relation between the matter and the body of the beholder,
where the body is ‘guided by cultural patterns and pictorial technologies’
(2011: 9–13). All this makes Belting’s conception of pictures similar to
Nöe’s idea that images are kinds of tools. The question of what makes
images identical could thus be productively rephrased as: what makes two
pictorial tools identical? It may very well be that in answering this question,
the distinction between analogue and digital would become relatively less
revolutionary than it appears.
10. Here, I avoid a discussion of who is the author in the case of technical
images. Of course, it can be a machine or apparatus, but it deserves to be
mentioned that characters have their ‘authors’ as well as their inscriptions.
In some artforms, inscription authorship is aesthetically significant:
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under
Herbert von Karajan is something other than the same performed by the
Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel. But who are the authors
in the case of image inscriptions of digital images? Usually, we don’t care,
but when we do, we usually see the machine as their ‘author’. Although it is
the machine that is malfunctioning, on another level, it can fail due to bad
 the Age of Image Abundance   181

design that has already its name or, in the current state of affairs, many
names (or a name of some collective agency – for example LG development
department).
11. Usually, there is the possibility for advanced algorithmic supplementation
of the missing data besides just repeating (on your screen) pixels of the
same value.
12. To get an idea of how diverse digital print techniques are, see Martin Jürgens
The Eye (n.d.). Anachronistic paper print is also a popular strategy among
contemporary artists for ‘freezing’ the inherent instability of electronic
image circulation. A prime example is the ‘Printed Web’ project by Paul
Soulellis (n.d.).

References
Batchen, Geoffrey (2001), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Batchen, Geoffrey (2018), Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination. Prague
and Sydney: Power Publications and the Academy of Performing Arts in
Prague (AMU Press).
Belting, Hans (2011), An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brandom, Robert B. (1994), Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and
Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Budd, Malcom (1995), Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. London: Allen
Lane.
Davis, Whitney (2006), ‘How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age’, October, 117:
71–​98.
Davis, Whitney (2011), A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Fuller, Matthew (ed.) (2008), Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Goodman, Nelson (1976), Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of
Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merill Company.
Greenberg, Clement (1995), ‘Modernist Painting’, in Clement Greenberg, The
Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance,
1957–​1969. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1996), Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh (trans.). Albany:
SUNY Press.
Hopkins, Robert (2010), ‘Inflected Pictorial Experience: Its Treatment and
Significance’, in Catherine Abell and Katerina Bantinaki (eds), Philosophical
Perspectives on Depiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–80.
Jürgens, Martin (n.d), The Eye, <http://​​the-​eye.nl> (last accessed 11 November
2019).
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Lee, Jiun-​Haw, David N. Liu and Shin-​Tson Wu (2009), Introduction to Flat

Panel Displays. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
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sity Press.
McIver Lopes, Dominic (2005), Sight and Sensibility. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Mellin, Haley (2019), ‘Seth Price’s Self as Tube’, Garage, 18 July 2019. Available
at: <https://​​garage.vice.com-​en-​us-​article-​ywy8kg-​seth-​prices-​self-​as-​tube>
(last accessed 11 November 2019).
Moholy, Lucia (1972), Marginal Notes. London and Krefeld: Scherpe Verlag.
Moholy-​Nagy, László (1947), The New Vision. New York: Wittenborn.
Moholy-​Nagy, László [1925] (1969), Painting, Photography, Film. London: Lund
Humphries.
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Depiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 181–207.
Nanay, Bence (2016), Aesthetic as Philosophy of Perception. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nöe, Alva (2016), Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and
Wang.
O’Keeffe, Daniel (2019), ‘Real Life OLED Burn-​In Test on 6 TVs’, Rtings.com.
Available at: <https://​​www.rtings.com-​tv-​learn-​real-​life-​oled-​burn-​in-​test>
(last accessed 11 November 2019).
Podro, Michael (1998), Depiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Soulellis, Paul (n.d.), Printed Web. Available at: <https://​​printedweb.org> (last
accessed 11 November 2019).
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<https://​​www.e-​flux.com-​journal-​10-​61362-​in-​defense-​of-​the-​poor-​image>
(last accessed 11 November 2019).
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brico.net-​index.php-​project-​grand-​central-​> (last accessed 11 November 2019).
Umbrico, Penelope (n.d.), ‘Sun-​Screen-​Scan . . .’, Penelopeumbrico.net. Availa-
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205–26.
III Models,
Scans and AI
10 On Seeing Where There’s
Nothing to See: Practices of
Light beyond Photography
Jussi Parikka

WiFi Vision
In A ReCent PAPeR, Person-in-WiFi: Fine-grained Person Perception
using WiFi, a team of researchers suggested that WiFi antennas and signals
are, in principle, sensors capable of detecting body postures and move-
ment. This form of seeing beyond the visual spectrum is introduced as an
alternative to camera-based, radar, and lidar (Light Detection and Rang-
ing) technologies that have already been used in the context of ‘people
perception’ (Wang et al. 2019). In a city – nowadays, almost any city – that
is cut through by an extensive range of wireless signals between signal
stations, this means that, in effect, the city is continuously forming images.
These images, however, take a detour via WiFi, where transmission turns
into photography and signal processing into spatial modelling, in a
reminder that everything that exists as a signal can also exist as an image.
This is not the first paper to claim the usefulness of WiFi as a form of
perception: the authors list earlier work in which 1D signal space has been
reconstructed into ‘2D fine-grained spatial information of human bodies’,
itself questioning the theoretical focus on the visual spectrum through the
mapping of opening doors, keystrokes, dancing and even static objects.
Out of this broader ontology of ‘wirelessness’ (Mackenzie 2010) emerges
the possibility of mapping, visualising and modelling space, humans,
animals, objects – anything that reflects back, so to speak, the signals from
WiFi traffic and antennae. This quirky detail also reveals how vision, or
even a metaphorical extension of ‘seeing’ in this technological context, is
not a distinct sensorial capacity to be understood in relation to other
human-based sensoria (hearing, touching) but is something modelled
186  JUSSI PARIKKA

according to sampling rates: ‘lidars have sampling rate in the range of 5–20
Hz, which is much lower than other sensors such as cameras (20–60 Hz) or
WiFi adapters (100 Hz)’ (Wang 2019: 2). The image, then, is a sampling
of a spatio-temporal situation: a constantly produced entity that cuts
across the dynamics of a city as part of an operational processing of what
is being seen, at what time, in which relations, and to what ends.
How does this relate to our concern, photography off the scale? Most
visual theory and photographic studies have only now started to deal
with the not so new media discoveries of the early nineteenth century
such as the infrared (by Frederick William Herschel) and ultraviolet (by
Johann Wilhelm Ritter) as visual realities that form – alongside the more
traditional focus on photography, cinema, television and computer
images – an alternative genealogy to the technical media of the past 100
to 150 years. Of course, the two lineages are not separated, even if photo-
graphic theory and history have had a tendency to focus more on seeing
through things we call ‘cameras’ instead of, for example, sensors (Gabrys
2016). Such a view of images sees them as one subset in the larger field of
‘measurement’, whether as photogrammetry or as pattern recognition,
that then forms a fundamental background for the contemporary
contexts of AI, where images somehow persist as part of computational
culture. However, it is the assemblage of ‘seeing’ by other means – seeing
as measurement and seeing off the visible spectrum – that has thrown
photography off the scale, alongside many other traditional forms of
evaluating the techniques, discourses and habits of seeing in the cultural
context of 200 years of machine vision (Virilio 1994). These assemblages
can be coined post-lenticular landscapes, following the works of the
artistic design team ScanLAB, and others.
Alternative contexts of seeing, with a specific focus on technologies of
pulse and light, have emerged as one particular type of time-critical
(Ernst 2016) and post-human (Zylinska 2017) visual measurement and
observation. Of the multiple technologies of pulse and light, lidar stands
out as one of the most discussed examples in the contexts of architecture
and urbanism and one which has become a widely used technique across
a range of fields in scientific measuring, including architectural model-
ling. It is increasingly used in artistically driven projects that mobilise
lidar imagery as a way to survey and map landscapes and urban areas,
engaging with emerging mobile units, such as autonomous vehicles, as
key elements of these landscapes. The light-scanning technology devel-
oped earlier in the context of atmospheric modelling (Synge 1930)
becomes a recurring reference point for some of the insights that articu-
late both genealogies of seeing through signals and pulses of light and
sound, and contemporary technologies that map the city as one inten-
sive, complex landscape of dynamics and navigation.1 This same
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   187

genealogy links research into light waves and far-away planetary objects
by Christian Doppler in the 1840s, the realisation that the physical world
is (often a light-emitting) broadcasting station in the 1920s and 1930s
(Canales 2014: 23), the discovery of radar as the ultimate synesthetic
transformation of sounds to images in the 1930s, and the recent discus-
sions about lidar imaging and autonomous cars as a light echo pulse of
the city. In many ways, it is also clear that this form of imaging is not
about visuality per se, but about navigation: these are not images to be
seen, but terrains to manoeuvre (see Mende 2017). In this context of
images that echo across the city, to speak of the ‘pulse of the city’ is not
a metaphoric description but a technical one: lidar as light radar is a
technology of millions of directed (ultraviolet or near-infrared) light
pulses per second, where the returning signal is then recorded and
modelled accordingly. An image of the city, an image of clouds, an image
of complex formations; each is measured in front of our eyes.
Consider the city as an already complex formation, a pattern of
dynamics upon which technologies attempt to build their networks of
images. Cities are full of signals and light; they are full of cameras and
techniques of observation, of surfaces that refract and reflect light; from
shop windows to closed-circuit televisions, the city is continuously being
seen and registered and measured. However, an increasing amount of the
technological ‘seeing’ that takes place in the large-scale visual landscapes
of the city works to question traditional photographic modes of under-
standing visual power while introducing different genealogies of what
the city is, as an assemblage of materials and seeing, as movement and
large-scale dynamics. The city is a perfect test case – a laboratory even –
for technologies and images off the scale. This is not merely because
cities are large in scale, but because they exhibit such a vast multiscalar
complexity that speaks to many of the changes that are taking place at
the level of human perception and visuality and in the culture of the city
itself. The city becomes a site of post-human forms of sensing – if this
refers to the various autonomous systems that now process the majority
of the things we still call ‘images’. If the theoretically outlined media
archaeology of the camera has been, until now, focused on the detach-
ment of the seeing eye from the human body and from the act of seeing
(Silverman 1993), we can now articulate how this camera-eye got stuck
on the (autonomous) car, where it sees in ways that are not just seeing but
modelling, mapping, measuring, predicting, and a range of other cultural
techniques that pave the way for a wider set of infrastructural implica-
tions. In other words, the forms of seeing now introduced  – whether
through WiFi signals, lidar, radar or camera as measurements – are part
of the operative ontologies (Siegert 2017) that do not focus on the act of
seeing at the site of the device or the body of the perceiver, but in the
188  JUSSI PARIKKA

connected networks where multiple feeds are a part of the dynamic

formation of an image in real time.

What Is It Like to See Like a Computer?

At the centre of this chapter are themes that have been discussed earlier by
Paul Virilio, Harun Farocki and other theorist–artists, each contending
with machines that form images, and images that are part of computa-
tional systems. Machine vision, computer-assisted technologies of
scanning, and the nonhuman; all have already entered the photographic
focus, questioning divisions between media-specific analyses such as
cinema and photography (see, for example, Anderson 2017). In recent
years, artistic projects have attempted to understand the changing visual
landscapes of things unseen, from computer vision to AI, and the neural
network processing of image data. For Trevor Paglen (2016), images turn
to look at you in a complex assemblage of visuality where it is becoming
more and more difficult to pinpoint where the actual seeing happens along
chains of multiple operations that are connected to this network of events.
Another example of this difficulty is Ben Grosser’s computational
algorithm piece Computers Watching Movies (2013; Figure 10.1), the
staging of a situation in which humans are given a glimpse of what (and
how) a computer might see as it watches a film. Grosser’s work is primar-
ily focused on the software that ‘uses computer vision algorithms and
artificial intelligence routines to give the system some degree of agency,
allowing it to decide what it watches and what it does not’.2 Films such as
2001: A Space Odyssey, American Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, The
Matrix, and Annie Hall are each mapped as simple moving vector spaces,
while the soundtrack makes way for the possibility of the viewer recalling
what the films look like for humans. Sound calls forth a nostalgia for the
visuals that have already left the human’s visual spectrum. The visual
space is mapped in a different measure and becomes something other
than visual in the sense of seen and observed. It becomes part of the
regime of pattern recognition with multiple technical, aesthetic and
political implications (see Apprich et al. 2018).
While systems of machine vision are no longer limited to military-op-
erated large-scale analytical and targeting machines, they are still
relatively new in the context of contemporary visual arts. Although
architecture and speculative design are dealing with this at an ever-­
increasing pace, there remains much to discuss in relation to the
transformation I pointed out earlier in this chapter: when and where
visuality turns into navigation; navigation functions as part of large-
scale infrastructures; and images are both seen and processed as data (cf.
Bridle 2019). Our sense of machine vision is often metaphorical when it
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   189

tries to cater to the human assumption about what the machine sees. In
many contexts, the cultural, artistic and humanities responses to non-­
human vision are simply versions of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s (1974)
famous question ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ In the case of autonomous
and technological vision systems, the question should be: what it is like
to see like a machine? A more refined version of this move would be to
educate ourselves in machine ways of seeing, as a recent project and a
workshop put it, adapting the original words of John Berger in inventive
ways (Cox 2016). This means: not just speculating about what the
machine sees when it sees something – as if it would or could see some-
thing in the same register of things we consider to be perception – but
what this seeing means in the broader sense of processing patterns,
organising culture, or designing large-scale distributed nonhuman agent
systems. As Geoff Cox (2016) puts it:

In this we should not try to oppose machine and human seeing but take
them to be more thoroughly entangled  – a more ‘posthuman’ or ‘new
materialist’ position that challenges the onto-epistemological character of
seeing – and produces new kinds of knowledge-power that both challenges
as well as extends the anthropomorphism of vision and its attachment to
dominant forms of rationality.

The sort of imaging/imagining practices that actively avoid the

assumed primacy of human eyes and interpretation seem to be them-
selves one particular aspect of what we relate to as the automation of
images, but also, as I want to elaborate, the urban environment of images.
This refers to the images of the environment in the context of the ongo-
ing mass-scale disaster of climate change, global warming and toxic
planetary inhabitability, but also to the images as fundamentally involved
in those environments in ways that hark back to discussions about remote
sensing, large-scale visualisation practices and ultimately, images as data
and incorporated as elements in large-data sets (Anderson 2017).
The impact of such imaging becomes evident when considering the
range of automated image and machine vision systems that function in
large-scale, embedded and dynamic systems – from cityscapes to meteor-
ological systems, from military scanning of landscapes to development
of experimental ways of environmental visualisation. Each of these, in
many ways, detaches images from the usual register of what visuality
means as optical perception or quality. For example, different forms of
sensors would be one source that only leads to data visualisation that

Figure 10.1 (next page)  Still frame from Computers Watching Movies (The Matrix),
2013. <https://bengrosser.com> , used with permission.
194  JUSSI PARIKKA

provides something even remotely resembling ‘an image’. Of course, the

latter point should not itself be mistaken for something new or revolu-
tionary: for a long time visuality was governed in relation to geometrics
and calculation, including the perspectival calculations for painters (as
famously outlined by Alberti) as well as the metrics of measurement
through images for architects (also introduced by Alberti). In our context,
this relates directly to the genealogy of photogrammetry (Carpo 2017:
115). Hence, while there could be a longer narrative about the genealogy
of visuality as measurement (see Tomáš Dvořák’s chapter in this volume)
and as environmental analysis of the (architectural) image, I want to turn
to some recent examples that deal with alternative genealogies of machine
vision and post-lenticular landscapes.

The Urban Pulse

While the term post-lenticular landscape could be seen as describing
a wider shift in visual technologies and photography, it is also the title of a
work, Post-lenticular Landscapes (2016–17; Figure 10.2), by ScanLAB
Projects, who in the summer of 2016 travelled to Yosemite National Park
to produce a 3D model  – a hologram  – of Yosemite Valley with laser
scanning technology. From lenticular photography to laser-based pulses,
from scanning to modelling, the work was contextualised as part of the
history of landscape photography, extending from Eadweard Muybridge’s
famous Yosemite series of the 1870s through the various professional and
amateur images produced since. Besides the legacy of the site itself, the
work is situated in relation to the legacy of photogrammetric modelling
of geological landscapes where Edouard Deville’s large-scale experi-
ments ‘with dry plate cameras within the Rocky Mountains beginning in
1887’ (Mattison 2008: 949) is but one of many significant reference points
for the surveys and models that are contextually necessary to see where
post-lenticular landscapes fit in: to measure and to survey.
For ScanLAB, and somewhat in the spirit of landscape surveys, the
cameraless 3D scanning of the national park becomes a test case for
the still rather new form of imaging that fits into the lineage of photo­
graphy. But like the example of the WiFi imaging of people we began
with, laser scanning also represents a different set of concerns that move
the focus from apparatus of seeing to the forms of sensors, processing
and infrastructure in which ‘seeing’ (even without lenticular mediation)
is produced. Large-scale landscapes, as well as urban dynamics, become

Figure 10.2 (previous pages)  Equirectangular Landscapes 05: Nevada Falls (After
Muybridge), based on 3D scan data captured in Yosemite National Park in 2016.
Source: ScanLAB Projects, used with permission.
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   195

the objects of this form of modelling that emerges from history of land-
scapes and architecture and becomes integrated into contemporary
contexts of AI as we will see later. As ScanLAB articulate the use of laser
scanning, this shifts the focus from camera to scanning, but it also returns
to ‘Muybridge’s original endeavour to capture the scenes in three dimen-
sions as stereograms’3 (Figure 10.3).
Over a period of two weeks, ScanLAB traversed the valley with a team of
eight to scan the landscapes, and converging on the 4 x 4 car that they’d
turned into a digital base camp to process images, the stereogrammatic view
was updated in multiple ways with a particular awareness of the infrastruc-
ture required of imaging: ‘The logistics of taking such high tech equipment
into a comparatively inaccessible environment formed a major part of the
re-enactment, mirroring the epic nature of the early pioneer photographers’
(ScanLAB n.d.). This underlines that these technologies of imaging are

Figure 10.3  Post-lenticular Landscapes. Installation view at Hyundai ARTLAB, Seoul

2018, originally commissioned by LACMA. On view are Urban Diorama (holographic
vehicle), 2016, Post-lenticular Landscapes (4k animation), 2017, Equirectangular
Landscapes 01–06 (prints on aluminium), 2018. Source: ScanLAB Projects, used with
permission.
196  JUSSI PARIKKA

fundamentally about logistics and infrastructure – a point that becomes

clear in the context of lidar applications of contemporary urbanism and
autonomous cars. However, it also points out that traditional genres of
imaging and photography, aesthetics and cultural history are entangled
through the many and speculative uses of new technologies. In such experi-
ments of ScanLAB, photographic and rhetorical tropes such as landscapes
and Romanticism, as Geoff Manaugh writes (2015), shift gear and site:

If the conceptual premise of the Romantic Movement can somewhat hast-

ily be described as the experience and documentation of extreme
landscapes – as an art of remote mountain peaks, abyssal river valleys and
vast tracts of uninhabited land – then ScanLAB is suggesting that a new
kind of Romanticism is emerging through the sensing packages of auton-
omous machines.

We can also read ScanLAB’s Post-lenticular Landscapes in direct rela-

tion to their project the Dream Life of Driverless Cars,4 where lidar takes
a central role as the standard technology of imaging, processing and
transmitting movement in movement. The intensity of imaging practices
that relate to autonomous cars is due to their (by necessity) capacity to be
able to process in-situ a wealth of incoming data in relation to their envi-
ronment while simultaneously transmitting this data in real time with the
wider network in which they are connected. In this sense autonomous
cars are both an issue of data transmission and also reserve a place for
images as part of this data circulation and movement navigation.

As the scanner moves through the city, slowing for speed bumps and stop-
ping in traffic, the city map created warps and extends depending on the
speed at which we move. Stuck in traffic a Routemaster bus becomes an
elongated, narrow corridor, broken only by the shadow of a passing
cyclist. Turning the corner into Parliament Square duplicates Big Ben as
we observe the tower for a second time.5

The Dream Life of Driverless Cars offers a ghostly apparition of the

scanned city, shifting through street scenes without humans or other
organic life, passing by semi-transparent buildings with their collective
architectural layers. The scanner moves through the city, a second-order
record of movement as it observes, tracks and facilitates the vehicle
among the multiple other moving and unmoving parts of the city. Lidar,
beaming its pulsing, millions of light bursts per second across urban
surfaces, acts like the laser version of flash photography and the probe
light, each of which had a revelatory impact on the history of photo­
graphy: artificial light that enables seeing by a pulse quicker than the
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   197

human eye. The invention of flash in the mid-nineteenth century intro-

duced an artificial form of light that escapes even the blink of an eye,
producing a register of light essential to photography. While it allows
seeing, the flash itself remains beyond the register of the eye’s reaction
(Canales 2011). However, the autonomous car’s lidar system is not the
flash of photojournalism, but one of laser-based scanning operating on a
different frequency spectrum. These laser images are at the centre of
ScanLAB’s work and include both the modern version of Edward
Muybridge’s Yosemite images and the new photoscapes of cities as large-
scale systems, where seeing is not limited to the humanly visible.
Geoff Manaugh (2015) proposes that ScanLAB’s Dream Life of
Driver­less Cars is a form of the transformation of cityscapes and visual-
ity, images and data, movement and seeing movement, echoing some of
the concerns that Virilio tracked even earlier as a central part of the
transformation of visual culture since the beginning of modern technical
images (Figure 10.4). Manaugh outlines the case of autonomous cars as
a way to understand the visual change of environments as follows: the
use of 3D scanning lidar sensors in autonomous cars relates to a particu-
lar navigational way of mapping the city not merely as one image but as
an ecology of machine-flickering that captures ‘extremely detailed,
millimeter-­scale measurements of the surrounding environment, far
more accurate than anything achievable by the human eye’ (Manaugh
2015). Such large-scale images are premised on a particular ecology of
time when millions of light bursts per second echoed back their pulsa-
tions at great speeds. In many ways, this is the contemporary version of
the Doppler effect, named after Christian Doppler’s mid-nineteenth-cen-
tury investigations, insofar as it includes some early ideas about the
echo-pulse principle of measuring objects and their movement by way of
light. Doppler’s influential research, which can be quoted in relation to
multiple engineering and research innovations that characterise media of
the twentieth century, was focused on planetary movements and measur-
ing light. According to Doppler, colour being dependent on the frequency
of light led to the observation that objects in movement emit a different
frequency in relation to each other. This implied that a transmitted pulse
signal returning from a measured source can communicate the location
of said object based on its frequency, leading to all sorts of implications
in navigation, observation, location and, of course, frequency. So, while
the 1842 paper Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einiger
anderer Gestirne des Himmels (Doppler 1992) was indeed about the
extra-planetary scale of the measurement of light and movement, it also
began to speak to measurements at other scales too: the world is measur-
able as a function of signals and their echoes, of pulses and their
reverberations.
198  JUSSI PARIKKA

Figure 10.4  Dream Life of Driverless Cars, originally produced for the New York Times,
2015. Source: ScanLAB Projects, used with permission.

Twentieth-century variations of this include the array of military tech-

nologies that occupy this sphere of observation–seeing without eyes,
synaesthesia where sound turns into image (radar), and echo pulse signal
into visual perception. Indeed, as Ryan Bishop and John Phillips (2010:
101) write, ‘radar technology allows soundwaves to see’, which echoes as
a trait through modernist aesthetics and the military-technological infra-
structure that reorganised forms of seeing and perception, and visibility
and invisibility, across the twentieth century. In many ways, the naviga-
tional images of autonomous cars and the pulsing landscapes recorded
through the laser scanning of lidar are part of this story.
However, the nature of the scanned lidar image that emerges is not of
the usual scale because of the millions of tiny images, or light bursts, that
form the technical ontology of this sort of imaging practice: it also relates
to the complexity of the technological laser scan records both as a move-
ment across the city and as a sensitive way of dealing with light as a living
entity that records the complexity of the multiple surfaces of the city,
itself as an image, a trajectory of light. Besides the apparent techno­
logical accuracy, these are also systems of imaging that are particularly
vulnerable to over-seeing, where all sorts of things like ‘complex architec-
tural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   199

construction sites’ (Manaugh 2015) can throw sensors off, and lead them
to perceive the cityscape in surprising, accidental ways. But this reflective
reality, the over-seeing of light, also hints at what Manaugh aptly
describes as ‘a parallel landscape seen only by machine-­sensing techno­
logy in which objects and signs invisible to human beings nevertheless
have real effects in the operation of the city’ (Manaugh 2015).
Such accidents of over-seeing can cascade and be multiplied, and they
can be taken as guidelines for investigations into contemporary visual,
photographic, scanning technologies. In other words, as glitches, they
become ways to understand the functions of this form of imagining.
Indeed, ScanLAB’s Dream Life of Driverless Cars (Figure 10.5) was not
meant as a technical demonstration of the accuracy of lidar, but rather,
as an experimental framework for a scanning device that also records its
own conditions of existence:

Their goal, Shaw said, is to explore ‘the peripheral vision of driverless

vehicles,’ or what he calls ‘the sideline stuff,’ the overlooked edges of the
city that autonomous cars and their unblinking scanners will ‘perpetually,
accidentally see.’ By deliberately disabling certain aspects of their scan-
ner’s sensors, ScanLAB discovered that they could tweak the equipment
into revealing its overlooked artistic potential. While a self-­driving car
would normally use corrective algorithms to account for things like long
periods stuck in traffic, Trossell and Shaw instead let those flaws accumu-
late. Moments of inadvertent information density become part of the
resulting aesthetic. (Manaugh 2015)

A range of methodological implications emerge: on the one hand,

contemporary uses of lidar as it (and other alternative forms of imagin-
ing whether WiFi, radar, or other) rearticulates its relation to lenticular
histories of photography, and, on the other hand, the alternative geneal-
ogies of imaging that are but one way to explore lidar as the echo and the
pulse of the city, all the way from Doppler’s research into spectra of light
to the forms of flash and photography that define the technological
configurations of images in the age of photography. These scans, to echo
a theme articulated by Benjamin Bratton (2017), are part of the discourse
of the smart city and its multiple skins.

Large-scale Computable Scans

From the perspective articulated above, we can assert the following claim:
while these contemporary images are part of the history of scientific
photography, they also take a particular place in contemporary compu-
tational cityscapes as scans, as infrastructure, and as interfacial skins
200  JUSSI PARIKKA
Practices of Light beyond Photography   201
202  JUSSI PARIKKA

(Bratton 2017). Consequently, they are folded into multiple operations as

components in large-scale systems. In this sense, these images continue
the legacy of photogrammetry and plotting as computational solutions
to problems of measurement and analytics6 – although, in the contem­
porary situation, the extent and scale of computation are of a completely
different order and the processing of images becomes automated as part
of these operative chains. This is amplified with the automation of events
from image sensors as part of the distributed network of computing (of
which the mobile car unit is only one part) that tries to keep up with the
already existing complexity of the moving landscape. As Geoff Manaugh
writes (2015), ‘[h]umans are not the only things now sensing and experi-
encing the modern landscape  – that something else is here, with an
altogether different, and fundamentally inhuman, perspective on the
built environment.’ This is precisely where we shift our question from
‘what does the computer see’ to ‘what does the sensor and the scan do in
the context of sensing and movement’.
As Florian Sprenger (2019) demonstrates, lidar and related sensorial
systems sit as part of the history of environmentally sensitive robotics,
which, we should remind ourselves, are now also part of large-scale
systems. Adaptive systems that are continually producing information
about their environment have gradually become the solution to prob-
lems of manoeuvring and movement in robotics. From the experimental
robotic systems of the 1950s to the more recent robotics turn in the
1980s, these forms of autonomous systems became conceptually and
technologically dependent on sensing: instead of trying to upload a
map of the environment into the autonomous system, the goal is now
to create multiple layers of perception and sensing that situate the
system in its location. As Sprenger (2019) also argues, autonomous
systems and their forms of scan-based sensing, including lidar, can be
seen as special cases of robotics that were premised on being context
aware and reliant on adaptation to environmental conditions. For us,
this also helps to address the argument about contemporary forms of
sensing and sensors as mobile systems. Indeed, as mentioned earlier,
the case for understanding these imaging systems as inherently about
navigation becomes clear.7
Following this navigational focus, we can also claim that these images
are instrumental if we follow Allan Sekula’s use of the term: these sorts of
images operate in automated systems and as part of large-scale infra-
structural technologies, where such images include those used in aerial
imaging, military systems, automated navigation or robotic object

Figure 10.5 (previous page)  Dream Life of Driverless Cars, originally produced for the
New York Times, 2015. Source: ScanLAB Projects, used with permission.
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   203

recognition guided movement (an example being the factory assembly

reliance on automatism and action) (Keenan 2014). In our case, the laser-
scanned images and landscape are directly related to the instrumental role
these systems play in coordinating (in) a city, its multiple levels of agents
and events, and in other contexts, other forms of navigation in complex
ecologies. Consider Benjamin Bratton’s (2017) summary about the tight
coupling of sensors, images and the infrastructure of autonomous cars:

. . . driverless cars are emblematic of big heavy machines sensing/learning

in the streets. Their proprioceptive sensors include wheel speed sensors,
altimeters, gyroscopes, tachymeters, touch sensors, while their exterocep-
tive sensors include multiple visual light cameras, lidar range finding,
short- and long-range RADAR, ultrasonic sensors on the wheels, global
positioning satellite systems/geolocation aerials, etc. Several systems over-
lap between sensing and interpretation, such as road sign and feature
detection and interpretation algorithms, model maps of upcoming roads,
and inter-car interaction behavior algorithms.

It becomes difficult to detach the imaging systems from their role in the
overlapping systems in which they are operational. Even if for the sake of
genealogical arguments (like those briefly rehearsed in this chapter) some
of their histories are related to an expanded, transformed notion of
photography, they become emphasised as connective images. In other
words, the urban images produced are more akin to the skins and inter-
faces (Bratton 2017) that regularly guide and process, predict and instruct.
The computational – in its multiple manifestations and as multiple plat-
forms across the city and its devices – becomes a key reference point for
images that are the operational elements of an infrastructure.
Hence, in the midst of the car and its sensorial technologies, we have to
look beyond the image – or even the sensor – as a stand-alone unit, and
instead understand that the image is, at best, an interface (Bratton 2015:
220–6; Andersen and Pold 2018) that allows a kind of access to other
scales of infrastructural action that mobilise multiple kinds of knowledge
of large-scale, dynamic systems including maps, information systems, AI,
sensors, data-transfer, and so on. Environmental perception and localisa-
tion in relation to external data and maps become a form of synchronisation
that adds to the work of actual sensing that can be seen as one crystallis­
ation of what images have become in the complex and distributed
large-scale autonomous systems of the twenty-­first century.
This infrastructure can be understood as an operational bundle of
technologies that is also part of a political economy of innovation that
aims to reformat the city according to its ideals of the ‘city as computer’.
As Shannon Mattern (2017) argues, this trope assumes – and rhetorically
204  JUSSI PARIKKA

Figure 10.6  Still for Where the City Can’t See, directed by Liam Young, written by Tim
Maughan, 2016.

produces – a frictionless programmability of the city as its modus oper-

andi and aim, producing a particular corporate vision of what various
interlinking parts of movement and sensing can add up to. As Mattern
(2017) summarises, one can also track this infrastructure through its
corporate financial attachments that mobilise their own views of opera-
tive ontology through the employment of different forms of data feeds,
maps, location systems, and other variations on the theme of ‘seeing’ and
‘imagining’: digital data platforms connected to technologies of self-­
driving cars, to multiple scales of navigational infrastructure, to urban
technologies (for example, Sidewalk Labs), and to various forms of maps,
robotics, engineering and expertise that form the links between techno-
logical discourse and corporate hype (Figure 10.6).
We move from what the computer sees, and what the sensor and scan
do, to focus on those complex ecologies in which ‘seeing’ is embedded in
technological, corporate and aesthetic systems and discourses. The ques-
tion as to what sort of perception or agency an autonomous system
exercises is replaced with questions that underline the distributed
complexity of such systems in which images function, and moves to
survey speculative design in its attempts to offer glimpses of the broader
landscapes and cityscapes in which those systems function.
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   205

The echo light pulse systems of laser scanning become one emblematic
aesthetic face for the transition to complex systems which operate within
the genealogies of photography and also in the context of the contempo-
rary corporate mapping of what the city is transforming into. While
ScanLAB’s work turns towards technological and aesthetic questions, a
similar short film operates in the imaginary political near future of laser
scanning and corporate surveillance. Liam Young’s audiovisual work,
Where the City Can’t See (2016), written by Tim Maughan, relates to the
same bundle of issues that unfold when considering these images as
interfaces. Young’s speculative design version of these visible/invisible
interfaces is introduced as ‘the first fiction film shot entirely through laser
scanning technology’ and is ‘set in the Chinese owned and controlled
Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ), in a not-too-distant future where Google
maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are not only
mapping our cities, but ruling them’.8 Speculative fiction about automated
governance of cityscapes becomes a way to continue the discourse about
scanning, but with a particular focus on urban politics. Or, in other words,
scanning becomes a form of control, emphasising how this survey of a
landscape and this scan of a city is part of the reordering and rethinking
of what images do, positioned somewhere between the traditional visual
image and their role as digital measures of relations, movement, events
and management of large-scale dynamic entities. Young’s film also
engages with what could be coined as post-lenticular subcultures:

Exploring the subcultures that could emerge from these new technologies,
the film follows a collection of young factory workers across a single
night, as they drift through the smart city in a driverless taxi, searching for
a place they know exists, but that the map doesn’t show. They are part of
an underground community that work on the production lines by day, by
night adorn themselves in machine vision camouflage and the tribal masks
of anti-facial recognition, enacting their escapist fantasies in the hidden
spaces of the city. They hack the city and journey through a network of
stealth buildings, ruinous landscapes, ghost architectures, anomalies,
glitches and sprites, searching for the wilds beyond the machines.9

In some ways similar to ScanLAB’s investigation of laser scanning as

a technology that records its own glitches, the speculative fiction of
Young’s film works with corresponding themes. In the glitching of a city-
scape, the WiFi sees alongside other sampling rates that form the
perceived quality of the city. The city is itself a connected entity of sens-
ing and sensors, but what stands out is the transversal interconnection of
agencies. The images are not merely there as representational, but as
agential entities that enable and hinder perception as they hide and they
206  JUSSI PARIKKA

seek as operational entities of machine vision. Paradoxically, to under-

stand the transformation of visuality and the photographic, one needs to
look away from the representational quality of images and towards their
infrastructural coupling with large-scale systems of sensing and compu-
tation. The city itself is a large-scale analytical and synthetic, even
synthesising, unit (cf. Bratton 2015) that presents a particular case for
ecologies of images that are embedded in multiple sites, functions, vehi-
cles and passages to do a multitude of things. In other words, a discussion
of nonhuman photography is complemented with an infrastructural
angle that links images to the conditions of their existence outside of
their own frame of visibility. Logistics would be one word for this, thus
also implying connections to issues of labour, technology, and political
economy of contemporary financially driven circulation of data and
goods. Any discussion of the digital that obsesses with the isolated ontol-
ogy of representation based on the technical qualities of the image is
somewhat misguided – at least when it comes to the attempt to under-
stand what images have transformed into. It is only when situated and
considered in terms of their infrastructure that one starts to understand
the functions of invisible images and photography off the scale.

Environmental Media of Pulse and Light

The echo pulse of light bounces across city surfaces, registered by
machines that in the very act of registration also register their own condi-
tions of existence; their own algorithmic hiccups and glitches, affordances
and limitations, all part of their machine ways of seeing that are algorith-
mic as well as infrastructural (Cox 2016). Looking at machine vision as
an ensemble of applications such as embedded sensors in automobiles,
drones, security and, for example, supply chain management industries
becomes a way to begin to see the wider distributed link of the image: the
image is itself a measurement of environmental relations and, as such, a
non-representational part of data capture that acts within the large-scale
systems. Hence, to see the environment through a visual modelling of
WiFi marks a larger shift in what is considered the visible spectrum and
in what can be considered as part of the broader environment of visibil-
ity that does not cater to the usual understanding of images.
This topic of what is visible extends to a range of post-lenticular forms
of imaging that in some cases refer back to histories of photography –
whether photogrammetry or examples such as Muybridge’s Yosemite
photographic surveys – but also shift gear in how these images function
as scans, as data, and as components in a larger infrastructural set that
defines the computational city (both as corporate rhetoric and as techno-
logical programming of what connects where in the platform of sensing,
 Practices of Light beyond Photography   207

movement, navigation, mapping and control). From the scanned city that
pulses with millions of light beats that model the real-time movement of
and within the landscape, we come to a realisation about the function of
autonomous vehicles as not only cars but also as (data) platforms. In our
case, we consider the (lidar) image itself as merely one entry point into a
large-scale system, nested within a set of relations that are there to mobi-
lise the image as part of an array of functional uses: identification or
object-detection; prediction; big data analysis; among others. To be
accurate, one should say that the particular terminology of ‘image’ here
becomes somewhat inaccurate insofar as we are dealing with different
channels of registering the world.
The examples of work that speculate what the computer sees should
extend to situations in which seeing is seen as part of an infrastructural
system of operations, including navigation. In terms of autonomous
vehicles, for example, this relates to data pooling from the camera, light
detection, lidar, radar, ultrasonic sensor and vehicle motion data feeds;
furthermore, this data pool of combined sources – that may or may not
be images – is not only for on-site processing but for a variety of other
scales of uses, such as simulation and modelling (Meyer 2018). As a
network platform, this system becomes part of the flows but also the
design and engineering problems of storage and transmission, including
how to transmit in real time such a massive amount of data that consists
of multiple moving entities in an environment that itself is dynamic on
multiple scales, including the reflective surfaces of the city registered by
laser scanning. But here is the proposition that emerges: it is necessary to
discuss the image – including the broader category of the photographic –
as part of a bundle of other forms of measure and infrastructure where
forms of imaging are actioned; the image becomes entangled, even
conflated, with its own sensors which, in turn, act as the necessary prism
through which the image and the photographic too can be seen anew.
In other words, I argue that earlier photographic discourse about the
instrumental image must be updated to include the infrastructural image:
although these are not necessarily images that represent or depict infra-
structure, their mode of existence as environmental media (Hansen 2015;
Gabrys 2016; Hörl 2018; Sprenger 2019) is premised on what they action
in particular situations. It is in this vein that I am interested in the
aesthetic of the infrastructural that does not merely depict or represent
but operates in that broad category of image-data-environment.
This chapter has offered some potential ways to respond to this ques-
tion, especially in the context of lidar and its briefly outlined genealogical
contexts (though this can be extended into various levels of further inves-
tigation). This imagining infrastructural image deals with photography
off the scale as it deals with large-scale systems, remote sensing,
208  JUSSI PARIKKA

automated systems and the complex situations of dynamic data wherein

the image functions. From the artistic works of ScanLAB to Liam Young
and others, there is a common line that runs through these various prac-
tices that track images that track, that observe images that observe, and
that try to gather a sense of how images make sense outside the scope of
standardised human vision. It is this lineage that speaks to post-human
photography (Zylinska 2017) and its multiple variations across the
non-visible spectrum of pulse and light.

Notes
1. This was also one theme that emerged in the context of the event Art after
Culture: Navigation Beyond Vision, 5–6 April 2019. The event was partly a
response to Harun Farocki’s work on navigation and computer images,
especially in his Parallelen series.
2. See the project website for more fulsome descriptions at: <https://bengrosser.
com/projects/computers-watching-movies>
3. Quotes from ScanLAB Projects can be found on their website at: <https://
ScanLABprojects.co.uk/work/post-lenticular-landscapes>
4. A short film produced for the New York Times, an online version of the
project and the video can be viewed at: <https://ScanLABprojects.co.uk/
work/dreamlife-of-driverless-cars>
5. Directly quoted from the project page at: <https://ScanLABprojects.co.uk/
work/dreamlife-of-driverless-cars>
6. As Otto von Gruber (1932: 276) put it in the 1930s, ‘[t]he problem of auto-
matic plotting instruments concerns the representation on a map of an
object shown on photograms, without the need for carrying out computa-
tions point by point or for graphical constructions.’
7. On the navigational image, see Mende 2017.
8. Quoted from the Abandon Normal Devices festival website (2016), at:
<https://www.andfestival.org.uk/city-cant-see> . Where the City Can’t See
was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices, St Helens Heart of Glass
and University of Salford Art Collection.
9. A trailer of the film is available at <https://vimeo.com/188626212>

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11 Planetary Diagrams:
Towards an Autographic
Theory of Climate
Emergency
Lukáš Likavčan and Paul Heinicker

Introduction: The Earth Revealing Itself

on A PeDestAL in Musée d’Orsay in Paris stands a sculpture by Louis-
Ernest Barrias called Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (1899). It
depicts a heavily gendered imagination of nature, personified by a young
woman who reveals her breasts to the male gaze of Western science.
Seduced by their instruments, she is imagined to be ready to reveal her
secrets to those who approach her. Since the end of the nineteenth century,
this trope of nature unveiling itself has mutated many times. Its most
recent instantiation is the climate crisis; a situation when the planet turns
into a massive diagram of anthropogenic destruction, revealing itself in
hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, sea level rises, loss of wildlife or the
acidification of the oceans. Defying patriarchal reveries of the nineteenth
century, the Earth responds to our celebrated technologies of modernity
and progress in a rather destructive manner.
An original and contemporary variation on this trope is Susan Schup-
pli’s Nature Represents Itself (2018), a piece that investigates aesthetic
and jurisdictional aspects of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2020 in
the Gulf of Mexico. This video, commissioned by the SculptureCenter in
New York, confronts us with a massive, literal oil painting: streams of
petroleum diagram the ecological disaster on the surface of the water
(Schuppli 2019a), while underwater cameras live-streaming the oil
bubbling up from corrupted pipes provide us with a glimpse of the
Anthropocene in action. In this chapter, we wonder whether we can read
212  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

climate crisis in a similar vein, as a diagram of destruction that can be

captured by the very apparatus that contributes to the emergence of
climate emergency as a stand-alone ‘epistemic object’: the human-made
apparatus of sensing and modelling the Earth, a ‘knowledge infrastruc-
ture’ called ‘a vast machine’ by Paul Edwards (2010).
Our use of the notion of diagram requires additional explanation. In
political philosophy, ‘diagram’ happens to have a prescriptive connota-
tion, as an organising, disciplining tool (see Bratton 2006; Pasquinelli
2009). In data visualisation scholarship, diagrams are usually defined as
schematic visualisations of relations or processes. However, our notion
of a diagram is broader, and it differs from its usual connotations in
order to grasp a labour of ‘diagramming’ as a procedure when some
object or process reveals itself. Here, ‘diagram’, ‘diagramming’ or
‘diagrammatisation’ ceases to maintain its standard representational
character and, instead, tends towards an instrumental dimension of its
meaning, but not in the sense of a political tool. In our use, ‘diagram’
retains its prescriptive character only to a certain degree, that is, to such
an extent that ‘diagram’ is a trace of the process itself: it retains some
interpretative authority, and it is taken as a product of the phenomenon
at its face value. To understand, then, how we can interpret climate
change as a diagrammatic process, we need to update our theory of
visualisation to give us a different perspective on what can count as a
visualisation of human-altered planetary dynamics.
Today, it has become customary for us to encounter representations of
the planet – satellite photographs, videos and time-lapses, live streams
from the International Space Station or orbital spacewalks, and so on.
Interestingly, they resemble what Harun Farocki (2015: 659) described as
phantom shots: ‘. . . film recordings taken from a position that a human
cannot normally occupy . . . for example, shots from a camera that had
been hung under a train,’ or photographic images by cameras on military
missiles and drones. To call an image ‘a phantom shot’ simply means that
it is produced by – or with the great aid of – nonhuman machinic appa-
ratuses, but still, it remain the result of direct observation of the Earth’s
surface. Nowadays, this is also the case of global map apps, such as
Google, Baidu or Bing Maps.
Similarly, we have become accustomed to computational models and
simulations of the planet, which emerged as the primary means of visual-
isation of climate emergency. While these models and simulations still
retain their representational nature – at least to some extent – they also
move to the register of operational images, that is, images that ‘do not
represent an object, but rather are part of an operation’ (Farocki 2015:
660). They are operational to the degree to which they are synthetic:
human labour is joined and sometimes overwhelmed by the labour of
 Planetary Diagrams   213

computational algorithms, which is also the case for satellite footage

stitched together into a planetary patchwork of Google Earth (Kurgan
2013: 11, 20). These images remain many times invisible to us (Paglen
2016), and they serve as inputs for further algorithmic operations in the
computational apparatus of the vast machine. Moreover, they are recon-
structed from information on opacity, reflectivity and properties of light
emitted by objects below the satellite, broken down to individual wave-
lengths in colour spectrum, and only then rendered as images that can be
seen by us humans.
Yet, this chapter argues, there is a third register of planetary visualis-
ation that is not operational in a standard sense and is by no means
representational. We call this register ‘autographic’, following recent
elaborations on the theory of visualisation crafted by Dietmar Offenhu-
ber (2019a, 2019b). This alludes to cases when nature has revealed
itself – such as the oil spillage that Schuppli’s piece concerns – and serve
as localised examples of this register of visualisation. Ultimately, we
claim that the planet gains a peculiar autographic feature under the
conditions of climate emergency  – it becomes an image of the slow
violence that cannot be adequately visualised in computational models.
These models can yield visualisations of discontiguous processes, but
they cannot offer an urgency at scale; an urgency that comes with the
planet itself turning into a photographic surface of the integral catastro-
phe of the Anthropocene.
In this chapter we thus aim to analyse the emergence of autographic
visualisations produced by the Earth itself, and processed by a vast
machine of sensing and modelling the Earth. First, we introduce the
general framework of autographic visualisation theory as sketched by
Dietmar Offenhuber (2019a, 2019b), and we compare it to the notion of
operational images crafted by Farocki (2015). While doing so, we argue
that autographic visualisations are non-representational – which princi-
pally distinguishes them from photographs of the Earth – and sensitive
towards the socio-material context of the emergence of data  – which
makes them different from operational images. In the second part of the
chapter we explore the infrastructural context of the emergence of auto-
graphic visualisations on the global scale, answering the question of
whom or what is the primary witness of planetary autographic visualis-
ations. Ultimately, our claim is that autographic visualisations bring our
attention back to the ways in which the opaque reality of the planet
unveils itself in productive or destructive alignments between its human
and nonhuman elements, for better or worse.
214  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

‘The Language of Phenomena Themselves’: Foundations

of Autographic Visualisation Theory
Another work by Susan Schuppli can serve as an entry point to our
discussion of autographic visualisation – the 2014 video Can the Sun Lie?
that contemplates the nature of photography and its evidentiary role in
court hearings and juridical processes. The question  – ‘Can the Sun
lie?’ – was originally posed by ‘a US court in 1886 when reflecting upon
the probative value of new forms of technical evidence, specifically
photographs and film’ (Schuppli 2014). The main problem of the dispute
was whether a photograph can be a reliable witness, which was contin-
gent on understanding the causality of photographic processes that
would rule out any chance that the image might be illusionary or decep-
tive. As a result of the trial, photographs were judged as reliable evidence,
since they are a direct imprint of nature – they are traces of interaction
between light and chemical surface, an interaction that belongs under the
jurisdiction of exact, natural sciences. Hence, in a way, photographs were
considered to be instances of nature revealing itself.
An autographic theory of visualisation uses different examples to
arrive at a similar conclusion – around us, there are naturally occurring
diagrammatisations of physical, chemical and biological process, or so
the argument goes. This conception is developed by contemporary visual-
isation scholar Dietmar Offenhuber (2019a, 2019b), and it provides a
significant rearticulation of his earlier work on indexical visualisation
(Offenhuber & Telhan 2015), which follows the Peircean triad of icon –
index – symbol and offers a standard interpretation of data visualisation
as representation that uses indexical signs instead of symbols (as would
be the case in linguistic or para-linguistic representation).
To put it bluntly, ‘autographic visualisation is a set of techniques for
revealing material phenomena as visible traces and guiding their inter-
pretation’ (Offenhuber 2019a: 2). Just as in Schuppli’s work on the
Deepwater Horizon tragedy, autographic visualisation stands for those
cases of diagrammatical processes concerning ‘phenomena that reveal
themselves’ (Offenhuber 2019a: 2), ‘present themselves’ (Offenhuber
2019a: 7) and ‘inscribe themselves’ (Offenhuber 2019a: 2). Autographic
visualisation is thus not a representation of something absent but a
diagrammatic trace of the presence of the phenomenon (Offenhuber
2019a: 2): wind reveals itself in the movement of grass (Offenhuber 2019a:
6); air pollution reveals itself in the filter of a dust mask (Offenhuber
2019a: 5). However, what is crucial here is that autographic visualis-
ations must be ‘triggered’: they do not happen by themselves, but the
context of their emergence must be arranged or designed in a particular
way; only then do the phenomena reveal their material information
 Planetary Diagrams   215

(Offenhuber 2019a: 2). For this reason, a theory of autographic visualis-

ation also accounts for those design operations that might serve as
triggering conditions of autographic processes. As an example, take the
case of tree rings as material traces of the plant’s ageing. In order to
gather the information required to know the age of a tree, we need first
to cut the plant itself, in this case, the trunk: a paradigmatic case of an
autographic design operation. At other times, we have to force the
phenomenon to appear in a specific environment, such as gas chambers
that allow us to see the otherwise invisible movement of subatomic
particles.
Some of the primary references Offenhuber uses in his exposition of
autographic visualisation are the chronophotographs by Étienne-Jules
Marey, who spoke about his famous footage of running horses, falling
cats or flying birds as presenting ‘the language of the phenomena them-
selves’ (Marey 1885 cited in Offenhuber 2019a: 2). The crucial trait of
these pictures is that they are dealing with processes unfolding over time,
which allows the claim that in general, all autographic visualisations are
diagrams intimately related to temporality (Offenhuber 2019b). Such is
also the case of the seismometer, which translates motions of tectonic
plates into a chart, creating a temporal diagram of earthquakes

Figure 11.1  Dust Marks, Dietmar Offenhuber, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
216  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

(Offenhuber 2019a: 2, 3). This even holds for an example constructed by

Offenhuber himself – a work called Dust Marks (2018) that visualises air
pollution by spraying a kind of ‘reverse graffiti’ on urban surfaces:
removing pollution accumulated on them over time and letting it reaccu-
mulate (Figure 11.1).

Close Relatives: Early Photography, Operational Images

and Autographic Visualisations
With Offenhuber’s interest in photographic approaches towards reveal-
ing material traces of real-world phenomena, we can conceptualise the
historical tradition of autographic visualisations in line with other forms
of evidence-seeking artistic practices. Photography, in particular, provides
a rich culture of asking about the relation between the representation
and the material cause of its creation. While data visualisation studies
seldom examine indexicality of this mode of visual production (except
for a few attempts such as Offenhuber’s earlier notion of indexical visual-
isation), examinations of photography’s indexicality are more established.
For example, Jäger (2005: 349–61) crafted a classification of photography
that structures photographic strategies of image production into four
types, one of them being ‘structural images’. He claims that this category
no longer deals with the mere representational intention but creates its
own world of images. Here, the character of photography as a trans­
parent medium is suppressed and instead –unique for photographic
processes – conditions of light and light-sensitive material are intention-
ally negotiated. Historical examples are the Rayograms by Man Ray
(1963) and the photograms by László Moholy-Nagy (1946). Structural
images reveal the camera as a generative system which allows the decod-
ing of the underlying complexities and the creation of a type of imagery
that focuses on patterned symptoms of a material reality.
This ‘evidentiary tradition’ of photographic images is central to the
work of Harun Farocki (see Cirio 2019). He attempted to deconstruct
complex systems of power by seeking traces of capitalist mode of produc-
tion in increasing mechanisation and automation of vision, resulting in
his conceptualisation of a new genre of visual production, labelled by
him as ‘operational images’. This term was originally coined in Farocki’s
installation work Eye/Machine (2000). He cites Roland Barthes’s model
of operative language as a source of inspiration (see Eschkötter and
Pantenburg 2014: 207) and claims that operational images describe a type
of imagery that does not represent a process, but rather is a part of a
process.
Nowadays, one of the primary examples of operational images is
imagery meant for mediation of computational operations – graphic user
 Planetary Diagrams   217

interfaces, QR codes, images produced by artificial neural networks, and

so on. As an example, Jussi Parikka engages in this volume in an investi-
gation of different modes of ‘post-human forms of sensing’, based on
processing ‘things we still call “images”’ (see Chapter 10). Since Farocki’s
observations, it seems that the quantity of images produced by machines
and/or meant to be read by machine audiences has far exceeded the
number of images produced by and meant to be seen by humans (Bratton
2018). This, coupled with the proliferation of operational images, has
brought us to the point of culmination, our visual culture rotating towards
a nonhuman mode of its evolution, defying ‘the assumed primacy of
human eyes and interpretation’ (Parikka in Chapter 10). What is more,
these machine-produced images significantly differ from photographs or
videos taken by humans. In terms of their use, they cease to be objects of
aesthetic appreciation; instead, they become interfaces, or diagrammatic
surfaces, that actively hide some algorithmic processes in order to make
other processes visible or possible in the first place.
However, when using the notion of operational images as an analyti-
cal framework, we have to keep in mind its original purposes, since its
primary intent was not to capture nonhuman algorithmic visual cultures.
Since the 1980s Farocki was primarily interested in the disappearance of
eye labour and its replacement by technical processes in a broader sense
(not just computation). In this sense, operational images work by them-
selves. They are on the same level as objects and procedural executions,
and due to their operativity, they lose their status of representations.
Taken together with Farocki’s background in political filmmaking, which
ironically made him drop out of film school in the 1960s, we can see that
his investment in the notion of operational images lies in their capacity
to describe mechanisms between society, labour, and visibility in a Marx-
ist tradition (Pantenburg 2001: 15). This helps to reveal that the agency
of operational images in Farocki’s conception is a human one.
Despite these comments, it is still true that the ‘operativity’ of opera-
tional images threatens their pictorial character. They are not needed as
images anymore, but only as mathematical or technological operations. As
Farocki puts it, these images are without social agenda, not meant for edifi-
cation or reflection. This leads to a reading of operational images as clearly
having non-representational character, which allows us to compare them
to autographic visualisations, since  – as mentioned earlier  – one of the
main differences of autographic visualisations (compared to earlier kinds
of data visualisation) is that they are also non-representational. While
traditional data visualisation encodes visual variables in order to represent
patterns in the analysis of a phenomenon, autographic visualisation
isolates some qualities of the phenomenon itself and uses them as traces of
the occurrence of the given phenomenon or process (Offenhuber 2019a: 5).
218  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

Compared to data visualisation, autographic visualisation allows for a

phenomenon to present itself, thus defying the logic of representation and
incorporating the process-driven identity of operational images.
Further, just as in the case of operational images, autographic visual-
isation equally demands design interventions so that processes reveal
themselves in front of a human eye. Both approaches gather strategies to
cope with evidence in complex systems; however, the conceptual frame-
work of operational images is more interested in decoding power relations
produced by data, whereas the notion of autographic visualisation is
sensitive towards the socio-material contextualisation of data generation
itself (Offenhuber 2019a: 1, 5).
This leads to the main difference between operational images and
autographic visualisations. While the non-representational aspect is
shared by both concepts, they diverge in relation to predominant
‘data-centric’ perspectives on the production of different visualisations.
The standard positivist or affirmative approach to visualisation tech-
niques takes data as something given and decontextualised (Mareis
2015), and the myth of data as a rhetorical mode of naturalisation is
maintained by the equalisation of data with reality. Essentially, there are
two underlying assumptions which lead to this equation. Firstly, the idea
that data is prior to human observation; a form of raw material which
merely needs to be discovered and processed (Gitelman 2013). Secondly,
what is also implied when we talk about data is objectivity. The strong
confidence in numbers builds on a longer existing process that Western
capitalism has been able to assert as a widespread phenomenon since at
least the nineteenth century, with its computing practices, political
authorities and use of statistics (Vollmer and Mennicken 007).
This dominant approach to data and their emergence is not explicitly
questioned by the concept of operational images. On the contrary, it

Information Visualisation Autographic Visualisation

 Planetary Diagrams   219

seems that its frequent use in contemporary writings on digital media

unveils the political role of these images, but not the socio-material
context of the production of data. In contrast to this dominant approach,
the notion of autographic visualisation does not rely on data as raw
material processed in visual representation but takes some aspect of the
phenomenon itself, triggered by some design operation as its (always crit-
ically examined) source or input. As noted by Drucker (2011), ‘data are
capta, taken not given, constructed as an interpretation of the phenome-
nal world, not inherent in it’. This allows for a focus on the socio-material
conditions of datasets, as well as a self-reflective and critical understand-
ing of visual modelling. As Offenhuber (2019a: 9) also points out,
autographic visualisations reveal actual processes of data generation;
instead of putting data at the beginning of analysis to find patterns
within them, they begin with a phenomenon itself and end with data as
their final artefact (Figure 11.2).
Autographic visualisations also promote design agency. In order to
visualise material traces, someone or something needs to ensure the
emergence of autographic context through the combination of several
design operations. Against naive readings of material traces as natural
occurrences, autographic visualisations can clearly emphasise the
former’s artificiality. The concept of autographic visualisation thus also
changes the role of design operations: they are meant to isolate the qual-
ities of a phenomenon instead of purely encoding data into form. This
comes with an assumption that in an autographic design we are leaving
the comfort of the computational realm. Instead of creating endless
iterations in a short amount of time within a generative computational
system, autographic systems have to follow a different temporal and
spatial scale. Relying, for instance, on biochemical and physical processes,
the creation of autographic visualisations is slower and in need of

Figure 11.2  Models of traditional information

visualisation, autographic visualisation and
combined, Dietmar Offenhuber, 2018.
Courtesy of the artist.
220  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

various resources. However, this limitation is, at the same time, the kernel
of their critical potential. With the help of autographic visualisations and
their dependence on external, observer-independent scales, we can concep-
tualise our interest in phenomena of a planetary or more-than-human
scale, which we will discuss in the next section.

Scaling Up: Climate Emergency as an Autographic Process

Seeing how the theory of autographic visualisation stands in relation to
the concepts of representation, operational images and data visualis-
ation more broadly, we may ask broader questions about the applications
of Offenhuber’s approach outside of the scope of his initial proposal. In
this respect, our main research question relates to the climate crisis, and
its capacity to be a trigger of autographic processes: Can we have an
autographic theory of climate emergency? What would it mean? How
would an autographic visualisation of global heating look like?
First, we assume that if local biological and environmental processes
have an autographic capacity (tree rings, the flow of wind, and so on),
the same holds on a planetary scale  – the planet itself might provoke
procedures of visualising its changes over time in an autographic
manner. Second, this scaling also influences the extent of urgency that an
autographic process reports about  – it does not tell the story of some
local environmental damage but of a planetary emergency situation.
From this point on, far-reaching environmental disasters, extreme
weather patterns on a global scale and climate crisis in general become
perceptible indicators for profound Earth-system changes. The auto-
graphic theory of climate crisis thus proposes a reading of the Earth as
an ever-changing archive, in line with Weizman’s (2017: 274) description
of the planetary surface as a photographic inscription of human and
nonhuman processes.
For example, climate emergency reveals past traces of human design
activities on a large scale which are no longer visible under standard
conditions. We think of last year’s heatwave in the UK, which re-visual-
ised former archaeological sites in the form of patterns on the fields
(Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales:
2018). Here inscriptions of domestication and geopolitics were conserved
in geological memory and re-emerged due to the anthropogenically trig-
gered change of temperature and precipitation. In a sort of epistemic
serendipity, these archaeological traces also become indexes of the
climate crisis itself, just as an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not only a
visible trace of a spatially limited event but an index of larger ecological
collapse on the planetary scale, induced by the fossil fuel industry.
Another example includes historical revelations in Poland in 2015, where
 Planetary Diagrams   221

new record lows of the Vistula river near Warsaw revealed Jewish tomb-
stones, pointing to a dark period of industrial genocide (Associated Press
2015). In this case, instead of water being a cleansing substance, it
preserves and curates access to traces of modernity. And just as in the
case of the 2018 British Isles heatwave and droughts, these revelations do
additional labour in diagramming the ongoing climate crisis, since the
low water levels in the river are a direct result of this damaging process.
We might assume that such accidental diagrams of climate emergency
will be more frequent as global heating further escalates.
Returning to Susan Schuppli’s practice, we find this same approach
in her work on ice core samples. Her Learning from Ice (2019–21)
research project ‘investigates Arctic environments as a vast information
network composed of material as well as cultural “sensors” that are
registering and transmitting the signals of pollution and climate change’
(Schuppli 2019b). Through the prism of autographic visualisation
theory, Schuppli’s description can be read as an apt allusion to those
self-diagramming processes of the Earth that provide visible and deci-
pherable traces of ongoing climate collapse – the ice core sample, for
instance, becomes a material device for inscription of changing temper-
ature over time, just as tree rings inscribe the process of ageing, or as
sedimentation of soil and rocks into thick layers inscribes geological
processes.
However, it is not just different environments but also biological species
that might serve as autographic visualisations of climate emergency.
Jennifer Gabrys, for example, writes about organisms as environmental
proxies and indexes of ecosystem conditions: ‘. . . indicator species of
lichens and mosses and other organisms that can be studied as expres-
sions of environmental processes, whether for atmospheric pollutant
levels, radioactivity, or different types of mineral depositions in soil’
(Gabrys 2016: 124). This means that, for example, the decrease of
marine calcifiers species in the oceans turns their diminishing population
into the autographic diagram of global ocean acidification. The same
idea is expressed by Offenhuber (2019) when he refers to synthetic biol-
ogy as offering possibilities to design objects and organisms with
autographic qualities. So whether by direct (bio-)design intervention or
by naturally occurring capacities in some individuals or the whole popu-
lation of some organisms, autographic visualisations diagram the change
that massively influences their modes of existence. This should not be
that surprising given how organisms are irrevocably tied to their

Figure 11.3 (next page)  Cropmarks in Wales during the heatwave of summer 2018.
RCAHMW/SWNS, 2018. Source: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical
Monuments of Wales, South West News Service.
224  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

environment, in a sort of metabolic flux where each life-form stands for

the temporary compression of its external conditions, following, for
example, von Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt (2010).
Given these examples, we declare the human-made climate emergency
as a medium of indication and planetary framing of the archival processes
of the Earth that unfolds through different environments and biological
species (Figure 11.3). Human-accelerated ecological processes thus
become a method of autographic design. In opposition to material traces
that can be simply observed with some training, human-induced climate
change is a large-scale autographic design operation that was not even
planned to be one. Without explicit human intention, effects of climate
change reveal the archival processes of human cultural activities by the
Earth: a geo-epistemic serendipity which implies nonhuman processes
of distancing and distinguishing that are too sensitive for human percep-
tion of the world. Hence, the climate crisis enables a specific mode of
more-than-human visualisation to emerge, an opportunity to reveal the
dimensions of the memory space of the Earth itself.

A Vast Machine: Planetary Diagrams and their

Nonhuman Witnesses
We propose to further speculate on the possibility of autographic visual-
isations of the climate emergency as images neither produced by us, nor
meant for us: it is not visual culture about the Earth but visual culture by
the Earth. Here, apparatuses of sensing and modelling the Earth can
spark or catalyse the framing process of an accidental autopoietic visual-
isation on a planetary scale, revealing the Earth as a nonhuman archive
emerging from conspiratorial activity between biological, geological and
technological agents. To explain this point, Offenhuber also states in
relation to autographic visualisations that while being confronted with
them, ‘an observer becomes a participant, has to tune into the phenome-
non’ (Offenhuber 2019b). The last question to ask in relation to an
autographic theory of climate crisis then is: who or what is the observer
of planetary self-diagrammatisation processes? Who or what does the
labour of tuning into the planet itself? Answering this question will also
help us to better see how autographic visualisations are mediated, evacu-
ating this visualisation theory from certain perils of naive epistemological
realism.
Given the scope of the armature necessary to witness such an auto-
graphic process, the answer must be a planetary infrastructure, in this
case, an infrastructure that captures the Earth as a geophysical unit,
which nowadays happens through satellite imagery or computational
models and climate simulations. Especially these models and simulations
 Planetary Diagrams   225

stand for one of the many instances of a general contemporary shift

towards nonhuman visual cultures. These visual cultures can capture
phenomena beyond the range of our human sensibility – be it a ‘longue
durée’ of climate patterns and geological movements or slow violence of
environmental catastrophes (Nixon 2011: 2). Nonhuman visual cultures
facilitate evidence for current Anthropocene discourse, which is inter-
twined with the temporality of deep, geological time (Parikka 2015:
37–45). What is more, they are examples of widespread automation of
image-making that reaches far beyond the scope of the automation of
the infrastructure of sensing and modelling the Earth.
The provisional history of the infrastructure of planetary sensing and
modelling might have several points of departure. Some authors, such as
Kurgan (2013: 9), choose to depart from the first pictures of the Earth,
especially the paradigmatic examples of Earthrise (1968) and Blue
Marble (1972). Gabrys (2016: 1), however, focuses on pre-visual plane-
tary sensations, such as the auditory landscape of beeps and noises
produced by the first human-made satellite, Sputnik 1. Since the end of the
1950s, the planet has been gradually enveloped by a great number of arti­
ficial objects, surveying the surface of the planet, and giving us an
overview of environmental conditions around the world. And as
mentioned before, it is not just satellites that comprise this planetary
infrastructure of sensing and modelling: we can also see massive deploy-
ment of climate and biological stations, ‘airborne instruments, . . .,
ocean vessels, and buoys, as well as terrestrial monitoring stations such
as carbon flux towers that can be found dotted around the globe’ (Gabrys
2016: 116). All of these coalesce into what Edwards (2010: 17) calls a
‘knowledge infrastructure’ of the ‘vast machine’. This infrastructure
represents a planetary socio-­technical system that comprises ‘robust
networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and
maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds’ (2010:
17). This vast machine of meteorological calculations and planetary
visualisation also propagates a special regime of infrastructural
globalism, which means that the vast machine does not only produce
planetary-scale images but is also in itself a planetary-scale machine
(Edwards 2010: 25).
However, this infrastructure is not a giant monument but rather a
discontiguous network (Bishop 2016: 303). As Gabrys notes, it is not holis-
tic. Instead, it tends towards the proliferation of many fragmented
perspectives stitched together by the labour of computational algorithms:

If the satellite view has largely been narrated as a project of making a

global observation system and of seeing the earth as a whole object, then
the more distributed monitoring performed by environmental sensors
226  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

points to the ways in which the earth might be rendered not as one world,
but as many. (Gabrys 2016: 14)

This leads to observations on how the vast machine – and mainly its
computational infrastructure – is, according to Gabrys (2016: 1), under-
going a process of becoming environmental: digital technologies become
the general infrastructural background not just of scientific inquiries
regarding our planet, but also of our everyday activities. This holds
increasingly not just for humans, but also for nonhuman actors. What is
more, this process leads to computation being generative of new environ-
ments and technological ensembles: ‘The becoming environmental of
computation then signals that environments are not fixed backdrops for
the implementation of sensor devices, but rather are involved in processes
of becoming along with these technologies’ (Gabrys 2016: 9).
With this realisation that computational models of the Earth are
slowly becoming the Earth itself, we can see how the ‘becoming environ-
mental of computation’ might be interpreted as the vast machine’s literal,
physical tuning into the planetary reality, witnessing its autographic
processes. However, the vast machine is not just generative in terms of
visual representation of the Earth and observing its labour of self-­
diagrammatisation but also in terms of actually reformatting Earth’s
ecologies. Here, we can follow once more Gabrys’s suggestion that sens-
ing infrastructures inform the environments: they give shape to new
ecological relations and transform the environments they monitor and in
which they are deployed (Gabrys 2016: 14). Descriptions and observa-
tions of the planet become propositional, meaning that they ‘translate
from an observation of any single variable to a control of any single
variable, such as proposals for geo-engineering or ecosystem services
where environmental processes are one more data point to be engineered’
(Gabrys 2016: 134).
This leads to our last speculative remark. The general ‘tragedy’ of
visualisation is that when we try to visualise things, we tend to modify or
even destroy them at the same time. This might be caused, in part, by our
urge to visualise things not by ‘tuning into’ their autographic processes
and harvesting their self-diagramming capacities but by overlaying them
with our culturally produced frameworks and regimes of representation.
These idealised counterparts are then treated as proxies of the things we
aim to represent, and we end up in a situation resembling what Baudril-
lard (1981: 9–12) called the ‘precession of simulacra’. Representations
and even operational images of the planet thus enact – many times over –
a replacement of the authority of the thing with the authority of its image.
This ‘tragedy’ might be further conceptualised in Virilio’s (2003; see
also Bratton 2006: 21) vocabulary of integral accidents, where every
 Planetary Diagrams   227

technology is treated from the point of view of the new genre of the acci-
dent it generates: the blackout comes with the electric grid, the plane
crash comes with the aeroplane. If nowadays images are technical tools
rather than simple representations  – as is the case with operational
images  – even images and visualisation techniques might be judged as
bringing a new kind of catastrophe into the world: the disappearance of
the external object the image used to relate to. Even planetary imagery
then carries its integral accident: our visualisations of the Earth are
eating the Earth at the same time they capture it, as it is the technological
infrastructure of the vast machine, largely dependent on the fossil fuel
industry, that drives the climate crisis modelled by the very same infra-
structures (Hu 2015: 79–80). To see the ageing of the tree diagrammed in
the tree rings, we cut the tree. To see the planetary dynamics, we set the
planet on fire.

Conclusion: Three Registers of Planetary Imagery

To sum up, our argument interprets different biological and environmen-
tal processes, as well as artistic practices that build upon observation of
these processes, as cases of autographic visualisations, when some
phenomenon reveals itself through traces of its own activity. Scaling to
the level of the unfolding climate emergency, we interpret this tragedy as
an autographic process, triggered by the human fossil fuel economy,
witnessed by nonhuman apparatus that sense and model the Earth,
themselves by-products of economic and political globalisation. With
respect to this sensing infrastructure, we are now able to read three cate-
gories of planetary imagery in the following manner:

1. ‘Representations of the planet’, such as satellite photographs, which

are instances of aesthetic products of the Earth-sensing infrastructure;
2. ‘Operational images of the planet’, such as climate models and simula-
tions, which are instances of algorithmic processes of the Earth-sensing
infrastructure; and,
3. ‘Autographic visualisations of the planet’, such as oil spills and ice
cores, like those examined in Schuppli’s practice, extreme weather
patterns or heatwaves that reveal archaeological sites and turn them
into diagrams of climate collapse, all of which are instances of the
catastrophe triggered by the failure of global infrastructure to escape
the curse of fossil-fuel extractivism.

It is the identification of and speculation on the last of these categories

that we treat as the primary contribution of our chapter. Demonstrating
how autographic visualisations differ from mere representations, as well
228  LUKÁŠ LIKAVČAN AND PAUL HEINICKER

as from otherwise extremely useful registers of operational images, we

have examined, in-depth, the infrastructure that contributes to witness-
ing their emergence, as well as their persistence on the photographic
surface of the Earth that is within the spontaneous, nonhuman archive
of climate emergency. These ‘planetary diagrams’ demonstrate what ‘photo­
graphy off the scale’ might mean in the context of climate emergency,
both literally and metaphorically: our notion of the ‘photographic image’
needs to be scaled up to fit the genre of planetary autographic processes,
and it also needs to be accommodated to identify these autographic
processes as ‘photographic’ in a broader sense.

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12 Undigital Photography:
Image-Making beyond
Computation and AI
Joanna Zylinska

Photography Off the (Human) Scale

In JuLy 2018 the electronics manufacturer Huawei held a photographic
competition which was judged by photographer Alex Lambrechts and a
Huawei P20 Pro AI (artificial intelligence) smartphone. Building on its
previous claims that the Huawei P20 was equipped with ‘Master AI’
which automatically set the most optimum camera mode for every situa-
tion as well as learning to adapt to user behaviour (Huawei 2018), the
Chinese ‘AI-powered’ flagship was not just making photos but also eval-
uating them, ‘using its artificial intelligence to rate thousands of images
alongside a professional Leica photographer’.2 Art festivals and competi-
tions now regularly include AI-generated images, with an algorithm
partly taking on the role of the artist. This recent outpouring of comput-
er-made creative decisions and artefacts has been accompanied by the
unfolding of public interest in artificial intelligence, from fascination
with AI’s creative capabilities to anxiety related to the impending auto-
mation of the labour force or even the possible annihilation of the human
species.
Responding to the developments outlined above, this chapter discusses
the current rescaling of photographic practice and output by examining
the relationship between artificial intelligence and mechanical
image-making. With this, I propose to go beyond the question of scale
understood principally in terms of volume, whereby the human’s cogni-
tive and perceptive capacities are seen as fundamentally challenged or
even stumped by the sheer quantity of photographic acts and images.
Instead, I want to engage with the question of the nonhuman scale as
232  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

something that offers a different ontological understanding of photo-

graphic practice, at a time when the function of the image maker and
image recipient has been expanded to, or even taken over by, machines.
Traversing the oft-posed question: ‘Can computers be creative?’, the
chapter analyses the nexus between machine vision and human labour in
current AI research with a view to offering a critique of the political
underpinnings of AI and the way it feeds into image-making today. By
way of theoretical grounding, in the first part of the chapter I bring into
conversation artist Trevor Paglen’s understanding of photography in
terms of ‘seeing machines’ with my own earlier work on nonhuman
photography, in order to probe the algorithmic aspect of perception and
vision across apparatuses, species and time scales. The discussion of my
own image-based piece which engages with AI, presented in the second
part of the chapter, leads to a broader interrogation of spaces and insti-
tutions where critical thinking and learning about technology,
image-making and creativity takes place today: the public university, the
liberal arts college, the art school.

Trevor Paglen’s Seeing Machines

In his visual practice Paglen has always investigated how we see the world,
focusing on the way in which the logic of total transparency promoted by
the socio-political apparatus translates into global surveillance while
also creating zones of opacity that hide the actual operations of power.
And thus in The Other Night Sky (2010–11) he drew on data obtained
from amateur satellite observers to track and photograph classified
American satellites and space debris, in Limit Telephotography (2012) he
used powerful telescopes to capture images of classified military bases,
while in Deep Web Dive (2016) he photographed NSA-tapped underwa-
ter internet cables at the bottom of the Atlantic. In all of those works the
human–nonhuman assemblage was still driven by the human artist, who
had mobilised the hybrid apparatus to reveal the limitations of human
vision. Through this, Paglen raised questions about the inhumane aspects
of some of the viewing practices installed by the current political regimes
yet hidden from general view. The problem of seeing has been very much
of interest to the artist in his more recent work, which engages with AI
technology. He frames his current approach as follows: ‘Over the last ten
years or so, powerful algorithms and artificial intelligence networks have
enabled computers to “see” autonomously. What does it mean that
“seeing” no longer requires a human “seer” in the loop?’ (in Strecker
non-dated). In an interview associated with his 2017 exhibition ‘A Study
of Invisible Images’ at Metro Pictures in New York, Paglen highlights the
fact that the majority of images produced today are not only generated
 Undigital Photography   233

automatically, without human intentionality or oversight, but are also

intended for a nonhuman recipient: this or that section of the planetary
computational system that Benjamin Bratton has deemed ‘the stack’
(Bratton 2016). The artist has in mind here photographs produced via
face recognition technology which are increasingly used in policing,
surveillance and access; computer vision directing the self-driving cars;
or cameras on drones used to allow algorithm-driven ‘killer robots’ to
determine worthy targets.
Paglen’s project It Began as a Military Experiment (2017) included in
the Metro exhibition features rows of colour portrait photographs,
showing seemingly regular subjects of different genders, ethnicities and
ages – with the display looking like an updated version of August Sand-
er’s People of the 20th Century. Only a very close look allows the viewer
to detect grid-like white symbols, which have been superimposed on the
subjects’ faces. From the accompanying materials we learn that the
photos had been drawn from the so-called FERET database containing
thousands of photos of people  – many of them workers at a military
base in Maryland – which had been collected on behest of DARPA (the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to help develop facial
recognition technology. To advance the technology, the military needed
to train algorithms in correct pattern recognition by feeding the network
thousands of similar faces and teaching it to recognise variations between
them. Paglen spent months going through the FERET database to select
individual images, which he subsequently retouched and colour-cor-
rected, and then ran them through an algorithm to identify key points in
the faces. ‘[T]these photos represent some of the original faces of facial
recognition  – the “Adams and Eves” that nearly all subsequent facial
recognition research has been built upon’ (in Strecker non-dated). In this
sense, they not only hint at Sander’s totalising humanism but also refer-
ence Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man photographic exhibition held
at MoMA in 1955, whose ambition was to reveal a supposed universality
of human experience while also promoting a soft version of US imperial-
ism. And yet a strange shift occurs in this presumed Adamism – a term
Roland Barthes used ironically in Mythologies to refer not just to the
presupposed originary unity of ‘all men’ in Steichen’s exhibition that the
FERET database perpetuates, but also to a ‘lyricism’ which immobilises
humans in their place by making their social condition look eternal
(Barthes 1973: 102). What is new about the FERET images is that they
are not aimed at human eyes: as a training set for a facial recognition
algorithm, their goal is to establish this commonality-in-difference for
machine vision. Indeed, these images are not meant to be seen at all by
humans but are rather going inside the black box that AI has become.
The fact that most of AI research has been funded by the military, with
234  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

DARPA, the original funders of internet development, also sponsoring

‘more AI research than private corporations and any other branch of the
government’ (Barrat 2013: 180) from the 1960s through to the 1990s,
means that AI is literally a military project, even if developed by external
companies and research universities. It is precisely the impossibility of
knowing what is in the database – not only due to the lack of access but
also the sheer physical impossibility on the part of humans to sift through
all the data – that drives Paglen’s work.
This black-boxing of AI technology hides, for example, the data bias
of human engineers who construct the supposedly universal datasets. As
Alexander Strecker, editor of LensCulture, wrote in his review of Paglen’s
exhibition:

imagine the first time a self-driving car has to choose between two children
who have run out into the road, one white and one black. If the computer
‘sees’ the black child as a small animal, due to the bias of the training sets
it has been given, its choice will be clear. (Strecker undated)

Yet it is not only the question of data bias – which some AI researchers
argue can be overcome by feeding the system a wider set of data, training
people in labelling the data better, making them undergo bias awareness
training or simply paying them more – that emerges as a concern here. A
deeper problem lies in the very idea of organising the world according to
supposedly representative datasets and having decisions made on the
basis of these, in advance and supposedly objectively. Such technologies
are of course already in use: we can mention here not only face recogni-
tion at border control and other security access points, but also Facebook
photo-tagging algorithms, identification of bank cheque deposits or
rapid decisions about credit. One might even go so far as to argue that
what we humans perceive as ethical decisions are first and foremost
corporal reactions, executed by an ‘algorithm’ of DNA, hormones and
other chemicals that push the body to act in a certain way, rather than
outcomes of a process of ethical deliberation concerning the concept of
the good and the value of human life.
I am therefore reluctant to analyse AI developments by pitching the
human against the machine in order to wonder whether ‘they’ are going
to get ‘us’ or not. But I do want to throw some light on the very debate
about AI by shifting from a polarised and dualist narrative to one that
interrogates entangled human–nonhuman agency while also raising
political questions. Technologically aware art can open up a space for
interrogating who funds, trains and owns our algorithms. This interroga-
tion is important because, as shown by Safiya Noble in Algorithms of
Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
 Undigital Photography   235

[D]ata and computing have become so profoundly their own ‘truth’ that
even in the face of evidence, the public still struggles to hold tech compa-
nies accountable for the products and errors of their ways. These errors
increasingly lead to racial and gender profiling, misrepresentation, and
even economic redlining. (Noble 2018)

Critical projects such as those by Paglen encourage us to ask: Whose

vision is AI promoting? Who is doing the looking, in what way and to
what purpose?
Paglen’s project Sight Machine (2017) was aimed at exploring precisely
these questions. A collaboration with Kronos Quartet and light installa-
tion company Obscura Digital, it involved staging a concert in a San
Francisco warehouse (replayed at London’s Barbican Centre in 2019),
accompanied by the projections of various bits of data driven by AI algo-
rithms. As well as displaying, in frequent motion, one of the face
recognition training datasets discussed above, the artist had installed a
number of cameras in the warehouse, with feeds going into the video
mixer and the hardware. The cameras then made visible on the screen
behind the band renderings of outlines of the human members of the
band in the form of multicoloured squiggles, circles and squares. The
artist and his team occasionally turned the camera on the audience to
allow them to see themselves being seen by the computers, with their
faces identified as faces and also rendered as rectangles. The idea behind
the project was to examine the architecture of different computer vision
systems by trying to learn what it was that they were seeing. Yet we
should ask to what extent this is still actually ‘seeing’. And are we still
talking about intelligence? Or are they just behaviours that look like
seeing and intelligence to us, their human interpreters? Echoing a quip
that is popular with AI researchers, ‘Can the submarine swim?’, these
questions are important because the systems put in motion that enable
computer vision and other forms of AI determine who and what is
allowed in and what isn’t.
Much translation work had been involved in Paglen’s Sight Machine,
yet ultimately the performance revealed the basic untranslatability of data
between different recipients, resulting from the opacity of code (from
brute force algorithms of the 1960s systems to contemporary AI systems
such as TensorFlow, Torch and Caffe). It is precisely in that very gesture of
attempting to undertake the work of translation that the incompatibility
between different cognitive frameworks and different forms in which
intelligence is embodied was revealed. The project thus succeeded and
failed at the same time: it failed at transparency, at revealing (to us) what
and how computers supposedly see, but it succeeded at unveiling this
translation gap – which is also an epistemological and ontological gap.
236  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

And even though the project failed the classic Marxian promise that
revealing the conditions of injustice would lead to increased political
activity and eventual liberation, that promise itself has been debunked by
the public responses to platform capitalism. It would be naive to think
that people are unaware that, for example, Amazon is spying on them,
that Google tracks their every move or that Facebook mines their personal
data for commercial gain, yet the percentage of those who permanently
sign off social media or remove their personal data from the cloud is –
and indeed can be – very slim. Yet what Paglen unveils is precisely the fact
that vision itself is changing and that we cannot ever truly see the condi-
tions of our material existence. He also shows us that a new network of
visibility, much of which remains permanently obscured from human
vision, has now emerged which has the potential to redefine radically
what counts as visible and what doesn’t – or what counts, full stop.
We could therefore conclude that Paglen’s work reveals the impossibil-
ity of ‘seeing it all’ on the part of the human, while also demonstrating
how the link between seeing and knowing has been ultimately severed in
the algorithmic culture that organises our social and political lives. And
yet, as with his previous projects, there is something romantically futile
about this artistic gesture, premised as it is on unveiling the dark machi-
nations of ‘the stack’. To say this is not to dismiss his artistic undertakings
but rather to suggest that the success of Paglen’s work lies in its parergo-
nal nature: to really ‘get’ what he is showing we need to engage not just
with the images he produces but also with the narrative about machine
vision, the human intervention into the limits of the image and the
discourse about art-making. The term ‘parergon’, referring to a supple-
mentary remark, additional material or ornament whose function is
merely to embellish the main work (i.e. the ‘ergon’), has been immortal-
ised in art theory by Jacques Derrida. In his reading of Kant’s Critique
of Judgement included in The Truth in Painting, Derrida takes issue with
the idea of a self-contained nature of the work of art, conveyed by the
belief in its supposed intrinsic value and beauty, by literally bringing the
work’s framing into the picture.

A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work
done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it
touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside.
Neither simply outside nor simply inside. (Derrida 1987: 54)

The supposedly secondary function of the framing, be it literal or concep-

tual, is argued to be actually foundational to the artwork’s existence and
recognition as an artwork, as its very existence delineates and preserves
the artwork’s identity. For Derrida, a work of art is therefore never
 Undigital Photography   237

self-contained; it always depends on its parerga  – frames, ornaments,

commentaries – if it is to be recognised in its supposed uniqueness and
singularity. And thus to say that Paglen’s work is parergonal is not to
criticise it for its supposed lack but rather to acknowledge its (perhaps
knowing) reliance on the grid, the network and the cloud. In other words,
Paglen’s projects about seeing machines mobilise human intelligence and
machinic technology to say and show us something, while also revealing
our own cognitive and political limits and blind spots. His practice does
not amount to producing political art per se, but it does engage our sense
and sensibility to reprogram the human cognitive-sensory apparatus  –
and maybe to open it up to a different hack.
Paglen actually uses the notion of ‘seeing machines’ to describe the
contemporary condition of photography. In a series of blog posts written
for Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2014, he proposed an expanded under-
standing of the photographic medium, encompassing ‘the myriad ways
that not only humans use technology to “see” the world, but the ways
machines see the world for other machines’ (Paglen 2014). His definition
includes various image-capture apparatuses, from mobile phones through
to satellite cameras, but also incorporates data, storage systems, inter-
pretation algorithms and, last but not least, the technologies of perception
that emerge as part of the networked photographic practices – and that
establish and legitimate particular regimes of visibility. Most impor-
tantly, the concept of photography-as-seeing-machines highlights the
fact that to focus ‘too closely on individual images is entirely to miss
the point’ (Paglen 2014). With this argument Paglen offers a blow to the
art-historical understanding of photography in terms of singular histor-
ical records and framed artefacts. It is not even that digital technology
has resulted in the supposed over-production of images today, with singu-
lar photographs giving way to image and data flows but rather that
photographs cannot be treated as discrete entities because they are part
of the wider technological network of production and perception: they
are both objects to be looked at and vision-shaping technologies, for
humans and machines. Their identity as discrete images is thus perform­
atively established by the very acts of looking at them. But we must bear
in mind that the ‘looker’ is not always human.

After Nonhuman Photography

There is an affinity between Paglen’s conceptualisation of photography
in terms of ‘seeing machines’ and my own notion of ‘nonhuman
photography’, developed in the book of the same title (Zylinska 2017).
The book’s argument was premised on my conviction about the inade-
quacy of the traditional photography theory for analysing the image
238  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

landscape today, because, as Paglen points out, ‘Susan Sontag’s seminal

work has little to say about the infrared imaging system on a Reaper
drone’ while ‘applying Roland Barthes’ ideas to the billions of images in
London’s city-wide surveillance archives would be utterly absurd’ (Paglen
2014). For me, the concept of ‘nonhuman photography’ refers to photo-
graphs that are not of, by or for the human (see Zylinska 2017: 5),
encompassing images as diverse as depopulated vistas, satellite pictures
and QR codes. Even though the opening premise of Nonhuman Photogra­
phy was that today, in the age of CCTV, drone media, medical body scans
and satellite imaging, photography has become increasingly decoupled
from human agency and human vision, I also suggested that even those
images that have been taken by the human entail a nonhuman element.
This element, executed by means of technical and cultural algorithms, is
revealed by the fact that most people’s wedding photographs, holiday
snapshots and Instagram feeds look very similar.
The recognition of this cultural iterability allowed me to suggest that
humans have always been technological, i.e. that we have run on algo-
rithms  – from DNA to behavioural instructions developed in various
cultures to legitimate and promote certain ways of doing things over
others. If we accept this premise, we will then have to conclude that all
manifestations of art, and specifically all images, starting from cave
paintings, have depended on bodily prostheses, cognitive extensions and
expanded modes of intelligence. My concept of ‘nonhuman photo­
graphy’ thus arguably goes further (or deeper) than Paglen’s idea of
‘seeing machines’ because it not only studies humans as seen by machines
or machines that see things outside the human spectrum, but also because
it understands humans as seeing machines. Last but not least, it also
reaches towards the geological past, with the universe positioned as a
giant camera making photo-imagistic impressions on a variety of
surfaces, from rocks through to skin.
Yet, rather than enter into terminological competition with Paglen,
whose work I greatly admire, I am more interested in bringing his theory
of machinic sight into a conversation with my own work that probes the
algorithmic aspect of perception and vision across apparatuses, species
and time scales. The rationale for this conversation is an attempt on my
part to imagine better ways of seeing the world at a time when it is being
re-shaped by the discourses and practices of AI. It is also to envisage
better ways of acting in the world. While I acknowledge that both seeing
and acting will be undertaken by human and nonhuman agents, the
reflective process on what constitutes this goodness and what forms it
may take, and also on the competing claims as to its validity – depending
on one’s political and ontological constitution – will be uniquely human.
To enact this encounter, I want to offer a new conceptual figuration:
 Undigital Photography   239

‘undigital photography’. The term is not fully mine: I have borrowed it

from the academic discipline of computational photography, a field
which deals with images captured and processed by means of digital
computation rather than as a result of optical processes. ‘Undigital
photography’ is the alternative moniker given to this new field in which
‘the snap is only the start’ (Kelion 2013) and where changes to focus,
lighting, framing or depth of field can take place after an image has been
taken. It goes without saying that computation has been part of mechan-
ical image-making for a long time now: we can think here of Photoshop
or internal processing of jpg or even raw files by various digital cameras.
What changes with computational photography is the inherent instabil-
ity of the outcome of the imaging process, with its openness to
manipulation constituting the very ontology of the undigital image – and
not just a possibility aimed at professionals or advanced amateurs, as it
was with more traditional digital images produced by early mobile phone
or DSLR cameras. Yet in the term ‘undigital photography’ I also see a
conceptual and poetic promise for rethinking our current frameworks
and modes of understanding image-making as developed in both media
theory and visual culture. The term thus offers new possibilities for
thinking photographically in the age of AI. This terminological rein-
scription is made partly in jest: my real goal is to cut through the smoke
and mirrors that envelop the discourses of computation and AI. But I
also want to raise broader questions about the conditions of image-­
making, creativity and labour today.
Undigital photography recognises the (human) history of photo­
graphy: its artistic legacy, affective attachments and technological
residues. But it repositions this history as premised on events undertaken
by human agents along the lines of technical assemblages – assemblages
which also include humans. This repositioning is undertaken with a view
to offering a more complex understanding of the relations of causality,
influence and change, but also of human responsibility and the possibil-
ities of its enactment as part of such assemblages. It is an attempt to
respond to Flusser’s probing question as to what humans can do in a
universe driven by geophysical forces which are not of our making (see
Flusser 2011: 16–19) – and to explore what form human creativity can
take, be it on an artistic, engineering or political level. This attempt also
entails questioning to what extent such creativity can ever be solely
human. The renewed interest in, and research into, artificial intelligence
makes such an enquiry ever more urgent. My contribution to this enquiry
has taken the form of an (un)photographic project that has engaged with
‘artificial artificial intelligence’. The latter term is what Amazon has
been informally calling its Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform, an online
‘marketplace’ connecting labour suppliers with providers worldwide.
Figures 12.1 to 12.5  Joanna Zylinska: excerpts from View from the Window, 2018. The
complete project is available at: <https://vimeo.com/344979151 or it can be viewed
by scanning the QR code at the end of this chapter> (Figure 12.7).
242  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

The ‘labour’ here consists of HITs, ‘human intelligence tasks’ usually

involving simple mechanical actions performed on digital data, such as
tagging photographs or filling in surveys, priced very cheaply (from 0.01
to 0.25 cents per task on average). The project basically puts humans in
the role of machines, as it would be too impractical and costly to program
a computer to perform such tasks.

Imaging (as) Off-the-Scale Labour

For my project I commissioned 100 MTurkers to take one photo of a
view from a window of the room they were in at the time (see Figures
12.1 to 12.5). The instructions clearly stipulated that if there was no
window in the room, they should go to the next available room with a
window and take a photo from there. They were also asked not to upload
stock photos, existing images from the web or their old photos. I
explained that this HIT was for a research/art project which studied
human and machinic creativity. The participants were asked to make
their photo look beautiful, according to their own idea of what this
meant. Post-processing was allowed but not required. The HIT was
priced at double the US living wage (per hour), which probably explains
why all the tasks had been snapped up and fulfilled almost immediately –
although, given that the task was to take 1–2 minutes on average (precisely
because I wanted a somewhat automatic production of the scene, to be
executed by time-poor humans in assembly with their heavily automated
phone cameras), I could hardly be said to be alleviating world poverty.3
Indeed, the very act of using MTurk for this project was not unproblem-
atic, as I will show further on, and can actually be seen to be perpetuating
unfair labour conditions worldwide by validating Amazon’s platform.
The exploration of these issues and conditions also forms the fabric of
my project.
I do not know where the MTurkers that responded to my call came
from, although it is possible to make some guesses from the images them-
selves, using clues from signage, architecture and vegetation. According
to a 2018 study, ‘Most of the [MTurk] workers are from the USA (75%),
with India (16%) being second, followed by Canada (1.1%), Great Brit-
ain (0.7%), Philippines (0.35%), and Germany (0.27%)’ (Difallah et al.
2018: 3). The composition of a group of available workers at any one
time also depends on what time it is in different time zones. The geograph-
ical concentration of the platform’s workers is unsurprising given that,
even though many of the advertised tasks are very simple, they require a
command of the English language to understand and perform them,
which puts native and near-native speakers at an advantage. Yet MTurk-
ers operate anonymously and are only identified through their assigned
 Undigital Photography   243

number, creating an illusion of a fluid mobile labour force that forms

part of the digital cloud.
The idea behind my project was to re-materialise the cloudy vapour
behind this narrative by creating a group portrait of MTurkers’ loca-
tions. Neither conventional portraiture nor landscape photography, the
collective image-base of View from the Window offers instead a non-com-
prehensive demographic snapshot of the global workforce, looking out.
The concept and the title entail a return to the mythical ‘first photo’ in
the history of photography: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the
Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827) (Figure 12.6). Due to the limited sensi-
tivity of photographic materials – namely, the pewter plate covered with
bitumen – at the time, Niépce’s image of a view from a window of his
country house in Bourgogne took eight hours to expose. It resulted in ‘a
scene which the human eye could never see’, with sunlight and shadow
being visible on two sides of the buildings at left and right (see Anthes in

Figure 12.6  Enhanced version of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at
Le Gras, 1826 or 1827. Public domain.
244  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

Modrak 2011: 112). I argued elsewhere that the first image in the history
of photography therefore presented a distinctly nonhuman vision
(Zylinska 2017: 21–2), while also enacting a nonhuman agency at the
heart of its production. It is also for this reason that I chose Niépce’s
image as a conceptual frame for my MTurk project. The ‘artificial artifi-
cial intelligence’ of Amazon’s invisible and distributed labour force can
therefore be described as ‘undigital’ in the sense that, even though it uses
digital technology to perform at least partially digital tasks, simulating
the work of machines in its quiet efficiency, it also ruptures the seamless
narrative and visualisation of the machine world. It does this by bringing
the material traces of human bodies and their locations into the picture,
literally. The view from the window also shows us that there is a window
in the first place (or not). This window is not just a rectangular visualis-
ation of the software interface patented by Microsoft and used by other
operating systems as part of their user-friendly GUI, but also a metal or
wooden frame holding a glass pane (and, occasionally, curtains, shutters
or a mosquito net) that brings in the outside world. It simultaneously
keeps this outside world at bay, precisely as ‘the outside’, the place where
the person looking out is not.
In her book provocatively titled book, Artificial Unintelligence, which
deals with a misguided belief that computation can solve all complex
social issues (see Broussard 2018: 11), Meredith Broussard argues that
‘How you define AI depends on what you want to believe about the future’
(89). Yet, unlike Brossard’s effort to humanise technology and bring the
human back to the centre of the technological assembly, View from the
Window (Figures 12.1 to 12.5) aims to do something different. Indeed, for
me such a well-meaning effort at humanisation can only ever be misguided
because it is premised on severing the human’s constitutive relationship
with technology. What the project does offer, though, is a different vantage
point for perceiving this relationship at this particular moment in time –
and, more importantly, a recognition that there is a vantage point, and
that the ‘view from nowhere’ (see Haraway 1998) promoted by most AI
designers ends up putting a very specific (white, male, ahistorical) human
in the picture. View from the Window thus also suggests that, as well as
breaking through the glass ceiling, (un)digital workers may be ready at
any time to start smashing their virtual windows. How is that for the ‘AI
breakout’ many AI researchers are supposedly scared of?
Computer scientists Djellel Difallah, Elena Filatova and Panos Ipeiro-
tis have conducted a 28-month survey which revealed that ‘the number of
available workers on Mechanical Turk is at least 100K, with approxi-
mately 2K workers being active at any given moment’ (Difallah et al.
2018: 2). They have also demonstrated that ‘the MTurk workers’ half-life
is 12–18 months, indicating that the population refreshes significantly
 Undigital Photography   245

over time’ (2). Branded a ‘virtual sweatshop’, MTurk basically offers

labour as performed by not yet quite artificial intelligence. The plat-
form’s name is borrowed from the late eighteenth-century chess-playing
automaton constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen and displayed at
European courts and other venues of prominence. In the game of magic
often associated with new technologies and the promises made in their
name, tinted by the orientalist fantasies of the day, von Kempelen’s
automaton featured a turban-sporting sculpture (‘The Turk’) positioned
above all sorts of contraptions that hinted at the complex mechanisms
inside. Yet what the inside really hid was a human chess master, whose
intelligence was needed to power the illusion of a chess-playing machine.
Given that the tasks required by Amazon’s low-price anonymous
labourers are infinite, it is understandable why artists may flock to the
platform. Driven by opportunism, curiosity or even a desire to unveil the
hidden conditions of global labour in the digital age, they have asked
MTurks to ‘draw a sheep facing to the left’ that later made up a massive
digital tapestry, paint small sections of a $100 bill without realising it was
to become part of a larger picture, literally and metaphorically (both
projects by Aaron Koblin), photographing themselves holding a sign
which revealed why they did this work (Andy Baio), realise webcam
performances (Eva and Franco Mattes) and even write poetry (Nick
Thurston). There is a long history of artists exploring the multiple
dimensions of creativity while challenging their own singular role in the
process by ‘crowdsourcing’ their works – from André Breton’s Exquisite
Corpse, which involved collectively assembling words and images,
through to mail art, smart mobs and Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s
LearningToLoveYouMore.com, where participants were asked to
perform simple tasks (e.g. ‘Take a picture of strangers holding hands’)
and upload the results to a website (see Grover 2006; Holmes 2011). What
is new about using MTurk is that crowdsourced art is really an outcome
of extremely cheap labour undertaken by those who rely on Amazon’s
platform for income, rather than of playful participation in a shared
activity. Yet artists sometimes flatter themselves or alleviate their
conscience by saying that they are providing a diversion to workers
exposed to the chain of otherwise mindless HITs by allowing them to do
something ‘creative’.

An Uber for Art?

Koblin’s work has garnered particular criticism. LABoral, a Spanish
Centre for Art and Industrial Creation, has argued that ‘Exploitation
of creative labour, albeit in a humorous way, is built into this system of
participatory art making’, while at the same time acknowledging that
246  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

The Sheep Market ‘questions the commodification of networked “human

intelligence” and cultural production’ (LABoral non-dated). M. C. Elish
has pointed out that in projects of this kind ‘[t]he implications and the
stakes of Mechanical Turk as an economic system are left untouched’
(Elish 2010). These implications have been addressed by many scholars
of labour in the networked global economy, but they have also become a
focus of artists working explicitly with crowdsourced material. Nick
Thurston’s book Of the Subcontract contains poems written by MTurk-
ers as part of their HIT and is prefaced by a foreword which Marxist
critic McKenzie Wark had commissioned, via Freelancer.com, from a
ghost-writer in Pakistan for $75. The poems veer between naive and
self-knowing, crafty and well-crafted, but, in being framed by the MTurk
pricing and the time dedicated to the fulfilment of the task, they all serve
as a basic lesson in classic materialism: there is no ‘pure’ aesthetic expe-
rience outside the wider social conditions of labour, even if the artist or
the recipient want to use the work to create an illusion of its existence.
While many of the poems deal with supposedly universal topics such as
pain, love and beauty, several are knowingly self-reflexive about the task –
and the life – at hand:

0.04 [written in response to the offered payment of 0.02 cents]

Would you do work for this measly amount?
Would you take it seriously, would it even count.
(‘Am I Blind, or Maybe Dumb?’, in Thurston 2013: 24)

00.17 [payment of 0.17 cents]

To write a poem for you
That would surely not do
For you to take it and make it your own.
(‘A Poem You Did Not Write’, in Thurston 2013: 38)

Thurston’s book thus foregrounds the MTurkers’ conditions of labour,

which turn them into an ‘“elastic staffing pool” to whom the employer
has no obligation beyond the agreed payment’ (Thurston in Voyce 2014:
105). Clone-like in their anonymity, MTurkers are ‘differentiated only by
their listed efficiency relative to the efficiency of the latest Master Work-
ers, just as all computers are the computer, differentiated only by their
inbuilt processing capacity relative to the capacity of the latest
market-leading computers’ (Thurston in Voyce 2014: 108). The artificial
artificial intelligence of the MTurk labour force is thus both a represent­
ation of a labour ideal in the times of global capital flows and a
premonition of things to come, for the majority of workers, in the major-
ity of jobs and careers. Yet the worry that AI-driven robots will take over,
 Undigital Photography   247

that they are going to replace us, is often dismissed by technocapitalists

with the breezy reassurance that new jobs will be created, poverty dimin-
ished, and that, as a result of widespread automation, ‘we’ will simply
have more free time. The rebranding of unemployment and precarity as
freedom sounds particularly ominous in the positive reports about the
supposed desirability of the gig economy, with its ‘flexibility’ and ‘free-
dom’. In the aptly titled article, ‘The Internet Is Enabling a New Kind of
Poorly Paid Hell’, published in The Atlantic in January 2018, Alana
Semuels explains:

A research paper published in December that analyzed 3.8 million tasks on

Mechanical Turk, performed by 2,676 workers, found that those workers
earned a median hourly wage of about $2 an hour. Only 4 percent of
workers earned more than $7.25 an hour. Kotaro Hara, the lead author of
the study and a professor at Singapore Management University, told me
that workers earn so little because it’s hard to secure enough tasks to be
working every minute they’re in front of the computer. He says workers
spend a lot of time looking for tasks, waiting for the interface to load, and
trying to complete poorly explained tasks before deciding to return
them . . . How is it legal to compensate workers so poorly? The federal
minimum wage in America, after all, is $7.25 an hour. But . . . crowd-
sourced workers do not have to receive the minimum wage because they
are considered independent contractors, not employees. (Semuels 2018)

This problem of underemployment and underpayment affects not

only workers on labour-sourcing platforms such as MTurk, Crowd-
Flower, Clickworker, Toluna or Fiverr, but also other actors in the
‘disruptive’ gig economy, bankrolled by Silicon Valley capital, such as
Uber and Deliveroo drivers, zero-hours contract shop assistants and, last
but not least, casualised academic staff.
Darren Wershler’s afterword to Thurston’s Of The Subcontract makes
an important suggestion with regard to the force of such projects. More
than as a critique of a particular form of creativity (in this case, poetry,
with all its forms and conventions) or even of the economics of MTurk,
he suggests that Thurston’s project can be read as an institutional critique
of the conditions of the production of art, with fame and glory attached
to the singular auteur, but with the labour and infrastructure provided by
‘legion’. (This applies to fine art made by the likes of Damien Hirst, to
which of course there are historical antecedents predating the era of
industrial capitalism – if not that of the celebration of the individual/ist
human subject – as much as it does to fashion or entertainment media.)
Wershler recognises Thurston’s gesture as ‘fully ironised’ (Wershler 2013:
138), revealing as it does that
248  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

[T]he once-lauded cultural value of the work of poets is now so close to

nothing as to be indistinguishable from it, and that the work of precarious
labourers in a networked digital milieu, which is remunerated far below
minimum wage, without benefits or the collective bargaining power of
unionisation, is nevertheless dignified.

Wershler proposes to read Of the Subcontract not as a solution but

rather as a symptom of an age in which all sorts of activities are recon-
figured as Human Intelligence Tasks. This reconfiguration goes hand in
hand with the full automation of typically human creative tasks such as
reporting, journalism and data analysis, with a growing list of jobs and
careers threatened by being lost to AI. ‘Poets and professors can point to
this change’, says Wershler, ‘but, so far, have not been able to move
beyond it. As we are being to realise, our tasks, too, can be outsourced’
(Wershler 2013: 139). This state of events, deemed ‘the uberfication of
the university’ by Gary Hall in his book of the same name (2016), hints
at a near future in which we all become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, with
every aspect of our lives – from inhabiting a room or sleeping on some-
one’s sofa, making friends and dating through to walking – monetised
both as a ‘shareable’ good and a data point. Yet any wealth generated as
part of this so-called sharing economy is ‘concentrated in the hands of
relatively few’, who ‘also centrally control the platform, software, algo-
rithm, data, and associated ecosystem, deciding on pricing and wage
levels, work allocation, standards, conditions, and preferred user and
laborer profiles’ (Hall 2016).
Significantly, Hall offers more than just a critique of the precarious
labour conditions in the digital economy – or of the extension of these
conditions to professions and careers that were previously seen as safe
from the disruptive logic of its algorithms: Wershler’s ‘poets and profes-
sors’. He also issues a call to arms aimed at those in the academic world,
highlighting that ‘the university provides one of the few spaces in
postindustrial society where the forces of contemporary neoliberal-
ism’s anti-public sector regime are still being overtly opposed, to a
certain extent at least’. The most important question we are posed here
is not therefore whether robots and algorithms can replace us as artists,
poets and professors. Although, to answer that underlying question,
‘they’ surely can – by being able to produce singular artefacts that will
‘take us in’, evoke the sensation of beauty, become popular or even sell
well, and by producing online books, classes and whole courses made
up of the existing and rehashed content that ‘will do’, for a while at
least. The question rather is how to create conditions in which creativ-
ity with its accompanying institutions, especially those not driven by
the logic of innovation, profit and capital – institutions such as public
 Undigital Photography   249

universities and art schools, state-owned galleries, museums and

cultural centres – still count for us embodied humans with material and
other needs.

Scaling Back: A Conclusion (and an Opening)

The belief in the wisdom of the crowd associated with the optimism of
the early internet era, and driven by the spirit of communitarianism and
collaboration, has lost its shine in the age of global digital surveillance,
fake news, Twitter bubbles and possible election manipulation via social
media. The crowd has now been revealed to be not so much wise as
mouldable and subject to all sorts of exploitation. We have also learnt
not only that ‘they’ are really watching us but also that we are all doing it
to one another: we are all MTurks in Jeff Bezos’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s
digital factories. Crowdsourcing therefore becomes a form of crowd-mob-
bing. And thus, even if I argue that we have always been artificially
intelligent, the specific historical and cultural labour practices of humans
at a given point in time do matter. View from the Window can therefore
be seen as an indictment of inhumane labour practices, of the supposed
ease with which an erasure of the human is being enacted. In its photo-
graphic legacy and epistemological ambition to see otherwise, it casts
light on the lingering shadows of the globalised digital labour market.
Presented as diptychs in an automated photobook, the photographs in
the project foreground the mediation processes shaping the production
of knowledge, while also revealing the human signal points involved in
the process. We see in them different labour distribution from what looks
like the suburbs in the US, possibly in India, maybe somewhere in Latin
America. Through the uneasy parallelism of the image pairs, the work
asks whose interests are bring represented  – and who can afford to be
creative, where, when and for how long.
The defence of art practices and institutions for the human offered in
this chapter has little to do with any residual humanism, a desire to
preserve ‘our human uniqueness’, ‘our sense of beauty’ or any other
humanist niceties of this kind. Instead, it has to do with asking poets and
professors to keep fighting against the uberfication of the university and
the art school, of knowledge production and art production. In other
words, it is a form of ‘scaling back’. With View form the Window, and
the wider project of undigital photography, I thus want to show that,
even though we are all entangled in algorithms, it matters how we use
them, what visions and vistas they will be made to produce, who will get
to see them, who (or what) will take the picture, of what, in what circum-
stances, to what purpose and for what price. Building on the legacy of
the term in computer science, undigital photography thus becomes for
250  JOANNA ZYLINSKA

me a way of reframing the picture after it’s been taken, of looking askew
and anew, of refocusing and re-zooming in on what matters, and of
rethinking what matters to begin with. It is also a way of seeing photo­
graphy and image-making as a practice that is inherently unfinished.
Moving beyond the uniqueness of the single image on a gallery wall or
the predictability of the Instagram flow, undigital photography becomes
an ethico-political opening towards the unknown, coupled with a demand
for this knowledge not to be computed too quickly.

Notes
This chapter has been adapted from Joanna Zylinska, AI Art: Machine Visions
and Warped Dreams (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020).

1. Competition announcement available at: <https://consumer.huawei.com/

uk/campaign/sparkarenaissance> (last accessed 4 March 2019).
2. I had to reject 20% of the original tasks I had received because, contrary to
the instructions, some participants had just used stock photos or because
the download link to the image did not work, so I reopened the HIT to get
up to a hundred images.

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Coda: Photography in the
Age of Massification
A Correspondence between Joan Fontcuberta
and Geoffrey Batchen

‘CoRResPonDenCe’ is an online project created by the Foto Colectania

Foundation, in collaboration with the Banco Sabadell Foundation, which
aims to reflect upon the relevance that photography has had in contempo-
rary visual culture, keeping in mind historical perspective and the original
contexts in which photographs have been created and disseminated. The
Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta and the Australian theorist and historian
Geoffrey Batchen exchanged a number of letters about the role of the
photographer in contemporary culture between October 2016 and Janu-
ary 2017. This chapter presents an edited version of that exchange.

6 October 2016

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 with the
publication of a book, La furia de las imágenes: Notas sobre la postfoto­
grafía [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 maîtres­à­penser of photography who have most guided
my own thoughts and reflections.

In line with previous projects of mine based on a more or less semiotic

approach to elucidating the degree zero of photographic writing (I’m
254  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

thinking, for example, of Blow Up Blow Up and Gastrópoda), my

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 patho-
logical 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 unique­
ness. 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 Traumdeu­
tung (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, Acher-
onta 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.
The archaeological operation carried out in Trauma has yielded a rich
harvest of insights. The first is that on crossing the threshold of recogni-
tion 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 informa-
tion of the initial scene disappears, to make way for the information
intrinsic to the actual substance of the photograph itself (grain, oxida-
tion, 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 over-
whelming dematerialisation 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

Figure 13.1  Joan Fontcuberta: Trauma #2862, 2016.

Figure 13.2  Joan Fontcuberta: Trauma #2879, 2016.
Figure 13.3  Joan Fontcuberta: Trauma #2897, 2016.
 Photography in the Age of Massification    261

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. 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’ (Guardiola 2016).

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 awaken-
ing ‘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.

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 photo­
graphy. 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 meta-
phor for representation and the meaning this may have. Penelope cannot

Figure 13.4 (previous page)  Joan Fontcuberta: Trauma #4123, 2016.

262  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

offer her shroud to Odysseus ‘because, continually interrupted, continu-

ally 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’ (Agut 2016). Agut seems to be giving us a poetic
message: it is only by making and unmaking the photograph that we
become photographers.1

17 October 2016

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”’ (Maas 1975: 20). 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 crea-
tion 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’ (quoted in Bann 2001:
36). As if to prove his point, in the following year he received 2,000
francs from Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet for the right to engrave his Napo­
leon Reviewing the Guard in the Place du Carrousel, painted in 1838.
Importantly, Vernet’s text argues that a painter produces both a ‘mate-
rial 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.
 Photography in the Age of Massification    263

Although English photographers were not granted legal copyright

protection until 1861, commercial studios immediately recognised the
pecuniary 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 repro-
duced images are like ghosts, haunting the history of photography with
their ephemeral, ink on paper presence (Batchen 2016). They are photo-
graphic 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 photo-
graph 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 photo-
graph’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. Under this rubric, these ruined photo-
graphs, 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 intelli-
gibility and its other? I’m interested in this possibility, as it might help me
move away from your biological/psychological metaphor, with its infer-
ences of a photographic pathology perhaps beyond our control, to a
discourse I’m a little more comfortable with: politics.

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’, (Derrida 1981: 6) or, as you
put it, ‘make[s] way for the information intrinsic to the actual substance
264  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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 photograph’, in relation to the
so-called New Materialism that currently preoccupies certain philoso-
phers? The adherents of New Materialism claim to be offering a counter
to what they regard as the orthodox view propagated by both decon-
struction and psychoanalysis, the view that there is nothing outside of
discourse (Cox et al. 2015). ‘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 real-
ity, 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)?

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 photogra-
phy reproduced a representational schema derived from peculiarly
modern notions of power, knowledge and subjectivity. The photo-
graphic 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
 Photography in the Age of Massification    265

weathered snapshots found after the earthquake and tsunami that swept
over eastern Japan in March 2011 (Takahashi 2014). 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 melt-
down 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
channelled through Herder and German idealist philosophy) when
moved to speak of this same divinity as ‘an ever industrious Penelope for

Figure 13.5  Unknown (Japan): Weathered colour snapshot, c. 2011.

266  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

ever unravelling what she had woven, for ever weaving what she had
unravelled’ (Batchen 1997: 60). 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.

27 October 2016

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, which offers
a comprehensive and well-documented overview of counter-informa-
tion strategies in contemporary art and political activism. In one of the
actions presented in the show, The Ballad of Use Value (2011–12), 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 Come-
ron 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 bureau-
cratic 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
 Photography in the Age of Massification    267

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 author-
ity – 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 exam-
ple, 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 authors’ 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 authors’
rights and copyright today must be subordinated to a previous discus-
sion on the very notion of the author, which is precisely where we get
bogged down in the sand.

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 of the work as a
physical object). The existence of this corpus misticum is what enabled
the nineteenth-century artists you mentioned to claim and receive remu-
neration 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 photo-
graphs. 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
268  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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.

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 poli-
tics, 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 semi-
otic inquiry and poetic speculation – I have never tried to pass myself off
as a theoretician.

In a recent article entitled ‘Buried by Images’, 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 (Antich 2016). 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 of images
is a symptom of a hypermodernity that manifests itself in cut-throat
globalisation and cataleptic consumerism.
 Photography in the Age of Massification    269

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? For my part, and pending what-
ever 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-im-
ages evoke presents us with the great challenge.

8 November 2016

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 Amer-
ican 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 artwork 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 ready-
made sculpture in the middle of a gallery, with the surrounding walls
covered in the letters back and forth between himself and the long-suffer-
ing 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 theo-
retician, but who, in your very next sentence, refers to a recent article by
a philosopher) ask me about the radical transformation of our relation-
ship 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 respon-
sibility in the face of it?
270  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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 analogue 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.

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 situ-
ation. 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 repeti-
tion 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.
 Photography in the Age of Massification    271

For Benjamin, these processes are fraught with an inherent contradic-

tion, an alienating inversion of social and commodity relations, such that
reproduction is simultaneously capitalism’s lifeblood and its poison.2
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’ (Benjamin 2008: 23).3 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 condi-
tions 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’ (Marx 1990: 165). 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 objecti-
fied and thinglike’ (Wood 1996: 263–4).

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.
272  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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 photo-
graphs 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 affir-
mation 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 ennui 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 criti-
cal 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’ (see Sachsse
2000; MacDonald and Weber 2007; Schmid 2008; Batchen 2013). 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
 Photography in the Age of Massification    273

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’ (Barthes
1977: 147).4

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’ (Barthes 1981: 38). Our job, as intellectual
hooligans, is to make the viewing of photographs more pensive, more
thoughtful, than it might otherwise be.

18 November 2016

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 state-
ments, 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 antennae 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.

Figure 13.6 (next page)  Joachim Schmid (Germany): pages from Self (in the Other
People’s Photographs series), 2008, printed book, 17.6 cm x 37.0 cm (open). Courtesy
of the artist.
274  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN
Photography in the Age of Massification    275
276  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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 circum-
stances of physics.5 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 propor-
tional 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 photo-
graph that borders on infinity also requires its own particular quantum
revolution to adapt it from phenomena that are measurable in kilo-
metres to those measurable in light years. The disciplines that have
allowed us to approach the analysis of the image from different perspec-
tives (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.

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 oppo-
sition 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
 Photography in the Age of Massification    277

the image of its magical dimension. It also pushes us towards insensibil-

ity and a new mode of censorship: concealment by smothering and
fatigue. ‘Art has become iconoclastic’, Baudrillard tells us. ‘Modern icon-
oclasm no longer consists in destroying images, but in manufacturing a
profusion of images where there is nothing to see’ (Baudrillard 2005:
118). Saturation actually causes blindness.6 Just as an excess of informa-
tion 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 formu-
lated 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. He emerged as a leading
apostle of the commitment to rethinking accumulation with the publica-
tion of his Petit traité de la décroissance sereine in 2007. 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 satu-
ration, resistance.

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 photo-
graphs as symbolic substitutes for the real, but the strength of that
substitution value has been weakened. Value, in terms of appreciation, is
278  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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 not to last but to interact and connect. The phenome-
non 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.

30 November 2016

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 anal-
ogy, 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, regard-
less 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 inter-
net or digital cameras or social media.7 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 desensitisation that might result from exposure to an
excess of atrocity pictures – Roland Barthes (1979), Susan Sontag (1977)
 Photography in the Age of Massification    279

and John Berger (1980) – were writing in the 1960s and 1970s, in the age
of illustrated magazines and television.

So I suggest we need to be cautious as we explore the issue of ‘massifi­

cation’. 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 seem-
ingly infinite numbers.

So where is the crisis here? For you, this crisis might be summed up thus:
‘[t]he photographic act itself often prevails over the content of the photo-
graph . . . 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 neces-
sity, 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 phoe-
nix 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 Ameri-
cans 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’
(Batchen 2010: 122–3, 126). Photography, it seems, continues to have
meaning (and a profound meaning at that) even in the absence of
photographs.

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
280  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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-cen-
tury avant-garde, to a period before the somewhat mournful, cynical and
theory-laden moment we call postmodernism, and are seeking to re-ex-
plore 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 Centre 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.8 Making photo-
graphs 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 photo-
graphs 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 expe-
rience precisely so that the photograph can be brought back into our
consciousness.
Figure 13.7  Justine Varga: Desklamp from the series Film Object, 2011-12, chromogenic photograph,
105.0 cm x 83.8 cm (image). Courtesy of the artist, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide and Tolarno
Galleries, Melbourne.
282  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

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, regis-
tering 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 autobiographi-
cal 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 vocabu-
lary 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 contamina-
tion. 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 (quoted
in Baillargeon 2014). About half the resulting images remained almost
black, but some were soon speckled with a blizzard of radioactive emis-
sions, 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
 Photography in the Age of Massification    283

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 instantane-
ous 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 both by the camera and a centralised referent, such photo-
graphs also actively decentre 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 percep-
tion of that environment, and to encourage a more thoughtful
consideration of its consequences. A politicised photographic poetry, in
other words, is still possible and has never been more necessary.

Figure 13.8 (next page)  Shimpei Takeda: Trace #7, Nihonmatsu Castle (Nihonmatsu,
Fukushima), 2012, gelatin silver photograph, 40.0 cm x 50.5 cm. Courtesy of the
artist, Tokyo.
286  JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN

Notes
1. Joan Fontcuberta’s letters were translated into English by Graham
Thomson.
2. Benjamin establishes the contradictory logic of his argument in his first
paragraph: ‘Going back to the basic conditions of capitalist produc-
tion, . . . what could be expected, it emerged, was not only an increasingly
harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of condi-
tions which would make it possible for capitalism to abolish itself’ (Benjamin
2008).
3. Anne McCauley concludes that ‘Benjamin failed to see that the aura, as he
defined it, was untouched by mechanical replication’. Pointing out that visi-
tors still flocked to see original paintings, despite their reproduction in other
media, she asserts that ‘their aura certainly remains intact’ (McCauley
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.
4. 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 vari-
ety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture’ (Barthes 1977:
146).
5. 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 Inerna-
tionales de la Photographie in Arles in 2011. The catalogue was published
jointly with R. M., Barcelona/Mexico City.
6. 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 be familiar with as co-editor of Picturing Atrocity:
Photography in Crisis, Reaktion Books, London, 2012.
7. Your quotation was taken from Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulation and Transaes-
thetics: 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.
8. 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 Photo­
graphy, 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
 Photography in the Age of Massification    287

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.

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Names index

Alberti, 194 Brewster, David, 6, 20, 280, 287

Alphen, Ernst van, 17, 141, 143, 145,
152, 157 Calvino, Italo, 147, 154
Andrejevic, Mark, 85–6, 89, 93–4 Campbell, Sue, 81–2, 94
Antich, Xavier, 268, 287 Caraffa, Constanza, 116–17, 137
Aragon, Louis, 277 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 39
Atget, Eugene, 9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 265
Azoulay, Ariella, 64, 75, 92, 94 Comeron, Octavi, 266, 269
Cox, Geoff, 189, 206, 209, 264, 287
Ball, Harvey, 83–4 Crawford, Kate, 85, 96
Barrias, Louis-Ernest, 211 Cubitt, Sean, 6–7, 12, 14–15, 20, 98,
Barthes, Roland, 7, 9, 19, 81–2, 92, 100, 109
94, 148, 154, 216, 233, 238, 250,
270, 273, 279, 286–7 Dällenbach, Lucien, 130, 137
Batchen, Geoffrey, 10–11, 16, 19, Darius, Jon, 57, 59
74–5, 134, 142, 154, 179, 181 Davies, William, 85–6, 90, 94
Baudrillard, Jean, 25, 228, 277–8, Derrida, Jacques, 63, 75, 236, 250,
286–7 264, 288
Beard, Richard, 270 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 57, 59, 82,
Benjamin, Walter, 7, 9, 19, 27, 32, 39, 92, 94
58–9, 268, 270–1, 286–7 Difallah, Djellel, 242, 244, 250
Berger, John, 189, 279, 287 Dijck, Jan van, 86–7, 96
Berlant, Lauren, 16, 102–4, 109 Dobson, Susan, 104, 109, 124, 126,
Binkley, Sam, 83, 92, 94 131, 137
Bishop, Ryan, 14, 20, 198, 209, 225, Doppler, Christian, 187, 197, 199,
228 209
Blumenberg, Hans, 49–50, 59
Boehm, Gottfried, 261 Edwards, Paul, 30, 39, 225, 228
Bonnet, René, 51–2 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 41, 59
Boudinet, Daniel, 7, 9 Engels, Friedrich, 44
Bratton, Benjamin, 75, 199, 202–3, Ernst, Wolfgang, 17, 141, 157, 186,
206, 209, 212, 217, 226–7, 233, 250 209
290  Names index

Farocki, Harun, 188, 208, 212–13, Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 47–8, 58, 60,
216–17, 228 245, 251
Filatova, Elena, 244, 250 Homer, 261, 265
Fisher, Andrew, 4–5, 15–16, 20, 114,
146, 153, 156 Illouz, Eva, 80–2, 85, 95
Flusser, Vilém, 7, 9–10, 17, 20, 28, 39, Ipeirotis, Panos, 250
88, 94, 143–4, 239, 250
Fontcuberta, Joan, 11, 16, 19, 114, Jäger, Gottfried, 216, 228
137, 256, 258, 261–2, 286, 288 Jameson, Fredric, 42, 60
Freud, Sigmund, 31, 254, 263
Frosh, Paul, 77, 80, 87, 93–4, 146, Kant, Immanuel, 236, 251
155 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 245
Kessels, Erik, 1, 4, 16, 116, 138, 270,
Gabrys, Jennifer, 29, 39, 186, 207, 286
209, 221, 225–6, 228 Knowles, Kim, 146–7, 155
Getty, Jean Paul, 101, 135–7, 139, 172, Koblin, Aaron, 245
280, 286 Kundera, Milan, 82, 95
Gide, André, 130, 137 Kurdi, Alan, 64–5, 76
Goldbach, Philipp, 117, 120, 122–3,
130, 138 La Bruyère, Jean de, 53, 60
Goodman, Nelson, 17, 168–71, 180–1 Latouche, Serge, 277, 280, 288
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 50–1, 60 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 51
Greenberg, Clement, 82, 95, 165, 179, Lenot, Marc, 17, 141–1, 145, 154–5
181 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 50–1,
Grosser, Ben, 188–9, 208 60
Groys, Boris, 100–1, 104, 109 Lovejoy, Josh, 11, 20, 52, 60
Guardiola, Ingrid, 261, 288 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, 41–2
Lucaites, John Louis, 114, 132, 138
Haraway, Donna, 95, 103, 244, Lugon, Olivier, 149–50, 156
251 Luther, Martin, 31
Hariman, Robert, 114, 132, 138 Luxemburg, Rosa, 34, 39
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lysenko, Trofim, 44
44–5, 60, 74
Heidegger, Martin, 45–6, 60, 74–5, Magny, Claude, 130
165–7, 181 Magritte, René, 277
Henning, Michelle, 11, 15–16, 114, Majewska, Ewa, 100–2, 109–10
134, 138 Malraux, André, 46–7, 60
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 266 Man Ray, 216, 229, 277
Herschel, Frederick William, 186 Manaugh, Geoff, 196–7, 199, 202,
Hilliard, John, 134–5 209
Hispano, Andrés, 254 Manovich, Lev, 12–13, 20, 141, 153,
Hochschild, Arlie, 82, 95 155–6
Hokusai, Katsushika, 170 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 215
 Names index   291

Marx, Karl, 32, 39, 44, 104, 217, 236, Sander, August, 77, 79–80, 92, 96,
246, 271, 288 233
Massumi, Brian, 107 Schmid, Joachim, 270, 272–3, 286–8
May, John, 12, 20 Schuppli, Susan, 18, 211, 213–14, 221,
McLuhan, Marshall, 103 226, 229
Michurin, Ivan Vladimirovič, 44 Sekula, Allan, 47, 58, 60, 79–80, 92,
Mitchell, William John T., 16, 20, 90, 96, 202
95, 113, 129, 138, 141, 143–4, 156, Semuels, Alana, 247, 251
261 Shaaf, Larry, 136
Moholy-Nagy, László, 17, 158–60, Sharma, Sarah, 103, 110
178, 182, 216, 229, 280 Shigetaka Kurita, 84, 95
Mumford, Lewis, 41, 60 Siegel, Steffen, 130–1, 139
Muybridge, Edward, 194–5, 197, 206 Siegert, Bernhardt, 187, 210
Simmel, Georg, 47
Nagel, Thomas, 189, 210 Sombart, Werner, 47
Nakamura, Lisa, 105–6, 110 Sontag, Susan, 48, 56, 60, 74, 76, 152,
Nanay, Bence, 165, 182 157, 238, 279, 288
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 15, 61–3, 66, 67–76 Sprenger, Florian, 202, 207, 210
Neurath, Otto, 79, 84, 92–3, 95 Srnicek, Nick, 11, 21
Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 9, 243–4 Stallabrass, Julian, 11, 21, 61, 76
Nöe, Alva, 133, 165–7, 180, 182, 187, Stark, Luke, 68–9, 85–6, 93, 96,
202 160
Nordström, Alison, 126, 131, 138 Steichen, Edward, 15, 77–81, 90, 92,
96, 233
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandra, 16, Steyerl, Hito, 16, 61, 66, 76, 97–100,
98–110 102, 110, 151, 157, 174, 182, 208
Offenhuber, Dietmar, 18, 213–20, Szendy, Peter, 7, 21
224, 229
Owens, Craig, 130, 136, 138 Talbot, Henry Fox, 6, 28, 135–7, 139,
262
Paglen, Trevor, 11, 18, 20, 188, 210, Theweleit, Klaus, 89, 96
213, 229, 232–8, 251
Panofsky, Erwin, 117 Uexküll, Jacob von, 224, 230
Pascal, Blaise, 50, 60 Umbrico, Penelope, 17, 167–8, 170–2,
Patočka, Jan, 59–60 182, 270
Phillips, John, 198, 209
Plato, 261 Valéry, Paul, 254
Playfair, William, 29, 40 Varga, Justine, 281–2, 287
Pollen, Annebella, 10, 16, 20, 89, 96, Vilanova, Oriol, 16, 114, 116, 139
137–8, 143 Virgil, 254, 261
Virilio, Paul, 186, 188, 197, 210,
Rancière, Jacques, 261, 264 226–7, 230
Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 186 Vogl, Joseph, 50, 60
292  Names index

Wallace, David Foster, 261 Wershler, Darren, 247–8, 252

Wark, McKenzie, 246 Wright, Richard, 12, 22
Weber, Max, 47, 272, 288
Weizman, Eyal, 18, 76, 220, Zylinska, Joanna, 18, 21, 61, 76, 89,
230 96, 153, 155, 186, 208, 210, 241
Subject index

aerial photography, 58, 202 capitalism, 7, 12, 17, 47–54, 79, 81,
aesthetics, 4, 6–7, 11, 15, 17, 18, 37, 100, 104, 147, 216, 218, 236, 247,
46, 50, 63, 92–3, 96, 101, 123, 129, 264, 271–2, 277, 283
142, 148–50, 158, 164–7, 170, computational culture, 3, 17, 186
178–9, 188, 196, 198–9, 204–5, 207, contagion, 87, 90–1, 93
211, 217, 227, 246, 276 cyborg, 31, 103–4
affect, 10, 16, 25, 32, 35–6, 65, 78–9,
85, 88, 99, 102, 104–7, 131–2, 239 daguerreotype, 6, 263, 267, 270
affective images, 35, 65 DARPA, 233–4
Anthropocene, 29, 32, 34, 46, 97, 211, database, 4, 14, 25–9, 38, 88, 149,
213, 225 233–4
apparatus, 10, 34, 51, 66, 70, 91, diagram, 12, 26, 29, 36, 93, 211–12,
126, 128, 142–4, 147, 150–2, 180, 214–15, 217, 221, 224, 226–8
194, 212–13, 224, 227, 232, 237–8, digital culture, 4–5, 12, 19, 105, 141,
264 144–6, 152
archaeology, 13, 15, 27, 187, 221, 254 discourse, 1, 4–7, 10–11, 14–16,
archive, 4–5, 13, 25, 70–1, 80, 117, 18–19, 50, 63, 73, 79, 81, 89, 91,
123, 129, 143, 149, 220, 224, 228, 113, 140–1, 143, 161, 186, 199,
238, 254, 263 204–5, 207, 225, 236, 238–9, 263–4
astronomy, 11, 15, 26, 49, 53 dismeasure, 63, 66, 68, 70, 72–3
aura, 268–9, 271, 276, 286 disproportion, 49–50, 55, 57, 66, 72,
autographic visualisation, 18, 213–21, 74, 104
224–8
ecology, 14, 18, 28–9, 31–3, 36, 152,
bubble vision, 97–100, 102, 104–7 197, 282
emoji, 15, 78, 84–6, 89, 92–4
calculation, 4, 17, 45, 52, 194, 225 epistemology, 6, 11, 14, 46, 141, 189,
camera, 6, 11, 26, 30–1, 47, 48–9, 56, 225, 235, 249, 276
66–7, 80, 131, 135, 141–2, 145, 147, ethics, 37, 46, 64, 66, 72, 74, 234,
149–51, 174, 185–7, 194–5, 203, 250
207, 211–12, 216, 231, 233, 235, extension, 29, 81, 129, 185, 238,
237–9, 242, 264, 268, 278, 283 248
294  Subject index

facial recognition, 11, 25, 93, 205, modernity, 45, 74, 81, 160, 211, 221,
233 264, 268
feedback, 31, 34–6, 86, 88–9 montage, 27, 92
Flickr, 116, 153 multiplicity, 64, 72, 113–14, 146,
149–50, 153, 273
genealogy, 14–15, 17, 127, 186–7, 194, multitude, 6, 13–14, 113, 206
203, 205, 207, 268
geology, 53, 194, 221, 224–5, 238 observation, 50, 72, 102, 141, 186–7,
197–8, 212, 217–18, 226–7, 273
hardware, 98, 100, 170, 235 ontology, 18, 62, 66, 68, 185, 187, 198,
204, 232, 235, 238–9, 267
imagery, 56, 85, 91–2, 123, 128, 165, operational image, 212–13, 216–20,
170–1, 178, 186, 216, 224, 226–7 227–8
indexicality, 216 ornament, 236–7
information overload, 6
Instagram, 11, 13, 16, 25, 85, 98–9, parergon, 10, 236–7
102–3, 105, 153, 238, 250, 268 perception, 31, 50–1, 63, 108, 187,
internet, 35, 42, 98, 101–2, 104, 153, 189, 198, 202–5, 232, 237–8, 268
174, 232, 234, 247, 249, 276 performance, 86–7, 98, 101–2, 169,
invisible, 25–6, 46, 50, 56–7, 65, 170, 235, 245
199, 205–6, 213, 215, 232, 244, phototheque, 62–3, 70
271–2, 282 political economy, 47, 203, 206, 227,
iterability, 238 266, 272
post-lenticular, 17–18, 186, 194–6,
kitsch, 15, 81–2, 84–6, 92 199, 205–6
posthuman, 189
literalism, 82 power, 6, 15, 33–4, 48, 65, 71, 90, 93,
Lomography, 17, 140–1, 144–52 97–100, 106, 142–4, 147, 187, 189,
loop, 14, 31, 34, 87–8, 91, 232 216, 218, 232, 245, 248, 264, 267,
271–2, 286
machine, 5, 15, 18–19, 25–6, 28, 32,
34, 37, 66–7, 70, 78, 86, 91, 99–100, quantification, 5, 7, 15, 41, 45, 48
103–5, 107, 136, 151, 160, 178, 180, quantity, 4–5, 10–14, 16–19, 43–4, 74,
188–9, 196–7, 199, 203, 205–6, 98–9, 116, 126, 134, 141, 150, 217,
212–13, 217, 224–7, 232, 234–5, 231, 270, 278
237–8, 242, 244–5, 264
machine vision, 10–11, 13, 18, 186, radar, 19, 185, 187, 198–9, 203, 207
188–9, 205–6, 232–3, 236 representation, 1, 4, 15, 26, 29, 33, 42,
metaphotographers, 144 46, 48, 51, 56, 65, 75, 79, 90, 100,
metaphysics, 45 106, 129–30, 134–5, 142, 175,
metapictoriality, 141, 147, 151–2 179–80, 205–6, 208, 212–14,
metapicture, 16, 113, 129, 143, 144, 152 216–20, 226–8, 235, 254, 262, 264,
microscope, 49 277, 282
 Subject index   295

reproducibility, 6–7, 136, 271 symbol, 12, 31, 79, 84–6, 91, 134, 146,
retromodernism, 280, 283 150, 169–70, 181, 214, 233, 278, 282

satellite imaging, 175, 224 technical media, 4, 6–7, 29, 186

ScanLab, 18, 186, 195–9, 202, technology, 32, 34, 36–7, 46, 86, 88,
205 91, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 106–8, 116,
semiotics, 252, 276, 177 128, 131, 133, 145–6, 161, 165, 167,
simulation, 1, 28, 26–37, 207, 212, 175, 186–7, 194, 196, 198, 205–6,
224 232, 234, 237, 244
social networks, 100, 104, 107, telescope, 49–50, 232
153 transmission, 185, 196, 207
software, 11–12, 30, 36, 98, 150, 175, transparency, 4, 91, 117, 165, 175,
188, 244, 248 232, 235
stereoscope, 47
strobe photography, 9 Umwelt, 224
subjectivity, 4, 15, 69–70, 264, 283
surveillance, 11, 64, 106, 205, 232–3, visibility, 4, 11, 49–51, 57–8, 100, 108,
238, 249 198, 206, 217, 236–7, 283