Online images and porcelain cats

from Metropolitan Times 2/2022

The author’s hotels – Column by Magdalena Hai

Written by VilMa MalMgren translated by toMi ristola

The fall exhibition at The Finnish Museum of Photography's K1 exhibition space dives deep into the image culture of online marketplaces

The fall 2022 exhibition at the K1exhibition space of the Finnish Museum of Photography is Learning from eBay by the American photographic artist Penelope Umbrico. The exhibition delves into the people, consumer culture and use of photographs during the internet age. The exhibition is open from October 14 2022 to February 5 2023.

Penelope Umbrico: 49,309,225 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial).

Umbrico’s exhibition is located in the new K1 exhibition space of the Finnish Museum of Photography on the lowest floor of the Kämp Galleria in the center of Helsinki. The exhibition space was opened in 2020 to accompany the museum's original exhibition space at the Cable Factory. By the K1 exhibition space you can also find the gift shop, The Object, and the museum restaurant, The Glass, which draws inspiration from Nordic cuisine. The exhibition space and restaurant together allow visitors to enjoy a comprehensive experience combining art and food.

With the K1 exhibition space, the museum wants to bring photographic art even closer to the bustle of the city center and to offer quality art experiences to an even wider audience. “Through photography, we look at the world from many angles. K1 exhibitions feature lots of international photography without forgetting Finnish photography either. We want to offer photography experiences to a large audience,” says museum director Elina Heikka.

So far, K1 has exhibited a wide range of photography art from different decades. These have included street photography by the hugely popular Vivian Maier and early magazine photos by film director Stanley Kubrick. The leading front of modern photography has been represented by the ZAZISE exhibition by South African Zanele Muholi depicting gender and racism, and the retrospective Love by the late top Finnish photographer Susanna Majuri.

Umbrico's exhibition is further evidence that the number of photographs is huge nowadays and growing exponentially. “Photographs are present in our culture more than ever,” notes Heikka.

Learning from eBay Penelope Umbrico’s exhibition consists mainly of photographs she has collected from online marketplaces. The photos people use to sell items on eBay, Craigslist or Tori.fi play an important role; few of us would buy an item without one. What do these photos tell us about people, internet culture and the current uses of photographs? “Thinking about the web as an archive is a useful tool for me Umbrico, who started her career in the visual arts, began working with online images in the late 1990s as the internet to make a body of work. I’m using the web as an archive grew more common. During her career, she has worked with images from online marketplaces as well as photos uploaded of humanity, as kind of an index of who we are,” to the image sharing site Flickr. Her series Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (2006- ) consists of thousands of almost identical photos of sunsets on Flickr. The artist is interested in PENELOPE UMBRICO how our uploaded photos start to resemble each other, as well as what sort of communal dimensions this entails. Umbrico’s methods resemble that of an archivist: she examines the online image streams and compiles the images she finds into different series. For her, online images form a sort of archive that serves as the basis of her work and against which modern culture is mirrored. “Thinking about the web as an archive is a useful tool for me to make a body of work. I’m using the web as an archive of humanity, as kind of an index of who we are,” says Umbrico. Umbrico’s interest in image streams from sites such as eBay, Tori.fi and Craigslist is not very common. The images found on online marketplaces are not usually seen as having any artistic value; their main function is to sell an item. What appeals to the artist in

these seemingly random, low-quality images? “The same way that photography in general is kind of an index, like all the photographs ever taken are a kind of archive of who we are as human beings. Any image online is equally that,” Umbrico says.

On the other hand, these images can be much richer in meaning than it first seems. The photos in the series TVs from Craigslist at the exhibition are from television ads downloaded by Umbrico from Craigslist. At first sight, the images are strikingly simple. Often the low-quality photos portray only a TV, but on closer inspection they reveal something intimate and personal about the photographers themselves. You might see a reflection on the TV screen of the photographer and the room in which the photo was taken. For Umbrico, these reflections offer access into private homes. “I specifically look for things in those contexts that will reveal a certain kind of domestic intimacy. For example, TVs are often placed in people’s bedrooms, so we get a reflection of their bed. There is something about being invited in to these very private, intimate spaces, willingly.”

While the images of televisions for sale reveal something about the photographers, they also function as a window into the history of the development of camera technology. Photos from the early 2000s have poor resolution and the reflections on the TV screens are blurry. As technology has developed, reflections have grown in size and television screens have become flatter. Nowadays, smartphone cameras enable photos to be taken without a flash even if it’s dark indoors. The resolution of the photographs is higher, which makes

the images more detailed. This in turn allows for a better peek into the photographers’ rooms. Ceramic cats as an embodiment of emotions The final room of the exhibition has a surprise in store for the visitor. The room is full of white ceramic cats of different sizes sitting next to each other on top of small parcels. Cute cat figurines that resemble each other have been ordered from online marketplaces in Finland and the US. They sit on top of the mail parcels they were delivered in. Online marketplaces are full of ads for used cat figurines. Often sellers of cat figurines photograph Penelope Umbrico: Used Same White Ceramic Cats - eBay, 2014–2022 them from different angles and include in their ads text such as: “Take this cute cat home, it will warm up your life.” Even though ceramic cats cannot feel emotions or love us back, we project all sorts of emotions on them. “The cat figure is just a piece of clay; it has no emotional anything. And yet people project all this emotion onto it. But I’ve been thinking that actually that’s real. That cat really does have emotion because I’m projecting this emotion on it,” says Umbrico. A group of white ceramic cats resembling each other makes the viewer think about people’s interaction in the internet age on a wider scale. For Umbrico, cats are a manifestation of internet culture. They are everywhere, as gifs, videos and emojis. Cat emojis, videos and gifs represent us and convey emotions on social media and various instant messaging apps. Few of us have been able to avoid the influx of cats. s