Image as an Uninhabited Place, Photography as Advocacy for an Indeterminate Territory Belén Zahera, London 2012
With regard to the nature of the photographic medium, there are two circumstances that arise and which it would be advisable to analyse. Their relevance lies in the fact that both seem to suggest a specific type of relationship with photography and, therefore, a contemporary position from which to talk, make and think about image production. In the first place, the democratization of photography, its instantaneity and the means of its distribution have contributed to transforming the world into imagery, and thus to perceiving the photographic trace everywhere. What is important here is no longer the analysis of a reality constituted by images but the condition of being prone to act indistinctly as their producer, manipulator, consumer and broadcaster. In the second place, when thinking about photography, one always gets the unnerving suspicion that it does not exist, that it, in itself, is neither anything of substance nor a concept, but a constant indication of something that has nothing to do with it in itself. This non-identification of photography with itself is the origin of numerous debates about the medium, about its being, but it may also be the departure point for thinking and making photography in another way. Far from the scepticism that these two problems – the blurriness of roles due to its constant presence and its apparent lack of ontology – could lead to, this situation does no more than demonstrate that photography is currently both a no-man’s land and an everyone’s land and that it therefore
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constitutes an uncertain yet also common space for the appearance of discourses and the production of meanings. In this sense, the position that it occupies today with regard to photographic production is inherent to a constant reflection on image. It is a double process that turns back on itself over and over again. Therefore, photography can no longer be conceived as a discipline of isolated products with specific characteristics. Photography is a process. It establishes a type of language, a relational space. Photography has become a type of thought, thought with images or in images. Precisely because its condition as a medium is subsumed to its beingspace, photography is constituted as reality in itself instead of solely representing or connecting to a world that is supposedly conceived as external to it. This status of photography undoubtedly fuzzes the traditional limits not only regarding the production/reception of images but also what we expect of them. In order to think about photography and the production of images these days it is necessary to understand, in the first place, that the roles of the photographer and the viewer, of the producer and the consumer, are constantly intermingled. And in the second place, by virtue of this convergence and through images, a series of relations with reality come into play – that reality of 79
images and of the world – which no longer advocate a re-cognition of it, but a reinvention or reassignment of meanings. These two aspects, which much of contemporary art practice has understood perfectly for a long time, continue, nevertheless, to enter into conflict with certain academic disciplines. The conflict arises when they want to provide answers instead of raising questions, to seek contexts rather than pretexts, to call a space a territory, to conceive art production in a specific time rather than suspended time or to try to discipline what should remain free. Thinking that art goes backwards and is therefore incapable of action only arises from a generalized scepticism inherited from certain types of thought. Being able to relate to reality in another way entails being able to use it, to intervene in it, and to create tools with which to rewrite it and understand it, instead of always considering it subjected to its structures. This is something that takes place every day in our societies and that artists have recently known how to defend even without realizing it. There is a scene in Beckett’s film Film that is relevant to illustrate a particular relationship with photography as material of a reality liable to be intervened by a subject within the iconoclast-iconophile binomial.
Buster Keaton, the leading character, looks at some old photographs while running his fingers over them. He recognizes and is recognized at the same time. This space-time that these images make possible is of a tactile nature in relation to the supposed indexicality of 80
photography. Caressing that surface is like entering into direct contact with what was before it. This breaking of image is the breaking of that connection between past and present, of representation and identification, a material and psychological break.
In the traditional conception, the photographic process is, in some way, linear. Reality, photographer, photograph and viewer form a species of unidirectional chain. In this context and if the previous scenes did not belong to a film, that iconoclastic act of destruction of image would never have existed in anyone’s eyes. In other words, in a process where the person contemplating the image is the last link in a chain in which every role is fixed, this action against photography is lost in oblivion. What technology has now made possible is that that assignment of roles is constantly muddled and the oft-criticized loss of indexicality of photography, owing to the possibility of its manipulation and redistribution, does nothing but add tactility to the image. So, on the one hand, we have a decentralized photographer and, on the other hand, a viewer who is equally responsible for the images that he looks at and those he also produces through some sort of contact with them, because any type of operation on an image in itself creates another, whether by manipulation of its surface, alteration of its colour, size or form, addition of elements, simple erasure or by association with other photographs. These operations are both iconoclastic actions and producers of new images. And if technology has changed something it is that all these transformations, to which every image is 81
susceptible, have in some way come about, immediately, and hence they are tossed back to the universe of images like a boomerang. These operations scratch the surface of the photographs just as Keaton did in the film. They alter that figuration, that tendency to think that photography is just a medium that carries the reflection of the world. And since everyone may act in the way that was formerly restricted to the photographer, photography becomes a space, a participatory space. So what photography offers, even before it occurs – as object – is the possibility for a community to affect reality. This way of understanding photography as a common space tells us something about the ways of doing, about how that production of images currently takes place within the sphere of art. To photograph would then mean the constant failure in the attempt to territorialize an experience. To territorialize is nothing more than to limit something, to determine it, to subject it to a system and to keep it there. Composing a shot is believed to be a way of conquering a space of reality, separating it and making it one’s own. If photographing always becomes a failed attempt, a species of unsatisfied desire, it is only because of the continual suspicion that delimiting the image is simultaneously opening up an infinite space, a nonterritory, a territory impossible to determine. To the photographer who goes out to take a piece of reality there is always a part of that experience of the shot that escapes him. And what is lacking in the photograph, that which cannot be identified, is what allows another person to relate those images, to transform them, yet again, to try to territorialize the experience of the beholder. This activity, which has become an inseparable loop, reinvents not only the images but also the supposed reality of which they were conveyors. The attempt at territorialization arises from the certainty that it is the intertextuality between images rather than the images themselves that makes it possible to produce other meanings, other discourses that are reintroduced in the world and therefore transform it. In some way, the characteristics of visuality and tactility that Benjamin attributed respectively to the image and collecting are joined, nowadays, almost inseparably, in that place of thinking in images: “property and ownership are subordinated to the tactile, and they are in relative opposition to the optical.”1 How can one make that distinction nowadays? Aren’t images as material as those collector’s objects where “the world is present, and certainly ordered […] according to surprising criterion”2? After all, aren’t they more important for what they lead to than for what they contain? In July 2011 the journal Science published an article about how we memorize information in the Internet age.3 Analyzing the results of four studies it was concluded that, when the subjects expected to be able to have future access to information, they remembered the content less, yet increased their capacity to memorize how to return to it, where to find it again. They defined, therefore, Internet as “a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves”.4 This way of knowing 1. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 2002. 2. ibid. 3. See: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745 (2012) Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips”, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745 – 14 July 2011. 4. See abstract: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745
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and remembering is not afforded exclusively by the possibility of access to the Internet but also by the huge amount of information available that it makes possible. Images are also information. It is no coincidence that in recent years the use of tools such as blogs, which are no more than a form of archive, has skyrocketed. This practice, which is not new in artistic processes, speaks of a generalized relation with images. The question does not, as is sometimes thought, lie in whether or not more images need to be created; this is constantly done. What matters is what is done with them, and this is something that art practice or investigation is very clear about. These online archives not only offer a form of memory, but also a connection between images – information – from any field, which appear connected in their supposed disconnection, often disconnected from their original context, located in their dislocation. Isn’t this the constitution of a space where there is something that is constantly being produced? What art practice does, then, is take photography as this indeterminate space that has nothing to do with what it represents, but with the location of the discourse that is the location of its appearance. This conception of images as small events is what makes possible the articulation of narratives and the construction of realities that belong to another possible world. Only if photography is accepted as a space and not as a discipline can it be understood that what shapes thinking in images is the relationship between them and not their isolated meanings as fragments of an unreachable exteriority. In this situation, the greatest harm done to photography may be the fortification of something like its photography-ness, its purposeful enclosure when discussing it or showing it in institutions. Whereas photography has been established as a thinking that advocates a space, the images shown still impose roles and relational forms in the traditional manner. Critical theory, which continues to be obsessed with adding a caption to every image, seems not to perceive that artists have long since based their practice on illustrating references. They know very well that one does not photograph only with a camera and that meanings emerge from what escapes more than from what is captured. Would it be very hazardous to say that artists are interested in history but they cannot take it seriously? Barthes said, perhaps accidentally, “Image is what I am excluded from”.5 To make and think about images always and exclusively takes place in an approximation. It is therefore not a matter of knowing their essence or the essence of what transcends them, but of surrounding them, relocating them, connecting them, rearranging them, inventing their signifiers, etc. Their materiality, as the objects of the world that they are, allows their surfaces to be altered and their meanings to be altered through appropriation, fictionalization and endless recontextualization. In this sense, photography, conceived as a type of thinking of art, establishes a non-territory that is a common place, whose limits have been erased precisely by that desire to take possession of them. Only through this device and in this space of action will we be able to imagine other worlds, not the representation of the latter but the construction of the former.
5. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, New York, 1977.
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