The ubiquity of the image

In order to respond to Christian’s request, let’s clarify a few points. I’d like to qualify his assertion that it all depends on the dissemination of images, not on their nature. Without denying the importance of transmission, it seems to me that the nature is crucial. I said in an earlier message that the really subversive images are the ones that are not content simply to represent things, but call into question the status of the image and the nature of representation. These are the images that have the ability to lay bare the functioning of the world of images.

Christian is right when he says that the battle is unequal. Statistically, these images are not even a drop in the ocean of visual banality. However, the power of these images should not be engaged in a frontal attack against a very much larger number of enervating images: their impact is much stronger when their action is based on guerrilla tactics. In such an approach, numerical inferiority can be offset by the force and daring of the blow. One of the best examples is the famous book Sputnik by our friend Joan, a real hammer blow to the credulous acceptance of the veracity of images. The best results are obtained by way of the old Trotskyist strategy of entryism, first infiltrating the system the better to destroy it from within. Joan did this using the distribution channels of publishing, the museum or television while dismantling their mechanisms, and it’s what Matthias Bruggmann has done by publishing his photos in a recent issue of Time magazine. It’s slipping through the gaps in the system that works best.

Even so, this strategy of trying to subvert the world of images from the inside will never succeed unless it is accompanied by a genuine education in images from an early age: something that, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t exist anywhere at the moment.

The debate is becoming more and more difficult, because we agree on the essentials. What’s left are the points that need clarifying.

Unlike Joan, I don’t produce images, so for all that I love -actually it’s more than that…- his work and his ideas, I can’t say right now how far they may be a form of resistance to the dominant imagery. It all depends on their dissemination, not on their nature. Dream: we invent a network for the transmission of images on the Net that can blue-pencil and disrupt all the conventions, clichés, stereotypes and manipulations that impose themselves on us every day. But where do we find the means?

Radu is right to say that terrorism is not a solution: the best proof is that when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, erasing those unique sublime objects from human history, they created -intentionally or not- a new image: that which bore witness to their loss. It would not be out of place to relate this to the fact that every mediatized video ‘intervention’ by Bin Laden is an event… Well, it’s been a while since he last showed himself in images. What is he ‘really’ preparing? An attack on the TGV?

One of the issues underlying our common rejection of the dominant and debilitating imagery is the question of how to reject it. Even if they’re not always convincing, the attempts to inscribe images in the urban space that fight against the spaces of advertising, occupying them, hijacking them, circumventing them, make sense. At least the sense of questioning, disrupting. I’m thinking here of the young Frenchman JR: www.jr-art.net/

But I think we have to accept that we’re doomed to be a minority. Because we have no way of blowing up the system or overturning it from within. The case of Matthias that Radu referred to is really interesting. His work is remarkable, and he has not and will not find the spaces for presenting it that it deserves because it challenges the system. We should take note.

In the history of images, for centuries now each new modality of representation has referred to -whether agreeing with or breaking with- that which preceded it. About fifteen years ago Paul Virilio marked out the field of images between ‘mental image’ (dream) and ‘instrumental image’ (what we now know as the virtual, illusions, 3D). Today, relayed by the art market, neo-pictorialisms are manifest and dominant, among others with the large, colour ‘picture’ format. That doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bath water. But…

The question of speed (Virilio again), so that the notion of time, of the change of temporality between the photograph and the digital image is essential. We have gone from the crystallization of memory to flux and beyond, to evanescence. Never before in human history have so many images been produced at the same time, there have never been so many images in circulation. At the same time, n ever before have so many pictures been destroyed so soon after their creation. This takes us back to my questions about memory: questions that start with technical data (the short reliable life of disk media, only a few years at most) and continue with the fact that the idea that ‘all’ information is ‘immediately’ accessible means that every piece of information, like every image, banishes and negates the previous one.

We are a long way from Plato’s cave and we are indeed in a state of ‘hallucination’. How do we make it known today that there are very few images of the bloody repression in Tibet? And how do we combat the iconic convention of the few we do receive, which repeat the stereotypes of demonstrations, flags being burned, and devastated, deserted streets that could have been taken somewhere else and at some other time? Photography once served to denounce, to raise awareness, sometimes to mobilize. But today?

I can only agree with two points of view expressed here. With that which says that any contemporary image is constructed by reference to pre-existing images (which is why we re-cognize them), which confirms my conviction that images have become a constituent element of our society. And, as I’ve been saying for years, with the fact that the shortcomings of our education system have produced a society of illiterates who can only take in the visuals that manipulate them.

I don’t have any solution with regard to alternative images and their dissemination or impact, but I’m convinced that the base, the real issue, is a choice of a political nature: namely, the choice of teaching children from an early age the alphabet of images, in the same way that they’re taught the alphabet of letters and words.

Christian was right to say that the iconoclast option doesn’t really exist. I would add that to be a iconoclast it’s not enough to become a terrorist: that would serve only to destroy images on order to replace them with others, because terrorists have imagery of their own. 

I share his pessimism when he doubts the possibility of ‘deactivating’ images with images, so of course it’s difficult to stop ‘the endless flow of consumption, entertainment, playing with images’. Having said that, we cannot stem the flow of images with a flow of words! Only images can confront the power of images! Now more than ever we need the production of images that are critical of the production of images. What we need is images like those of the young photographers already mentioned, Matthias Bruggmann and Robin Collyer, or those of our host Joan Fontcuberta: images whose concern is no longer with how to represent things but with the nature of the representation. What these images have in common is a questioning of iconicity, this essential and yet still so little-understood attribute that defines the image. In any photograph there is a relationship of collusion between its indexical dimension and its iconic dimension, and this connivance obscures the understanding of the image as a fabrication. By virtue of its double referent, which simultaneously takes us back to the scene photographed and the history of photography, a picture by Matthias Bruggmann functions in a different way and obliges us to consider the real complexity of the production of images. In many of his pictures, Joan Fontcuberta deliberately sets the indexical aspect and the iconic aspect in conflict: mosquitoes spattered on a windshield become constellations or macros of Yale keys become mountain ranges. There are few ways of shattering the blind faith that one might have in images.

How can we ensure that profoundly subversive images of this kind are not swamped by the mass tide? Almost everyone would agree that we live in a civilization of the image, but at the same time our schools’ curricula are still almost entirely founded on the supremacy of the written word. Our schools produce visual illiterates. So, the first priority is to inform the iconodoules!

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.

Rapidly -and because of insomnia…- a brief comment in relation to Radu’s contribution, as always both elegant and cultured. He is absolutely right to stress the extent to which our relationship to the image has for centuries been based on the way that organized religion has alternately made use of it (promotion) or forbidden it (another, ‘anti’ form of promotion). I’m afraid to say that if I had lived in the 17th century, I would have been an iconoclast. And that would have made sense. Or it would, at least, have been adopting a position.

Today, I can only be an iconoclast if I decide to become a hermit, to go and live me in an ashram in some part of Tibet not controlled by the Chinese, to cut myself off completely from everything that happens in the contemporary world. To be an iconoclast today involves, quite simply, withdrawing from the world. I well remember my stupefaction, a few years ago, on arriving in a remote village in Laos and seeing, in the one and only shop in the valley -grocery, tobacconist, restaurant, guest house, guide service, pharmacist and many other things on request- plastic bags that were obviously being sold as a rare commodity printed with the face of Leonardo di Caprio!

How can one be an iconoclast, without becoming a terrorist, when the image has become a constituent and essential element, the driving force of our society at the start of the 21st century. Malraux -of whom almost the only good thing I have to say is that he invented, in France, the now virtually moribund idea of a Ministry of Culture- claimed that the 21st century would be religious or it would not be. Andy Warhol said that everyone would have their quarter of an hour of fame -which in the age of You Tube would be equivalent to their quarter of an hour (but that’s too long…) of image. Clearly they were both right: they anticipated a world that they helped shape. And here we are, impotent in the face of the parade of images that no longer have a meaning, that are both merchandise and a summons to consume.

How can one be an iconoclast today????

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.