The ubiquity of the image

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!

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.