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.

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.

I don’t so much want to try to answer the questions Christian asks himself -and us- as to say something about his tone. It troubles me to find him withdrawn, dejected, pessimistic… We’ve know each other for a long time: if I’m not mistaken, since he came to Barcelona in 1978 to present the exhibition by Bernard Faucon in the Fotomania gallery. For thirty years, then, what he has done and what he has said have always struck me as very much to the point. So I am afraid that he is not a pessimist but a well-informed realist. At the same time, though, I still want to believe that we have options open to us. I may be naive, but I’m committed to possibilist optimism. I’m not, of course, advocating terrorist action, but perhaps the guerrilla tactics proposed by Radu, or at least sniper tactics. You’re right, Christian, to say that a sniper doesn’t win a war, but the sniper’s effort is useful in making resistance visible and inflicting a symbolic blow on the enemy. And -to swap the cumbersome military metaphors for the terminology of medicine- the work of the artist can function as a vaccine, inoculating an organism with debilitated strains of a virus in order to trigger the production of antibodies. The vaccine may or may not work, and even if it does work it may take some time to produce appreciable results, but at least, as Sancho Panza says at one point to Quixote, ‘Let them not take from us the glory of the attempt.’ [Incidentally, I have this quote fresh in my mind because it has been chosen by Mariona Fernández, director of SCAN, to support the convening of this new event.]

In other words, there are images that transform lives, and images that can even change the course of history. If not, why would governments and the military censor the free work of photojournalists? Photography has always questioned itself about its capacity to impinge on reality. I remember an observation of Bertolt Brecht’s to the effect that photography could show us the façades of the Krupp factories without telling us anything about the conditions of exploitation that existed inside them, the interpretation being that photography doesn’t fall within the discourse of important things. Meanwhile, however, Heartfield and Renau were rousing the spirit of the masses with their photomontages, and groups such as the Arbeiter Fotografie in Germany and the Photo League in the United States were producing documentary photography in the service of the workers’ struggle. These and others initiatives have not put an end to the injustices of capitalism; I don’t even know if they have helped make a better world (if you’ll pardon the expression), but they do constitute actions from the realm of photography that are not sterile.

And so, in effect, the situation has changed radically, and we end up asking ourselves: what should be done now? I place my confidence in two things. On the one hand, the creativity and tenacity of the photographers. However tough conditions get, there will always find the ingenuity to come up with responses. And on the other hand, the role of the Internet and the new technologies in allowing decentralized interpersonal communication. However restrictive the control exercised by the system may be, there will always be ways of escaping it and constructing alternatives.

The debate is becoming more and more difficult, because we agree on the essentials. What’s left are the points that need clarifying.

Unlike Joan, I don’t produce images, so for all that I love -actually it’s more than that…- his work and his ideas, I can’t say right now how far they may be a form of resistance to the dominant imagery. It all depends on their dissemination, not on their nature. Dream: we invent a network for the transmission of images on the Net that can blue-pencil and disrupt all the conventions, clichés, stereotypes and manipulations that impose themselves on us every day. But where do we find the means?

Radu is right to say that terrorism is not a solution: the best proof is that when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, erasing those unique sublime objects from human history, they created -intentionally or not- a new image: that which bore witness to their loss. It would not be out of place to relate this to the fact that every mediatized video ‘intervention’ by Bin Laden is an event… Well, it’s been a while since he last showed himself in images. What is he ‘really’ preparing? An attack on the TGV?

One of the issues underlying our common rejection of the dominant and debilitating imagery is the question of how to reject it. Even if they’re not always convincing, the attempts to inscribe images in the urban space that fight against the spaces of advertising, occupying them, hijacking them, circumventing them, make sense. At least the sense of questioning, disrupting. I’m thinking here of the young Frenchman JR: www.jr-art.net/

But I think we have to accept that we’re doomed to be a minority. Because we have no way of blowing up the system or overturning it from within. The case of Matthias that Radu referred to is really interesting. His work is remarkable, and he has not and will not find the spaces for presenting it that it deserves because it challenges the system. We should take note.

In the history of images, for centuries now each new modality of representation has referred to -whether agreeing with or breaking with- that which preceded it. About fifteen years ago Paul Virilio marked out the field of images between ‘mental image’ (dream) and ‘instrumental image’ (what we now know as the virtual, illusions, 3D). Today, relayed by the art market, neo-pictorialisms are manifest and dominant, among others with the large, colour ‘picture’ format. That doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bath water. But…

The question of speed (Virilio again), so that the notion of time, of the change of temporality between the photograph and the digital image is essential. We have gone from the crystallization of memory to flux and beyond, to evanescence. Never before in human history have so many images been produced at the same time, there have never been so many images in circulation. At the same time, n ever before have so many pictures been destroyed so soon after their creation. This takes us back to my questions about memory: questions that start with technical data (the short reliable life of disk media, only a few years at most) and continue with the fact that the idea that ‘all’ information is ‘immediately’ accessible means that every piece of information, like every image, banishes and negates the previous one.

We are a long way from Plato’s cave and we are indeed in a state of ‘hallucination’. How do we make it known today that there are very few images of the bloody repression in Tibet? And how do we combat the iconic convention of the few we do receive, which repeat the stereotypes of demonstrations, flags being burned, and devastated, deserted streets that could have been taken somewhere else and at some other time? Photography once served to denounce, to raise awareness, sometimes to mobilize. But today?

I can only agree with two points of view expressed here. With that which says that any contemporary image is constructed by reference to pre-existing images (which is why we re-cognize them), which confirms my conviction that images have become a constituent element of our society. And, as I’ve been saying for years, with the fact that the shortcomings of our education system have produced a society of illiterates who can only take in the visuals that manipulate them.

I don’t have any solution with regard to alternative images and their dissemination or impact, but I’m convinced that the base, the real issue, is a choice of a political nature: namely, the choice of teaching children from an early age the alphabet of images, in the same way that they’re taught the alphabet of letters and words.