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.

I entirely agree with Joan. Including our responsibilities, which I absolutely accept, in our failure, after thirty years, to manage to establish a pedagogy of the image from the first years of schooling on. I ought to add that while I love teaching, and my -privileged- students are stimulating, exceptional, dynamic, I sometimes have doubts: what is the underlying significance of an education that trains photographers at a time when there are too many professional photographers and where everyone is producing and circulating images? Certainly to give them access to tools for understanding the history of the image and help them understand the need for critical thought in the process of developing their projects. And it works not too badly, even if they are a very small minority.

It’s quite clear that at a time when the funds allocated to culture and education are everywhere in significant decline, when financial flows -which direct the flow of images- are concentrating more and more on communication, consumption and entertainment the answer is not simple and guerrilla warfare is difficult to structure.

The earlier proposal regarding the public space might be an element, but it needs to be more complex, enriched by a genuinely educational action.

This is not really entryism -sorry, Radu- but I think we should be trying to enhance our ability to use the tool, the tools of ‘the enemy’. As someone who has tried for years to convince television channels of the editorial uses of photography, and has put on programmes (very minority: ARTE) that dealt with the image, I am well aware that we -definitely a minority- are marked by the Sisyphus syndrome…

Even so -and this proves that I’m still optimistic- I wonder if we couldn’t manage to invent, on the Internet, a site dedicated to the teaching of the image, with links to other sites we think are interesting, as a tool for teachers, a place of knowledge -however superficial- for the young. I think it can be conceived as something both serious and fun. One way of treating the Web as a counter-power…

Perhaps it’s because the light is coming back with the promise of spring.

‘The People have the power’ -  Patti Smith

Joan’s comment seems to me to be essential. The obliteration of a clear distinction between the producers and the consumers of images changes the whole deal. What characterizes the present situation is not only globalization, with the increasing prevalence and uniformity of images, but a new equilibrium, which for the moment, it must be said, is fairly unstable… With the new technologies, the fall in the price of digital cameras and the proliferation of cell phones, anyone can make images. With the appearance of sites like Flikr, which has been enriched with 3,739 images in the last minute, or YouTube, everyone can distribute images on a global scale. The ubiquity of the image is matched by the ubiquity of the makers of images. The system no longer has a monopoly!

But for the time being it is confusion that reigns. Disoriented by an evolution that has gone far too fast, many professionals are now manifesting defensively corporatist reflexes and seeking to bolt the doors on a market that is beyond their control. Disconcerted, some of the schools that train professional image-makers have been known to take refuge in a retrograde technicism. Completely at sea, public education is unable to adapt to a civilization of the image and is the prisoner of a system than for all practical purposes is structured on the text. As consumers, students find themselves immersed in a flood of images that they often take at face value because they are unable to decode them, and as producers they are equipped with the tools of which they have at best arrived at a certain technical mastery, but no real reflection on content. Everybody seems to have forgotten the famous sentence of Moholy-Nagy who said that “the illiterate of the future will be person ignorant of the use of the camera”. Let’s replace the word ‘camera’ with the more general term ‘image’ and pass on the message to the educational decision-makers!

Joan is right when he says that my tone is pessimistic… Maybe it’s the time, which is not very funny, either politically or in terms of view of global economic or aesthetic movements and the dominance of the market, rampant mediocrity, consumption replacing knowledge and communication ousting information that go with it.

I’m glad he feels that in the realm of the image in the last thirty years I have actually achieved a certain number of acts, appearances, disruptions of the routine that is imposing itself. All of this is in parallel, to some extent, with what Joan has produced as an artist. There has been, right from the start, a resistance to the norms for fixing the play of images and their appropriation by the viewer. Thirty years is rather a long time, and I still find it hard to understand the editors of prestigious magazines, who don’t even want to pay what it costs to produce an images, who say to us: ‘It’s great, but it’s not for our readers,’ and go on to add: ‘Our readers wouldn’t understand!’

But I am optimistic! The proof is that I write a column every week and publish the occasional portfolio in Internazionale in Italy. And that I ‘publish’ on the Internet (http://www.actuphoto.com/) an unlikely dialogue and daily journal with the Chinese photographer Aniu, who sends me a self-portrait every day to which I respond with a text. And that I’m taking part in the present dialogue. And that I still teach bright young people, give lectures, put on exhibitions and organize books.

I am optimistic because I continue to do things, to shake up ideas and images, to write in order to try to think what is happening to us in this maelstrom of ‘visuals’ that is all around us.

I am not a creator of images, just a ‘middleman’ between those who make them and those who receive them. My only real reason for being optimistic comes from seeing that a lot of young people today still have a desire to work through photography with the state of the world in which they live. Not only do they offer me new discoveries, they also manifest a desire to change the world, while being fully aware that photography can’t do it on its own.

They are a proposition for the future, both when they document -take a look at the exemplary latest works by the three World Press Photo prize-winners from the VU agency at http://www.agencevu.com/, and those of others who didn’t win a prize, like Steeve Junker or Kosuke- and when artists use the image -as Joan does, for example- to take a stand on global issues. Terrorism, for example. Impertinence and derision are as much to the point as investigative journalism.

These are the people, the creators in different modalities, who oblige me to be optimistic!

It doesn’t really matter that their distribution is limited, that it can’t compare with the giants of the transmission. It may not be so important.

We are left with two basic questions: how can we introduce an education in the reading of images from the early years of schooling on, and what are we capable of inventing, on the Internet, to resist the dominant imagery?

A guerrilla, even if he or she is wrong, is of necessity an optimist. And I see myself, more than ever, as a guerrilla…

I am, of course, in overall agreement with Radu’s remarks. But I am less optimistic than him, which is not to say that I’ve given up… All the more so because I have always tried to wage this kind of ‘guerrilla warfare’ against the dominant imagery, clichés and stereotypes.

The fact that at Libération between 1981 and 1986 we atypically published artists as diverse as Raymond Depardon and Sophie Calle, that we have thrown into crisis the modality of the portrait or fashion imagery, has gained us readers. The fact that the Agence VU and its gallery have for twenty years now disseminated, published, exhibited and circulates unconventional points of view is a contribution to this resistance to the standard and dominant flow, as is the publication in the current issue of the Italian weekly Internazionale of a portfolio of work by the Indian artist Dayanita Singh.

But I have never been convinced by the Trotskyist strategy of entryism (actually, I was more Maoist…), an illusion that was tragically terminated with a an ice pick.

Given that we have no real means of acting on or intervening in the dominant vectors of the image, which are controlled by ever greater and more concentrated financial powers, it seems to me that we are condemned to remain a minority.

Maybe we ought to accept this, keep on resisting and, most importantly, continue to call for training, for education in how to read and understand images. In order for there to be fewer visual illiterates.

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.