The ubiquity of the image

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 It troubles me to find him withdrawn, dejected, pessimistic… We’ve know each other for a long time: if I’m not mistaken, since he came to Barcelona in 1978 to present the exhibition by Bernard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.

I couldn’t agree more with what Radu has just said. And I underwrite it both at an intellectual level and in practice. For example, in a recent project of mine, which has been published under the title of Landscapes without Memory (Landscapes without Memory, Aperture, New York, 2005), I created virtual images with a convincingly photorealist appearance using a topographic applications programme, a scene renderer. These kinds of software -like flight simulators, for instance- give an illusory experience of space, with all its geographical features, based on interpretations of cartographic data in the form of levels of colour, contour lines, satellite images or whatever. In other words, they transform a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional image according to the instructions of certain codes of interpretation. The programme was conceived for the purpose of providing elevations of the terrain on the basis of the input -a ‘map’- that the operator keys in to it, but I frustrate this expectation and force it to interpret an existing landscape: a Turner, a Friedrich, a Cézanne, a Weston… The programme is tricked into making a landscape out of a map that in reality was already a landscape. What obviously lies behind this process of recycling is that to make a landscape nowadays there is no need for any direct experience of nature: all that is needed is the experience of the existing images that have helped us arrive at the idea we have of nature. The images feed back. Vilém Flusser explained very graphically that images are screens charged with meaning that interpose themselves between us and the world. The reality remains remote and inaccessible, and we are left with no other option but to react and make do with the images, which constitute a metareality, but at least an accessible metareality. If the images in Plato’s cave were simply shadows, images have since become very complex ideological constructs: no longer the mere reflection of the world, they have now, as we have said, managed to supplant the world and leave us immersed in a state of ‘hallucination’ (Flusser dixit).

The contemporary creative arts cannot ignore this state of affairs. But there are two aspects to be considered here, or nuanced, if you like. On the one hand there is a framework of visual culture that conditions us. It has always been so, since the times of Altamira and Lascaux, and the producers of images have accepted with situation quite naturally, spontaneously cannibalizing the images handed down by their predecessors in the same way as they inherited ideas and values. The situation changes when the natural impulse to recover and transform becomes a conscious, critical act. This change has made itself felt above all since the invention of the notions of the author and originality canonized by Modernity. Think back to the 1980s, when, under the influence of the postulates of the postmodernists, photography was swept along on the effervescent tide of parody, quotation, appropriation, pastiche, copy, plagiarism… From Cindy Sherman with her Film Stills to Sherrie Levine unashamedly reproducing Walker Evans, before succumbing to the dérives of a reiterative sensationalism, the underlying gesture of facing up to the past - of facing up to the past of the images.

And this brings us back to the question of memory that preoccupies Christian. Up until the digital era, photography functioned as a ‘mirror with memory’. The future now opens up a territory of uncertainty, but the historical balance of photography is the tautological sensation of memory. This sensation has operated on two levels: as a document, as a vestige, but also as an agent that models a certain collective consciousness of the past. Many of the processes of mass communication and propaganda instrumentalize this dual principle. In an essay on the graphic treatment of the events of the 11th of September, in the journal Études Photographiques (Clément Chéroux, “Le déjà-vu du 11 septembre. Essai of intericonicité”, Études Photographic no. 20, Société Française of Photographie, Paris, June 2007) Clément Cheroux makes use of the term ‘intericonicity’ in order to explain the déjà-vu effect as a hegemonically implanted strategy. After the images of the Twin Towers wreathed in smoke, the most reproduced -and most emblematic- image of the attack and its sequels is the picture by Thomas Franklin (AP) which shows a group of firemen raising the stars and stripes over the ruins of Ground Zero. In the North American collective imaginary the shots of the towers evoked the columns of smoke from the explosions on the ships anchored in Pearl Harbour, which were also the victims of a treacherous attack. Franklin’s photo, meanwhile, invokes the denouement of that conflict and the photo by Joe Rosenthal of the group of Marines raising the US flag on the island of Iwo Jima, the conquest of which marked the overcoming of the last line of Japanese defence and thus symbolized the final victory over the enemy. The images of 11-S thus articulate its meaning through an appeal to the last great national conflict that the United States engaged in without getting its fingers burned, and with a certain consensus about a ‘just cause’. Could it be that this ‘intericonicity’ demonstrates the tendency to privilege recognition over knowledge? What is evident is that it has become a habitual resource for controlling the narration.

Interesting example, that one of Robin Collyer and his ‘semiological cosmetics’ (J.F.)!

The profusion of images is inversely proportional to their legibility. The profusion itself acts as a form of ‘noise’, in the semiotic sense of the term, that prevents us from seeing! Stripped of contents, Collyer’s ‘empty’ images become more ‘visible’ than before.

Starting out from the perception that every image appears in a world already full of images, another young artist, the Swiss-French Matthias Bruggmann, no longer satisfied with examining photography’s relationship with the real, sets out to make visible the relationship between the new image and the images that already existed before it was created.

Apparently, all of Matthias Bruggmann’s photographs belong to the category of reportage, and were taken in the field, often in very difficult conditions - Iraq, Haiti, Somalia. The ethics of photo reportage is respected: no staging, no manipulation after the shot is taken. And yet, in every instance, his image not only bears witness to the photographed instant but deliberately evokes the style of a well-known photographer or, in some cases, makes direct reference to a familiar image. In the case of this image of Chernobyl, made in 2006, a confrontation between two drunks outside a bar -a frequent occurrence in a place where alcoholism is endemic- is photographed in a way that resorts without hesitation to the celebrated mises-en-scène of Jeff Wall. By inverting the relations, the real scene invokes the fiction of the mise-en-scène. Bruggmann thus deconstructs the myth of a photography that would offer direct contact with the real and reminds us that every photograph has a double referent: that of its subject and that of the world of the images that have preceded it.

As always, Joan is exaggerating, incurable agitator who ends up being right… It’s quite clear that we discovered the images by Robin Collyer at the same time. The difference is that I don’t read them the same way he does: what is erased from the images is ‘only’ the text. It is still there, aesthetic for some, absurd for others, this construction of ‘places’ -because they are not spaces- that have invaded the city, marking it, occupying it. What I find interesting is that spaces, surfaces, have been created in the city just to accommodate texts and slogans and that they end up becoming structural elements of the city.

Words still having a meaning -for how much longer?- it would not be a question of the victory of an ‘occupation’ of the city by the communication. We no longer live in a world that ‘must’ create spaces of communication under pain of breaking its economic logics. We live in, and have become dependent on, a world that is based on the image. How many of you have managed to resist the iPhone? Who is not to some degree fascinated by the possibility of instantly transmitting to others a souvenir image to remember that will be all the more quickly forgotten that it will have to be destroyed in order to conserve memory capacity. Memory, moreover, which is only of concern to us in terms of technical ‘capacity’ and not of meaning.

It seems to me that one cannot ‘deactivate’ images with other images because the critique of the images that circulate and are consumed will never have any effect unless a specific structure is created for that purpose, the endless flow of consumption, entertainment, playing with images. It would be necessary to declare war… Or it would be necessary to find a way for these critical, perhaps alternative images to be accessible to a greater number of people.

We need to reflect on what the difference between images and imagery is based on.

So: against the idolatrous cult, sacrilege! Against the vertigo of the flows of icons, critical aplomb! By way of illustration, I find myself thinking of the work of Robin Collyer, a Toronto-based artist who has made a name for himself in the fields of sculpture and photography.

In the past, when documentary photographers such as Walker Evans or William Klein engaged with an increasingly dominant urban landscape they would obsessively register images of billboards, shop signs and advertising. The city was becoming -in that term of which Barthes was so fond- the ‘empire of signs’, a realm that photography celebrated under the influence of Pop culture and the fascination with the increasingly potent presence of the mass media. Collyer’s gaze seeks to warn us against excess. His way of doing so is to offer us panoramic views of characteristic pieces of the North-American urban space, with cables criss-crossing the sky, huge advertising hoardings, shop signs, traffic signals and so on. These are humdrum, anodyne, everyday photographs, but there is always some detail in each of them that will not escape the attentive observer: the images and the texts have disappeared. In effect, the pandemonium of linguistic signs that inescapably surrounds and overwhelms us has vanished, and all that is left are the empty surfaces, dotted in places with residual graphisms and logos, but now stripped of meaning. Collyer’s digital retouching amounts to an operation of semiological cosmetic surgery, its aim being to cleanse the residential and commercial façades of the post-industrial world. With the linguistic and iconic pollution eradicated, the city returns to a pre-signic state, to the primal realm of things not yet contaminated by images, to the nakedness that is prior to semiocratic saturation. In other words, Collyer liberates the city of the authoritarianism with which all of these messages impose themselves.

What is more, his gesture is underpinned by a series of crucial questions: can we deactivate images with other images? Is the artist’s action confined to the symbolic order? Does it have a utility beyond its testimonial value? Can these one-off actions really have a prophylactic effect?

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?