The ubiquity of the image

Like Radu, I love the idea of the ‘vaccine’ proposed by Joan. And I very much like the idea of intellectual judo!

All three of us agree on the evidence of the issues, on the need for resistance that corresponds to the practices of many artists, and ask ourselves about the form that resistance might take. What we are doing here is one such form. In the 1970s and 80s, when photography, still struggling for recognition, invented the Rencontres (Arles) and festivals, it was calling for access to the Museum. It has now achieved that, with a very significant number of exhibitions in the institutions and private galleries of the contemporary art circuit. There are hundreds of photography months, weeks or fortnights around Europe, and also in countries just now emerging on the international scene - China and India, among others. Though things are not always perfect, though there is still a need for more resources, it is no longer the time -given that the quantity of images and their circulation have increased considerably- of claims and demands. This is the determining factor in taking account of images in the realm of education.

I think that one of the major issues is the urban space, the public space. To make creative images and photographs a presence in this space, without their having any utilitarian function as advertising or decoration, could certainly be regarded as an interesting form of ‘vaccine’. Quite different from what we see in the streets, in the media or on the multiple screens that surround us, they could have an alerting or warning function, play an implicitly critical role, cause surprise and provoke questioning. They could be on display in the city streets, and also -and why not?- in motorway rest areas and other places of transit. What is needed is a strategy to make alternative images accessible to the largest possible public.

A question of means, you will say. Of course; but it would be interesting to think about what could be achieved in this direction with the budget of a photography event, often so inward-looking. I’m not saying that we should get rid of the festivals (well, maybe some of them…), but such ‘events’, very often conceived with the aim of promoting the places that host them, are no longer enough. An immense outdoor exhibition, extending, for example, from Paris to Tarragona (purely at random…) would give people something to look at and think about.

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.

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!

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.