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.