The ubiquity of the image

Like Radu, one of our bloggers who identifies himself as Juan sent us a post on March 25 in which he mentioned Moholy-Nagy’s famous remark about the illiterates of the future being those who are ignorant of photography. Juan also cited Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid society’, the ‘risk society’ of Ulrich Beck, the society of ‘new capitalism’ of Richard Sennett, Gilles Lipovetsky’s ‘Kleenex society’, Nicholas Negroponte’s ‘digital world’, the ‘network society’ of Manuel Castells… We could also add the ‘fiction capitalism’ put forward by Vicente Verdú, in which images, as generators of fiction, are the most prized commodities. To this schema I would add that the first step in a pedagogy of photography was to teach people to ‘write’ it; the second step was to teach them to ‘read’ it. This phase is not yet over ; in other words, we find ourselves in that future full of illiterates foretold by Moholy-Nagy but with the added aggravation of a new circumstance: what gives meaning to images today is their proliferation and circulation: that is, precisely the new scenario of communication we are discussing here. It is no longer enough to know how to decode a photograph in terms of its historical, aesthetic, semiotic and even ideological parameters: nowadays it is the economic and political uses of the image that prevail.

At the time of writing these lines I am driving across the Sonora Desert in Arizona. Unfortunately, I’m making the trip not for pleasure but for professional reasons, to take part in a series of activities at universities in Phoenix and Tucson, including workshops with students from graduate photography programmes. Incidentally, as I travel between the two cities I’m enjoying landscapes with iconic resonances and my head is filled with déjà-vus of many sequences from classic westerns like many of the photographers who, like Timothy O’Sullivan, explored the American West. So I am reliving at first hand the contemporary phenomenon of the image preceding the experience, illustrating what we have been talking about here. Well, I met bright students with competent teachers and enviable facilities, who could boast of work that was impeccable in its technical and plastic handling, some of it even conceptually powerful, often with timid programmatic or ethical justifications; as a rule, however, they were incapable of explaining why they had made those images, what effects they hoped to provoke, what strategies of dissemination they had conceived… They simply made images, full stop. Creativity and intellectual effort were concentrated in the images, but in images completely isolated from the world and its engagements, as if an image ought not have a life of its own outside of the art school art, or to put it more painfully, as if images were destined to be mere exercises in style. But what style? Well, that of the most total blindness. Because, as we have been insisting, nowadays the significant background to the creative work is all about the problems of circulation, the trajectory that is traced between artist and public in -I repeat-economic and political contexts in which artist and public are reduced to mere extras. If the students -that is to say, the future professionals- of the image are left ignorant these factors, we are lost. But be careful: this does not imply neglecting the actions that need to be carried out with regard to the general public.

I am delighted, though, that in the wake of our diagnostics have come proposals for action such as Christian’s. We need to extend Moholy-Nagy’s words and say that the illiterates of the future will be those who are left on the fringes of computers and the Internet. When I speak of the trajectory between producers and consumers, computers and the Internet are the heart and soul of any option that within a certain margin of freedom and operability would aim at raising awareness and arousing collective reactions. Over and above attitudes and intentions, computers and the Internet are the main tools with which to respond to the political and media Establishment. It is essential to make a real effort, then, to learn to use them effectively.

I entirely agree with Joan. Including our responsibilities, which I absolutely accept, in our failure, after thirty years, to manage to establish a pedagogy of the image from the first years of schooling on. I ought to add that while I love teaching, and my -privileged- students are stimulating, exceptional, dynamic, I sometimes have doubts: what is the underlying significance of an education that trains photographers at a time when there are too many professional photographers and where everyone is producing and circulating images? Certainly to give them access to tools for understanding the history of the image and help them understand the need for critical thought in the process of developing their projects. And it works not too badly, even if they are a very small minority.

It’s quite clear that at a time when the funds allocated to culture and education are everywhere in significant decline, when financial flows -which direct the flow of images- are concentrating more and more on communication, consumption and entertainment the answer is not simple and guerrilla warfare is difficult to structure.

The earlier proposal regarding the public space might be an element, but it needs to be more complex, enriched by a genuinely educational action.

This is not really entryism -sorry, Radu- but I think we should be trying to enhance our ability to use the tool, the tools of ‘the enemy’. As someone who has tried for years to convince television channels of the editorial uses of photography, and has put on programmes (very minority: ARTE) that dealt with the image, I am well aware that we -definitely a minority- are marked by the Sisyphus syndrome…

Even so -and this proves that I’m still optimistic- I wonder if we couldn’t manage to invent, on the Internet, a site dedicated to the teaching of the image, with links to other sites we think are interesting, as a tool for teachers, a place of knowledge -however superficial- for the young. I think it can be conceived as something both serious and fun. One way of treating the Web as a counter-power…

Perhaps it’s because the light is coming back with the promise of spring.

‘The People have the power’ -  Patti Smith

I have no conflict with the positions put forward by Joan and Radu, or with Joan invoking the line that runs through Gramsci and all that has been most intelligent, open and innovative -and freest- in the thinking of European communism. It’s more to my way of thinking, even if I am aware of the limits, than the reference to Trotskyite entryism, which I have opposed for thirty years… She who ‘enters’ never wins, I’m afraid.

It’s simply that I think that we have been both accomplices and willing victims of the system. We wanted to take a stand against the dominant ideologies which manifested themselves in pictures. We have done this by creating alternative images (Joan), by writing and editing (me), by teaching in a radical way and theorizing (Radu). We have been at the same time players, accomplices, critics and mainsprings of all these movements that have shaken up an image that no longer knew where it was. We have our responsibilities -our irresponsibilities, too- but I don’t believe that we are the worst… I still defend the right to entertain illusions and make mistakes.

Given that we agree on the need for actions that will affect the greatest number, I hope there will be a place online for my provocation -just a small provocation…- about the need to take the public space into account. To twist it, to pervert it, perhaps.

The need for pedagogy, about which all three of us are in agreement, reminds me of a sad experience. In 1982, when Jack Lang was Minister of Culture in France, about ten of us had a lot of meetings to develop what we called ‘a policy of image learning in school.’ The result was dossiers, report -no doubt buried away in drawers- and the ephemeral and since questioned creation of specialized ‘visual arts’ syllabuses. A way of negating the need for youngsters to become familiar with history of images.

Above and beyond the outrageous proposal for the presence of the image, with no function other than its presence, in the public space, I wonder if we might not be capable of inventing a method of teaching on the Internet.

Joan’s comment seems to me to be essential. The obliteration of a clear distinction between the producers and the consumers of images changes the whole deal. What characterizes the present situation is not only globalization, with the increasing prevalence and uniformity of images, but a new equilibrium, which for the moment, it must be said, is fairly unstable… With the new technologies, the fall in the price of digital cameras and the proliferation of cell phones, anyone can make images. With the appearance of sites like Flikr, which has been enriched with 3,739 images in the last minute, or YouTube, everyone can distribute images on a global scale. The ubiquity of the image is matched by the ubiquity of the makers of images. The system no longer has a monopoly!

But for the time being it is confusion that reigns. Disoriented by an evolution that has gone far too fast, many professionals are now manifesting defensively corporatist reflexes and seeking to bolt the doors on a market that is beyond their control. Disconcerted, some of the schools that train professional image-makers have been known to take refuge in a retrograde technicism. Completely at sea, public education is unable to adapt to a civilization of the image and is the prisoner of a system than for all practical purposes is structured on the text. As consumers, students find themselves immersed in a flood of images that they often take at face value because they are unable to decode them, and as producers they are equipped with the tools of which they have at best arrived at a certain technical mastery, but no real reflection on content. Everybody seems to have forgotten the famous sentence of Moholy-Nagy who said that “the illiterate of the future will be person ignorant of the use of the camera”. Let’s replace the word ‘camera’ with the more general term ‘image’ and pass on the message to the educational decision-makers!

Like Radu, I love the idea of the ‘vaccine’ proposed by Joan. And I very much like the idea of intellectual judo!

All three of us agree on the evidence of the issues, on the need for resistance that corresponds to the practices of many artists, and ask ourselves about the form that resistance might take. What we are doing here is one such form. In the 1970s and 80s, when photography, still struggling for recognition, invented the Rencontres (Arles) and festivals, it was calling for access to the Museum. It has now achieved that, with a very significant number of exhibitions in the institutions and private galleries of the contemporary art circuit. There are hundreds of photography months, weeks or fortnights around Europe, and also in countries just now emerging on the international scene - China and India, among others. Though things are not always perfect, though there is still a need for more resources, it is no longer the time -given that the quantity of images and their circulation have increased considerably- of claims and demands. This is the determining factor in taking account of images in the realm of education.

I think that one of the major issues is the urban space, the public space. To make creative images and photographs a presence in this space, without their having any utilitarian function as advertising or decoration, could certainly be regarded as an interesting form of ‘vaccine’. Quite different from what we see in the streets, in the media or on the multiple screens that surround us, they could have an alerting or warning function, play an implicitly critical role, cause surprise and provoke questioning. They could be on display in the city streets, and also -and why not?- in motorway rest areas and other places of transit. What is needed is a strategy to make alternative images accessible to the largest possible public.

A question of means, you will say. Of course; but it would be interesting to think about what could be achieved in this direction with the budget of a photography event, often so inward-looking. I’m not saying that we should get rid of the festivals (well, maybe some of them…), but such ‘events’, very often conceived with the aim of promoting the places that host them, are no longer enough. An immense outdoor exhibition, extending, for example, from Paris to Tarragona (purely at random…) would give people something to look at and think about.

Dancing around my head I have Gramsci’s quote from Romain Rolland, which may well sum up the tone of our latest comments: ‘Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.’ Perhaps we could end this line of discourse here, then, and set off in new directions.

Note how terms like ‘illiteracy’, ‘education’, ‘training’, ‘schooling’ and ‘students’ have run through various interventions. This brings us to a key issue, which is that of teaching and raising awareness. All three of us have been more or less intensively involved in teaching and popularizing. This being so, two points. First, it is not enough to criticize the present state of image culture: we also need to be critical of ourselves, because we are to some extent active agents of this culture and thus responsible for the current situation. We can analyse what portion of the blame we ought to bear -probably not much, given the mesh of powers and circumstances- but I don’t think it is intellectually acceptable to present ourselves as mere outsiders, as aloof external observers. Second, we ought to turn the argument round: we are in a privileged position to intervene in the state of affairs, or at least in its future, because one of our duties is precisely to help shape the spirit of photographers and publics - that is to say, both the producers of images and the consumers of images.

Traditionally, educational methodologies have been structured differently depending on whom they set out to address. It seemed logical to do this, not only because the conceptual mechanisms of writing or reading were different, but because an active attitude was expected of some and an essentially passive attitude of others. This is no longer the case, but I nevertheless have the impression that the programmes pursued by schools and exhibitions, specialists publications and canonical criticism continue to insist on the routine of that obsolete dichotomy. Nowadays we are all producers and consumers at the same time, and the lack of differentiation of these roles calls for a radically new educational agenda.

A brief article by Alasdair Foster, director of the ACP (Australian Centre for Photography) in Sydney, puts this forward very graphically (http://www.zonezero.com/editorial/editorial.html). Foster compares the reforms currently taking place in the world of the image with the Protestant Reformation that shook Christianity in the 16th century. In the Catholic Church the ministry of the faith is the preserve of an oligarchy of ‘professionals’ (members of the clergy, the priestly class); in contrast, Luther and his followers set out to ‘deprofessionalize’ the ministry, liberalizing the interpretation of the holy scriptures according to personal conscience. A Protestant pastor may be an expert, but his or her knowledge is meant to be at the service of the community without exercising exclusive authority over it, so that a lay person can also deliver a sermon to the congregation. In the world of art, of photography and visual communication in general this is also happening. The hierarchical separation between professionals and public is tending to diminish, even disappear altogether, with the result that their positions are becoming interchangeable. The image is ubiquitous today because we all make or deal with photographs, we all generate and receive graphic information, irrespective of the meaning that we invest it with. How, then, do we address this new reality in terms of a coherent pedagogy?

The ‘entryism’ I was referring to is a strategy put in place by Trotsky himself. As some see it, he was trying to strengthen the Left. Others, myself among them, think that Lev Davidovitch had an ulterior motive and wanted to gain power in the socialist parties and trade unions by infiltrating and working from inside them. In any case, ‘entryism’ does not end with the Ramón Mercader episode -it continued to be the watchword in Trotskyist organizations in the early 1970s.Despite the colossal power of the forces that control the dissemination of the image, and the enormous resilience of the system -does anyone still talk about Marcuse today?- I remain optimistic: optimistic because the system has its weaknesses, and artists have found strategies with which to exploit them. ‘Entryism’ is one of these. Rather than a frontal attack, infiltrating the system and using its power, its institutions and its channels of distribution to oppose it is a form of ‘intellectual judo’: using the strength of your opponent in order to combat him more effectively.

Hijacking and appropriation, key strategies of contemporary art, are starting to infiltrate more and more into (almost) every area of the production of images. Of course, as Christian rightly reminds us, this is a minority phenomenon. That said, it is important because it instills doubt. Doubts in relation to the ‘evidence’ that a picture apparently offers, doubts about its supposed objectivity, and doubts about the neutrality of the system that instrumentalizes it. And in order to make anyone change their point of view, the first thing is to make them doubt!

I believe there is more in all of this than merely ‘the glory of the attempt’, and I’m rather enamoured of the metaphor Joan used: a vaccine. It’s up to all of us to see to it that ‘the glory of the attempt’ goes beyond the simple merit of having at least made an effort and amounts to something more than a valiant last stand!

Joan is right when he says that my tone is pessimistic… Maybe it’s the time, which is not very funny, either politically or in terms of view of global economic or aesthetic movements and the dominance of the market, rampant mediocrity, consumption replacing knowledge and communication ousting information that go with it.

I’m glad he feels that in the realm of the image in the last thirty years I have actually achieved a certain number of acts, appearances, disruptions of the routine that is imposing itself. All of this is in parallel, to some extent, with what Joan has produced as an artist. There has been, right from the start, a resistance to the norms for fixing the play of images and their appropriation by the viewer. Thirty years is rather a long time, and I still find it hard to understand the editors of prestigious magazines, who don’t even want to pay what it costs to produce an images, who say to us: ‘It’s great, but it’s not for our readers,’ and go on to add: ‘Our readers wouldn’t understand!’

But I am optimistic! The proof is that I write a column every week and publish the occasional portfolio in Internazionale in Italy. And that I ‘publish’ on the Internet (http://www.actuphoto.com/) an unlikely dialogue and daily journal with the Chinese photographer Aniu, who sends me a self-portrait every day to which I respond with a text. And that I’m taking part in the present dialogue. And that I still teach bright young people, give lectures, put on exhibitions and organize books.

I am optimistic because I continue to do things, to shake up ideas and images, to write in order to try to think what is happening to us in this maelstrom of ‘visuals’ that is all around us.

I am not a creator of images, just a ‘middleman’ between those who make them and those who receive them. My only real reason for being optimistic comes from seeing that a lot of young people today still have a desire to work through photography with the state of the world in which they live. Not only do they offer me new discoveries, they also manifest a desire to change the world, while being fully aware that photography can’t do it on its own.

They are a proposition for the future, both when they document -take a look at the exemplary latest works by the three World Press Photo prize-winners from the VU agency at http://www.agencevu.com/, and those of others who didn’t win a prize, like Steeve Junker or Kosuke- and when artists use the image -as Joan does, for example- to take a stand on global issues. Terrorism, for example. Impertinence and derision are as much to the point as investigative journalism.

These are the people, the creators in different modalities, who oblige me to be optimistic!

It doesn’t really matter that their distribution is limited, that it can’t compare with the giants of the transmission. It may not be so important.

We are left with two basic questions: how can we introduce an education in the reading of images from the early years of schooling on, and what are we capable of inventing, on the Internet, to resist the dominant imagery?

A guerrilla, even if he or she is wrong, is of necessity an optimist. And I see myself, more than ever, as a guerrilla…

I am, of course, in overall agreement with Radu’s remarks. But I am less optimistic than him, which is not to say that I’ve given up… All the more so because I have always tried to wage this kind of ‘guerrilla warfare’ against the dominant imagery, clichés and stereotypes.

The fact that at Libération between 1981 and 1986 we atypically published artists as diverse as Raymond Depardon and Sophie Calle, that we have thrown into crisis the modality of the portrait or fashion imagery, has gained us readers. The fact that the Agence VU and its gallery have for twenty years now disseminated, published, exhibited and circulates unconventional points of view is a contribution to this resistance to the standard and dominant flow, as is the publication in the current issue of the Italian weekly Internazionale of a portfolio of work by the Indian artist Dayanita Singh.

But I have never been convinced by the Trotskyist strategy of entryism (actually, I was more Maoist…), an illusion that was tragically terminated with a an ice pick.

Given that we have no real means of acting on or intervening in the dominant vectors of the image, which are controlled by ever greater and more concentrated financial powers, it seems to me that we are condemned to remain a minority.

Maybe we ought to accept this, keep on resisting and, most importantly, continue to call for training, for education in how to read and understand images. In order for there to be fewer visual illiterates.

I don’t so much want to try to answer the questions Christian asks himself -and us- as to say something about his tone. It troubles me to find him withdrawn, dejected, pessimistic… We’ve know each other for a long time: if I’m not mistaken, since he came to Barcelona in 1978 to present the exhibition by Bernard Faucon in the Fotomania gallery. For thirty years, then, what he has done and what he has said have always struck me as very much to the point. So I am afraid that he is not a pessimist but a well-informed realist. At the same time, though, I still want to believe that we have options open to us. I may be naive, but I’m committed to possibilist optimism. I’m not, of course, advocating terrorist action, but perhaps the guerrilla tactics proposed by Radu, or at least sniper tactics. You’re right, Christian, to say that a sniper doesn’t win a war, but the sniper’s effort is useful in making resistance visible and inflicting a symbolic blow on the enemy. And -to swap the cumbersome military metaphors for the terminology of medicine- the work of the artist can function as a vaccine, inoculating an organism with debilitated strains of a virus in order to trigger the production of antibodies. The vaccine may or may not work, and even if it does work it may take some time to produce appreciable results, but at least, as Sancho Panza says at one point to Quixote, ‘Let them not take from us the glory of the attempt.’ [Incidentally, I have this quote fresh in my mind because it has been chosen by Mariona Fernández, director of SCAN, to support the convening of this new event.]

In other words, there are images that transform lives, and images that can even change the course of history. If not, why would governments and the military censor the free work of photojournalists? Photography has always questioned itself about its capacity to impinge on reality. I remember an observation of Bertolt Brecht’s to the effect that photography could show us the façades of the Krupp factories without telling us anything about the conditions of exploitation that existed inside them, the interpretation being that photography doesn’t fall within the discourse of important things. Meanwhile, however, Heartfield and Renau were rousing the spirit of the masses with their photomontages, and groups such as the Arbeiter Fotografie in Germany and the Photo League in the United States were producing documentary photography in the service of the workers’ struggle. These and others initiatives have not put an end to the injustices of capitalism; I don’t even know if they have helped make a better world (if you’ll pardon the expression), but they do constitute actions from the realm of photography that are not sterile.

And so, in effect, the situation has changed radically, and we end up asking ourselves: what should be done now? I place my confidence in two things. On the one hand, the creativity and tenacity of the photographers. However tough conditions get, there will always find the ingenuity to come up with responses. And on the other hand, the role of the Internet and the new technologies in allowing decentralized interpersonal communication. However restrictive the control exercised by the system may be, there will always be ways of escaping it and constructing alternatives.