Forget Photography

Front matter

Andrew Dewdney

Goldsmiths Press

Copyright © 2021 Goldsmiths Press

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

1 Forget Photography 2 Zombie Photography

Part Il

Part III 7 The Image afterPhotography 8 The Politics of the Image

Bibliography Notes Index

2.1

2.2

5.1

5.2

6.1

6.2

7.1

7.2

8.1

8.2

9.1

Figures

War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City. May 2019. Author. War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City. May 2019. Author. Bruno Latour, The Dichotomies of the Modern.

The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, Tate Modern, London. November 2016. Author.

Thomas Ruff, Tripe | Ruff, the Photography Centre, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. January 2019. Author.

Penelope Umbrico, 171 Clouds from the V&A Online Collection, 1630-1885, Modern Media Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. January 2019»Author.

Video screen, Westfield Shopping Centre, Bondi Junction, Sydney. 2019. Author.

Digital model Lil Miquela Sousa, screenshot, thecut.com, The New Yorker.

Installation view of the Photographers’ Gallery's Media Wall, featuring Indeterminate Objects (Classrooms) by Wendy McMurdo.2017. Image © Kate Elliot.

Promotional image for Born in 1987: The Animated GIF The Photographers’ Gallery, London. 2012. Courtesy the Photographers’ Gallery.

The dimensions of the socio-technical image assemblage. 2021. Author.

The intersecting fields of the networked image. 2021. Author.

193 195

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible, nor conceived, without having a job at London South Bank University (LSBU) for the last twenty years, a highly supportive and convivial institution at the Elephant and Castle, retaining much of its former polytechnic character and ethos. For the first seven years I was employed in managing a growing portfolio of undergraduate digital media courses in what was a second wave of such expansion in higher education in the UK, which afforded me no time for sustained scholarship. During 2005, by extending my working day and through a creative collaboration with Peter Ride, we were able to.produce The New Media Handbook for Routledge in 2006, which reignited my interest in academic study. There is a much longer history to my interest in what was once the medium of photography and how it could be mobilized, dating back to my time at the Cockpit Arts Workshop, The Watershed Media Centre in Bristol and at Newport School of Art and. Design. Over my years at LSBU I have had the support and encouragement of many serious scholars in social science and media sociology, in particular Jeffrey Weeks and Janet Holland. In its most recent incarnation, the School of Arts and Creative Industries, under the stewardship of Janet Jones, has provided me with a safe haven in which to pursue more focused research. Phil Hammond has been a stalwart supporter of humanities research in an otherwise technocratic institution and I would like to thank him for his steady hand. More recently, Geoff Cox and Elena Marchevska, colleagues whose opinions I value and judgements I trust, have provided me with strong support. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues Daniel Alexander, Adam Brown and Simon Terrill for serious and playful discussions held in offices, the pub and the Art Café, speculating on the future and fate of photography education. In 2007, I was fortunate to be the recipient of a successful Arts and Humanities Research Council research award in collaboration with Tate Britain, entitled Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture, and thus began a long and fruitful intellectual friendship with Victoria Walsh, whose sharp and fearless mind has helped me ever since, including a critical reading of the original book proposal.

xii | Acknowledgements

In 2012, I cofounded the Centre for the Study of the Network Image (CSNI) at LSBU with Katrina Sluis and Daniel Rubinstein, who shared an office next to mine in Borough Road. For a time we seemed to be in constant discussion and argument about photography education and the state of photography in general and that period remains seminal to this project. Annet Dekker arrived as the first postdoctoral administrator of CSNI and joined us as a co-director. Since then I have continued to work with Annet in joint supervision of our small group of research students and value her expertise, clear thinking and direct way of putting things. Annet also provided a critical commentary on the original book proposal, which helped my thinking. Working in the research environment of CSNI has also had a hand in shaping this book and I would like to acknowledge the contributions of all of my research students to my thinking, in particular Ioanna Zouli, Nicolas Malevé, Gaia Tedone; Lozana Rossenova, Carolyn Defrin, Nicola Baird, Jeannette Ginslov, and more recently Victoria Ivanova, Qian Xiao, Rosie Hermon and Theresa Kneppers, all of whose research topics border upon my own,

Parts of the book have had lecture outings. In particular, Chapter 5 on photography and modernism owes much to joint conference papers written with Victoria Walsh, while the key motif of the book, Chapter 2 on zombie photography, was refined over three lecture outings over a period of five years. I first presented the idea to a group of archivists and conservationists gathered at a Norwegian Arts Council Conference in Oslo in 2014, where the digitisation of photographic collections was under discussion and where] met Nina Lager Vestberg and Anna Dahlgren, who took a lively interest in my thinking. Subsequently I gave a shorter version of the zombie photography lecture at the 2015 Annual Conference of the UK Association of Photographers in Higher Education at Nottingham University. The last outing of zombie photography prior to writing the book was at a research seminar held by the Post-Photographic Research Project, directed by Wolfgang Briickle at the Hochschule Luzern - Design & Kunst in 2019. During the latter stages of writing I was extremely lucky that the Post-Photography Research reading group of Katrina Sluis and Wolfgang Briickle, together with Doris Gassert and Marco de Mutiis, both from FotoMuseum Winterthur, read the first two chapters and gave me encouraging critical feedback at a Zoom meeting.

Acknowledgements | xiii

In 2019, Goldsmiths Press accepted my proposal and I am deeply grateful to Sarah Kember for the risk she took and to the editorial board for endorsing it. Since finishing a first draft, Susan Kelly has been most helpful and responsive as the commissioning editor and I am more than grateful to Dan Shutt for editing the manuscript and tolerating my innumeracy when it comes to dates. Goldsmiths would not have taken it on, I think, ifit were not for the supportive critical reviews provided by Ben Burbridge and Katrina Sluis, whose help in seeing the book’s flaws has been invaluable. Their commentary has proved a trusted guide in clarifying the arguments over the course of revising the book during the Covid pandemic. I extend a particular debt of gratitude to Katrina Sluis, who has been so very generous in the level of detailed commentary on the entire manuscript and for providing constant encouragement. I would also like toacknowledge the long-term support of Chris Miller and Martin Lister,old friends on whom in the early ‘wilderness’ days of writing I pressed first drafts and who responded generously in reading, commenting and generally believing in me and the project. I would also like to thank Robin Marriner for taking the time to read the first three chapters and whose email responses have led to further interesting discussions about theoretical writing and art school education. I would also like tothank Stephen Wilson, who I reached out to on Max Dewdney’s instigation and who read Chapter 2 on zombie photography, giving me yet another insightful and positive response.

Writing the book has preoccupied my waking hours for over a year and it could not have been sustained without the tolerance, nurture and love of my lifelong partner Catherine, who has maintained and ordered the world around me during this indulgence, keeping me connected to my children Alice and Max, their partners Jeremy and Helen and our four grandchildren in addition to discussing my daily progress over supper. The book is the outcome of a rich network of love, encouragement and critical interest for which I am truly grateful.

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing fromthem names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of LouisBonaparte, 1852 (MECW 11), pp. 103-106.

‘Theoretical production, like material production; Baudrillard wrote, ‘loses its determinacy and begins to turn around itself, slipping en abyme towards a reality that cannot be found’ Sylvere Lotringer. 2007. ‘Exterminating Angel, introduction to Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

The book argues that if we wish to understand the politics of representation in the post-photographic era, or, more specifically, the image under the conditions of capitalist, computational reproduction, there is a necessary prerequisite, and*that is the need to ‘forget photography: The very term photography is a barrier to understanding the altered state of the default visual image. The central paradox this book explores is that at the moment of photography’s technical replacement by the screen, algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate like never before. Photography is everywhere, but not as we have known it; for some time it has been an undead, a zombie, in which the established language, thinking, meanings and values of photography now stand as an obstacle to grasping the new condition. The current mode of image production and circulation turns visual representation onits head and with itis changing how we think about humanness and the world. The image has fled its analogue forms and now haunts the opaque intimacy of the screen and its algorithmic abstractions, creating new questions of how to understand visual meaning, indeed all meaning, in computational and network culture. But, as this book takes up, it also bequeaths us the question of how to regard photography’s afterlife. Forgetting photography is not a simple injunction, made at the outset in order to move on to accounts of photography’s replacement by the computational networked image. True, the computational networked image is now the default of reproduction and the visual in culture and therefore is the new locus for understanding the power and agency of images. However, the afterlife of photography, residual as it might technically be, also maintains a powerful representational hold on culture and upon reality, which it is important to understand in relation to the new conditions. It is not a question of one medium superseding another, in a teleological version of technical development, nor even*finally a question of the remediation of the medium of photography by computing. Both exist in the same temporal space and the effort is to understand the conditions that maintain their state and the relations between them.

Forgetting photography is a strategy to reveal the redundant contemporaneity! of the photographic constellation and the cultural immobility of its epicentre. Forgetting photography attempts to put photography into historical perspective and‘to liberate the image from these historic shackles, forged by art history and photographic theory. More importantly, perhaps, forgetting photography also entails rejecting the frame of reality it prescribed and delineated and in doing so opens up other relationships between bodies, times, events, materials, memory, representation and the image. Forgetting photography attempts to develop a systematic method for revealing the limits and prescriptions of thinking with photography, which no amount of revisionism of post-photographic theory can get beyond. The world urgently needs to unthink photography” and go beyond it in order to understand the present constitution of the image as well as the reality and world it has shown and continues to show. Forgetting photography will require a different way of organising knowledge about the visual in culture involving crossing different knowledges of visual culture, science, technologies and mediums. It will also involve thinking differently about routine and creative labour and its knowledge practices within the institutions and organisation of visual reproduction and will therefore inescapably entail politics.

The need to forget photography is now overdue and the need to start somewhere else is urgent if we are to understand current ways of seeing and the reality they conjure up. Forgetting photography can be understood as looking back on photography and laying to rest its place in the culture of twentieth-century industrial capitalism. It can also be understood as the making of a new clearing from which we can look at the present and the interconnections between finance capitalism, proxy wars fought for resources, ecological damage and the new default structures and apparatuses of knowledge and communication with which we think and act. The book is a long argument about forgetting photography and a series of essays about how and where to start building a practically useful and politically engaged different account of the part played by technologies in reproducing reality. The choice between continuing to resuscitate photography in various post-embraces and forgetting its stark. Forgetting is not easy, not least because it is tied to remembering; but the starting point for this enquiry is an insistence that a decisive break with photography’s mode of being, thinking and language is required. Forgetting photography is the hypothesis upon which,the»book is based and forms the methodological approach in setting out not only why we need to forget photography but in practice how it might be done and what new vistas and approaches it affords. Forgetting photography as we will see has a methodological logic which is polemical, transdisciplinary and transactional in pursuing a problem across intellectual fields and institutional settings and can become a practical way of thinking and doing things. Forgetting photography ultimately seeks to align a knowledge of the image in culture with all progressive struggles for emancipation.

The title of this book is as serious as it is playful and is a direct reference to Jean Baudrillard’s (in)famous essay Forget Foucault (2007) originally published in 1977, in which Baudrillard declares Foucault’s writing to be ‘too perfect’ in giving an account of what it proposes. Baudrillard argues that as a discourse of power, no longer based on a despotic or catastrophic architecture, Foucault’s writing is a seamless, meticulous unfolding of a narrative without origin, in which power ‘seeps through the whole porous networks of the social, the mental and of bodies infinitesimally modulating the technologies of power’ (2007, p. 29). In short, Baudrillard sees Foucault’s discourse as a mirror of the powers it describes and cannot be taken as a discourse of truth, but a mythic discourse, which has no illusions about the effect of the truth it produces. The polemic advanced over the course of this book is that photography, in its analogic perfection, like Foucault’s writing, has been ‘too perfect’ and, in the same manner as Foucault’s discourse of power, photography reinforces objectivity and ensures the reality principle. Foucault’s too-perfect discourse maintains the principle of objective reality in the same manner as photography, through its exactitude, whereas Baudrillard argued that both power and reality have been disseminated and dissolved by simulation, creating a state of hyper-reality.

The book takes on a number of practical and personal challenges of different scales in order to articulate a different way of thinking about photography, the image and the visual world in networked culture. In making this attempt the biggest challenge and indeed the goal has been to overcome the stubborn, familiar and ingrained lexicon of photography and its visual taxonomy. This is an important task to attempt, not because photography is at stake, but because, more importantly, reality is at stake. This is the existential and affective*reality of all human beings on the planet, who make their own lives, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Such circumstances“are given, transmitted from the past and present in the material organisation of the ceaseless forces of accumulation and labour upon which national states, their laws, institutions, military and civil societies have been erected and continue to be maintained. Photography takes part in these arrangements and has prescribed and shaped a representational reality of the twentieth century, a reality that can and needs to be questioned. More to the point is that the image of reality bequeathed by twentieth-century photography was not only ideological and cruel, but no longer matches the conditions of representation, and conceals the conditions of the twenty-first century. The photographic image remains the cultural default for reality, even though the systemic default of the visual image has moved to a nonrepresentational system. The consequence is that the subjective, social and scientific reality that photography encodes seriously occludes the emergent reality of computation and misses the greater present chaos of reality. This is the reality of the interrelationships between human and other-than-human things, what Bruno Latour and others have called hybrids and in other ways what Jean

Baudrillard has called simulation and hyper-reality.’ It is also the reality of social democratic nation states colluding with capitalism in forms of systemic global oppression in which broadcast media has little or no insight into its own complicity. It is, finally, a reality of the paradoxical present, which, as will be seen, shapes the argument of forgetting photography.

Recalibrating the Visual

One of the main problems the book examines is that photography, as it is still known, takes part in reproducing the reality of the everyday life world whilst appearing to stand apart as a representation in different registers of that reality. In addition, on a common-sense view the photographic image is taken as synonymous with the spontaneous bodily reflex of sight, as natural seeing, and yet the photograph is far from natural; it is overwhelmingly a graphic artifice, a two-dimensional pictorial code of symbolic communication. Photography as part of the reproduction of ways of seeing has, over the course of the twentieth century, become naturalised in the everyday life world as a transparent window on reality, as well as being adopted as a scientific measure and an aesthetic expression. Photography also reproduces itself unknowingly as the unity which is photography. Beyond the practices of everyday life, the production of social and scientific knowledge related to reproduction is formalised at a tertiary level of commercial, state and educational research, in which photography is also involved. Disentangling ideas about photography, ways of seeing and the visual in culture is one of the tasks set out in what follows. The visual in Western culture contains a paradox in which human seeing is both an evolutionary property of the eye and brain as well as something humans collectively construct. The human infant’s adjustment to seeing the world is therefore biological and cultural. Seeing is both prewired and learnt. Reality is overwhelmingly remade through routine habits of thought and action within the given conditions of the everyday life world. Jacques Ranciére’s idea of ‘the distribution of the sensible”* is a more abstract and political way of putting this (2004, p. 12). The ways in which photography is practised and thought about are also a routine and a habit. The immediate human life world is shaped and constrained by complex interactions of global geo-political and bio-political forces and complexity is what we need to contend with. Photography, as it continues to be understood, takes part in these larger systems of relations of power. Individuals creatively struggle to make sense of their life world and to realise and channel agency in which common ways of seeing are involved; to change the world is to see differently. The formalisation of knowledge produced through disciplinary institutions is selectively distributed in culture through commercial application, compulsory education and broadcast and online media. In the case of photography its knowledge domain is constituted and distributed primarily through practice and education. The relationship between the everyday and formal knowledge transmission about the changes taking place in visual culture needs questioning and challenging, not only from the position of peer review but from the politics of everyday life, because it is an alliance which extends the afterlife of photography.

If photography is no longer photography, then what is it we are doing on our smart phones, cameras and computers, ,uploading, scrolling, swiping, saving, sharing and printing? Image making has become inherent to life itself. If this is not photography, then what is it? We will see that a number of new terms have come to»the’aid of the photographic image to help describe its current state, such as the technical, unfettered, fluid, soft, operational, machinic, non-human and, the preferred term here, the networked image. These adjectives are reached for to describe what has been called expanded photography on the one hand, and the computational or algorithmic image on the other. Such linguistic qualifiers of photography betoken, the central fact that whatever it has been has changed and that such a situation throws us back upon language as the means by which the visual image has to be rethought. The apprehension of the photographic image cannot easily be divorced from the language used to conceive it and reinforces an understanding that images have a social ontology. The relationship between the image and word and more abstractly the presence of the image in thought through language comes into contention with ideas about the primacy of vision and the acknowledged ascendency of the visual in culture since the second half of the twentieth century, when photography, film and television were seen to be predominant. Popular or mass media have been studied as ‘languagelike; even up to and including new media (Manovich 2001), in which a science of signs, claimed, with justification, increasing dominion over how meaning operated in visual images. Images were taken as texts to be decoded and thus foregrounded a literary tradition and the centrality of the logos in cultural analysis. Images were also recognised to be part of the psycho-social world, circulating in the unconscious, as much as in media culture, and provided fertile ground for thinking photography in terms of psychoanalysis and semiology (Burgin 1982). Now, the mathematical logic of the computational image seriously disrupts the semiological analysis of the photograph and calls for a new way of understanding the nonrepresentational basis of the image and the new practices it invokes. And yet the photographic image is still, for the most part, received in culture as a representational system of meaning. It is representation, rather than photography, that needs critical attention and the effort to separate the two is part of making the space to consider visual representation in its transmedial and multimodal forms.

The language used to interpret the photographic image and the idea of a photographic language are deeply entwined and rooted in Western philosophical thought and, in the dominant representational mode and its allied ways of seeing, language isdeeply embedded and inextricably linked to the visual image. One of the unavoidable problems encountered in attempting to see the historical limits of the language of photography is therefore how to. move beyond it - how in effect to account for visuality and representation in common culture in ways which connect the new technical condition of the image with the political traditions of critical analysis and cultural activism. It is still the case that progressive identity politics as well as the environmental activist movement continue to employ the photographic image in representational terms, in contrast to the neo-fascists, who have learnt to ‘successfully’ exploit network communication as fake news and alternative facts. Recently published academic work points to the fact that the massification of photography is being rethought and recalibrated primarily in relationship to the functions of technology. Such projects inevitably test the boundaries of concepts and language within which newer technologies of vision are accounted for. As yet the language of vision relies on the limited lexicon of the key terms seeing, image, picture and photograph, in themselves complex abstractions, to do a great deal of work in accounting for such major changes, and which are being qualified even more in relationship to technologies of measure and scale (Dvorak and Parikka 2021). As a qualification to the current emphasis upon technologies of vision, W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us that ‘The image never appears except in some medium or other, but it is also what transcends media, what can be transferred from one medium to another’ (2005, p. 16). The image then is as much a mental process as it is a material arrangement. To paraphrase Mitchell, a photograph is something you can frame and hang on a wall, but the photographic image is what appears in a photograph and, I would add here, both the photograph and the photographic image are constituted as the image of photography. The method of forgetting photography developed here recognises technical and formal distinctions between vision and language, the photograph, word and image, but adopts a pragmatic position in which the relationships between word and image, language and photography are experienced in their encounter and practical uses. The agency of each element is constituted by a network of active associations in which language is always entailed.

The visual in all forms of media operatesas a zone of social contact and symbolic exchange between the body, memory and phenomena, or what is lived and felt as the world of external events, and the world as imaged, pictured and represented. Over the course of photography’s history, the photographic image,has come to occupy a position of unbridled authority in and over the social and scientific real. During the latter part of the twentieth century the veracity of the photograph, founded on its supposed indexical link to external events in time and space, became increasingly contested in practice and theory. In the twenty-first century, concern over the veracity of images has become more muted and mutable through the immersion with screens and graphical user interfaces. This is a moment of the fully fledged post-photographic and as insisted so far there is a pressing need to move beyond it.

The main strategy of the book lies in adopting the view that photography is no longer the active organising mode of the visual image, in effect to see photography as redundant, but still exerting an influence in an afterlife. The afterlife of photography is cast as the fictional figure of the zombie, which is of course playful, but also a serious methodological ploy designed to discuss the limits of photography’s academic theorisation as well as its contemporary cultural institutional practices. It is important to stress that the project is not about announcing another ‘death’ of photography, but rather bringing its afterlife into focus. Photography has been a living dead since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Geoffrey Batchen noted as far back as 1994 that a number of distinct points of death have been plunged into the body of photography, even though he continues to take this as a sign of life in photography (2021), but the argument here is that the totality of these deaths has been for some time photography’s afterlife. This is an exploration of what this more-than-symbolic death of photography means for knowledge and understanding of the image and as an encouragement to move on. If we want to understand the vexed relationship betweeen image-representation-reality, photography can only assist in this task now as a ruin and an archive, as something whose outlines and conditions only memory can recover.

Photography is a ruined territory populated by archaic knowledge practices bounded by a computational network of relations between images, humans and machines. Such a stark,,if not bleak, perspective will, it is hoped, become clear in what follows?Since its inception photography as a transactional informationssystem has been deeply imbricated in military, industrial, commercial, scientific, medical, national, domestic and arts networks of associations, flows and reproductions. The import of such an understanding here, however, is not to repeat this perspective in order to extend the photographic map, nor to inventory the ways in which photography has been and continues to be constituted as a practice field. Rather, it aims at the opposite, to deterritorialise’ photography, to flee photography in order to force a new view of the image. But in order to do this, to forget photography, it cannot simply be abandoned, even though it has already been lost. There is as yet no outside to photography because it continues to be taken as a default of representation. The way out of photography proposed here is through remembrance, witnessing the trauma of photography’s several deaths, from the perspective of its afterlife. This is achieved by a trick, by adopting the future present from which contemporary photographic knowledge practices of collection, exhibition and archiving appear as photography’s spectral self. It is in institutional knowledge practices that the order of simulation can be identified: the order of representation, modernism, technology, heritage and finally post-photography. By looking at the contemporary state of photographic difference(s) the argument about why we need to forget photography emerges. It is an argument which claims that photographic discourse now conceals more than it reveals about the state of culture, society and the agency of the image. Forgetting photography calls for a more productive discourse in which the hybridity of the networked image, inequality, racism and climate damage stand at the centre of concern.

The approach taken to the task of forgetting photography is to ground speculative and conceptual thinking in the practical affairs and everyday arrangements in which ideas are produced, circulated and received, to see what purposes, functions, connections and advantages are served by the unintended conspiracy to perpetuate the photographic universe. The strategy of the book involves identifying how ideas and practices of what is still taken to be photography move seamlessly across time, the body, everyday life and formalised culture. The overriding.conceptual challenge the book takes on is how to intervene productively in the interstices of these related domains and fields of enquiry in order to open up a different way of thinking about the current state of the'visual in culture. The argument for forgetting photography issmade* primarily as an intervention into the (re)production of academic knowledge about photography and this comes with a cost in terms‘of what has to be taken on, the breadth of material which has to be covered and the technical language required. But writing into academia was not the original hope of the book, which aspired to speak more broadly and accessibly about photographic cultures under the new conditions of computational networks. In completing the book, I realised that making the metaphorical ‘new clearing’ from which a new theory of the visual image in culture might emerge required much more hacking through the dense undergrowth of academic writing about post-photography than I had anticipated. In attempting to forget photography the book has had to engage just as much with the technical apparatuses of knowledge production as it has with technologies of seeing and, of course, the two are centrally linked by the common condition of commodification and instrumental datafication. Holding the technological apparatuses of both seeing and knowledge together essentially frames the main object of this enquiry as the reproduction of the idea of photography and explains why the lengthy discussions of how to unthink photography’s history and theory are necessary.