May 2018

Over the past four or five decades, such widespread efforts have been made that in recent times it has indeed become possible to say: yes, photography is art. Yes, photography also has a place in museums and galleries. Yes, photography can be an autonomous image and not just a form of depicting reality. So, one might readily assume that the end-goal has been achieved.

But now, the question has suddenly changed tack and should perhaps be posed differently. Maybe along these lines: yes, photography can be art, but is it not actually much more than that? Are not 99 per cent of photographs and 99 per cent of photographic archives unrelated (or related only in some limited way) to the criteria of art? Nevertheless, is it not so that these 99 per cent are highly remarkable visual products of human endeavour which are, at least in part, worth contemplating, collecting, archiving and discussing? Indeed, is it not so that these 99 per cent might even be said to include the more important visual records of humanity and its history? Might it not be argued that these 99 per cent are, as it were, a visual sociology of human life in all its facets, its activities, achievements and ventures, both private and public, no matter how small or great?

It is said that, since 2012, more photographs have been made, more snapshots taken, in each year than in the entire history of photography, which already spans some 170 years. An almost inconceivable mass of technically produced images – millions, billions, even trillions of them – are shot, filtered, uploaded, liked, shared and deleted on social media platforms at incredible speed, usually uncommentated or with just a brief line of text or a short caption. Studies indicate that communication between young people today consists, to more than 50 per cent, of images posted on Whatsapp, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram etc. These images, particularly those that are electronically produced and disseminated, are becoming the new vernacular. Umberto Eco had already predicted two decades ago that we were entering a new emblematic age of visual communication involving photographs and electronic images accompanied only by one or two lines of text, if that. Now we are definitively living in that age. And the response to these photographs tends to be an emoji or two, or even three or ten or more.

What does that mean for photography? What does it mean for us, for the way we communicate, and for our understanding of the world? Images, as semioticians tell us, are weakly coded and therefore cannot readily be nailed down in ways that are easy to understand, while on the other hand they are difficult to falsify. They are open, ambiguous, but also at times thought-provokingly direct, powerful and influential. They affect us in ways that delight and sometimes even confuse our emotions and our reasoning.

The world of advertising knows full well that the intense repetition of specific images has a creeping influence on our perception and can chip away at our powers of judgment, leading us gradually in a different direction. In that respect, we evidently put our trust in something that we do not really know for sure, but which can subconsciously have a very profound and lasting influence on us.

Before this flood of images carries us away helplessly in a riptide teeming with open semantic fields, leaving us confused and speechless, and before the visual plumes clog up our sensory perceptions and rational minds like a well-targeted dose of pepper-spray, robbing us of our ability to distinguish between what is important and what is trivial, what is profound and what is superficial, right, wrong or misleading, we need to talk about how we should deal with this new situation. We ought to start with the basic question of how we perceive photography, what a photograph is, how it functions, what effect it has, what it does both in itself and to us, and how we are able to handle that.

Images shape the world that we want to remember, and will remember. Photography, including that 99 per cent of so-called reproductive, documentary, descriptive pictures, not only records things, as we know, but also generates our notion of the world. It shapes not only our future visual worlds, but, even more so, our vision of the world and, with that, our actions. This is how it has always been, from the very earliest days of photography, because its precise, optical, physical, chemical reproduction of reality, of things, and of the material world has been imbued with exalted credibility in what has become, since the nineteenth century, an increasingly atheistic world.

So these images of things, and their seeming objectivity, have provided us with an anchorpoint, generating a visual order of reality in the here and now. Today, especially, having entered a new visual and increasingly networked age, this reality has become even more stark. All of us, in our daily lives, in our jobs, and in the media, constantly experience how strongly the image is ousting and replacing the word around us.

Astonishingly, however, there has so far been very little consideration of images and their effect – or at least not in sufficient depth, nor with enough structural integrity. There is a dearth of visual education, visual understanding and visual syntax regarding not only the descriptive (denotative) and associative (connotative) effect of the image, but also the communicative and manipulative aspect of images, and there has been no such education whatsoever (as far as I am aware) in primary or secondary schools – or only with rare exceptions. We are faced with a situation in which we are all visual consumers, yet at the same time visually illiterate. What the world of today and tomorrow urgently needs is more visual literacy.

We know that schools are already challenged, perhaps even overwhelmed, by digitalisation, by manifold restructuring, and by new educational and vocational goals. In a unique joint venture between education, outreach and culture, the various photographic museums, galleries, archives, training colleges and schools could be put on standby to provide the kind of visual enlightenment that questions both the image and its role in communication, so crucial to a life now saturated with electronic images, by developing suitable modules for school classes and teachers, involving youngsters and adults alike.

In oder to do that, however, we need to shore up our institutions. On the one hand, there has to be an emphasis on the negatives, the prints, the collections. On the other hand, there also has to be a stronger focus on the mediation and knowledge of photographic images, as well as on researching photography as a form of communication and as a medium that shapes our reality. This includes promoting the production of meaningful visual documentation.

This is a plea for greater visual understanding in Switzerland and throughout the world. For a visual communication that we control, rather than one that controls us. For the visual memory of life and work in Switzerland. And it comes with an added plea for more attention to be paid to this topic, as well as for considerably greater financial means to support it.

Translated by Ishbel Flett