More than ten years ago now I asked the students at the school of applied arts in Vevey to count the number of images that they saw on their way from the school to the station, a five-minute walk away. The average was approximately 50 images, in an only moderately commercial part of a small town. How many images would they have seen in a big city?
In my opinion, the battle with images is not looming in front of us, we are right in the middle of it, if not already in the process of losing it. It is not just the physical proliferation of the images that constitute the iconosphere, but also the enormous extension of the limits of what it is possible -and desirable- to show. We need only compare Roger Fenton’s images of war with the famous image of the severed hand photographed by Todd Maisel on September 11 to see how far we have travelled. Images have infiltrated everywhere, and no space, not even the most intimate, is entirely safe from them. For quite a number of years now the emancipation of the adolescent has ritually commenced with a freely consented invasion of the universe of their childhood bedroom by images of singers, film stars and rappers. The theologians at the Council of Nicaea in 787 drew a distinction between proskynesis, the reverence that believers could show to religious images and latria, the adoration that was reserved for God. Today, this distinction no longer holds, and images of all kinds, from those of Che Guevara to those of Angelina Jolie, are adored by their respective devotees.
Are we at the beginning of a period of idolatry?
Joan’s point of view and his questions are far from apocalyptic. And what he is talking about takes us not into the realms of science-fiction but into a new reality of the contemporary world - a world in which the function and the role of the image are radically different from that which formed the basis, over a century and half, of our way of looking and seeing. The most radical change is structural: we have moved from the time of the photograph to the time of the image. And while photography was a way of representing, questioning or describing the world by holding it at a distance, the image has become one of the constitutive elements of the society in which we live and evolve. In much the same degree, ultimately, as financial flows or speculation in oil or other raw materials futures. We are starting this dialogue at a time when the euro ‘is worth’ one and a half US dollars; at a time when oil ‘is worth’ over a hundred dollars a barrel; at a time when Getty Images, which has been one of the key players in the photography market for the last twenty years has just been bought over by an investment fund for two billion dollars. We live from now on in a world in which the rules of economics have been blown apart, in which value -with the help of speculation- is more virtual before than ‘real’ or material. It is in this world that the challenges of the image develop and assert themselves. These images are at the same time a commercial venture -animated images more than still images- and the ground, by reason of the bankruptcy of the press and print in general, over which spectacular economic battles are fought.
I believe it is time -as we continue to regard the flood of images that surrounds us and sweeps us before it in terms of our ‘old’ culture of consumers of photography- to realize that we are witnessing a change of period, perhaps a change of culture. It is also time to realize that we have never seen photographs, but only their formalization, their utilization, their participation in a point of view which was not necessarily the photographer’s. If we want to resist because we feel that the relationship to the real has to continue to be grounded in physical experience, it seems to me that we ought at the same time to acknowledge that photography is an exceptional tool for relating to the real, and that it is by nature devoid of truth, and to defend the challenges facing what is happening today: with the digital, with the possibility for anyone at all to broadcast their images, the world is becoming more virtual than real. And speed has become the supreme value. Everything, right now: an old dream that is driving us toward catastrophe. Virilio saw it clearly, more than twenty years ago. And the games the politicians play with the image prove him right today.
There is a form of resistance, but one that has failed to find its place in society: that of those photographers who continue to assert that photography is a valid mode of exploration of the real. It may be that the only form of resistance, if we were capable of it, would be to slow things down, to affirm our rejection of king speed.
One of the recurrent story lines on the horizons of science-fiction is the confrontation between humans and machines. Computers, robots or other bits of state-of-the-art technology end up rebelling against their creators. For the present, though, what we are suffering is not so much an invasion of machines as an invasion of images: images that do not confine themselves to passively constituting our landscape -in other words, they are not the innocuous components of what the theorists call the ‘iconosphere’- but are actively belligerent toward us. The mise en scène of the battle that looms over us has plenty of parallels with those science-fiction stories: in the beginning, images were few and costly, and were our loyal servants, but then they began to proliferate to excess and we humans ended up having to submit to them. It would seem that, beyond functioning as supports for contents or as substitutes for actual physical things, images have attained autonomous consciousness and, like those sci-fi rebel machines, exercise a decisive capacity to act and affect our lives. Up to the industrial era, we exploited images; in the post-industrial era the images are exploiting us: they impose models of conduct, they condition experiences and points of view, they usurp our personality…
If this strikes you not as a wildly apocalyptic exaggeration but a plausible reading of the current situation, allow me to turn directly to the issues that most concern me: is it the omnipresence of images that makes them a threat? Is it only certain ‘corrupt’ uses that need to be stamped out? And most important of all: how can we establish effective strategies of resistance?
Where would you like to start?
