The ubiquity of the image

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.