September 2019 / December 2020
The authors of this essay have been collaborating on a research project titled ‹Post-Photography› since 2018.[1] Including perspectives from art history and visual culture, media and communication studies, as well as sociology and politics, we explore a concept of photographic culture that is based on a network of human and non-human actors, visual economies and aesthetic paradigms. We investigate notions where image practices have become part of discourses of information technology and computer science in which the meaning and agency of images are inseparable from the cultural dynamics of software and online platforms. We focus on media practices and curatorial strategies that have rarely been the subject of scholarly attention in the field of photography. We set out to establish connections between aspects of art, entertainment, network culture and everyday practices that have previously been considered only in isolation.
When we started discussing the overall topic of our project, we lacked a term for it. Now here’s the thing: while all team members seemed to agree on what we were going to focus on, we were much less sure of how we could pin it down without offending too many curators in and around the historic squares of Arles. To some people, ‹post-photography› sounds like a door being shut. Many like to think that the best results in the growing field of photographic practice, and the criteria we need to appreciate them, are hardly affected by technological and cultural change. Eventually, however, we decided that we needed a title more badly than universal consent, and we needed this title to stick, so we went for a term which is admittedly just another result of an avoidance strategy that comes with so many terminological post-its. Worse still, we had already been outpaced. A series of annual conferences had been attracting theorists and historians to Saint Petersburg since 2015 in repeated attempts to posit an ‹after› for a concept that was apparently only ‹post› in the past. [2] Has the present of a medium ever been framed in a more historically self-conscious way?
But then, the terminological embarrassment isn’t ours alone. Speaking at an exhibition of his Polaroids in a 2018 interview with the BBC, film director and Polaroid enthusiast Wim Wenders publicly testified to the death of photography. The blame, he argued, should be put on smartphones. But he acknowledged that this technical tool was only a means to an end. What Wenders really lamented was a murderous attitude and practice for which he had no name. Looking directly at the camera, Wenders appealed to the BBC audience: «I’m in search of a new word for this new activity that looks so much like photography but isn’t photography anymore. Please let me know if you have a name for it».[3] We know video killed the radio star. At least that’s what Bruce Woolley and The Camera Club told us in 1979. But what killed photography, Wenders asked? While The Camera Club were no longer around to provide an answer, the internet replied. Below the video that the BBC uploaded to its YouTube page, over a thousand users have commented so far, offering all kinds of possible answers to Wenders’s request. Here are a few examples: Alexander Rossa proposes «instagraphy», Jahangeer Zahid «potatography», Aman Sonkar «falsography», Tyson Ruck «FAUXtography», and Feb Vel suggests «whocareography». These efforts may not be any better than theoretical attempts to shed light on the changing role of contemporary photography, but their sheer number belies a shared concern: our traditional definition of photography seems to be inadequate and unable to address the complex world of images we all inhabit. We are left pointing at our screens without the words to name what is in front of us.
The term post-photography might have become a welcome means to help us liberate the medium from the agony of a nameless void. As an attempt to ‹rectify names›, it might be honoured by people with a predilection for applying Confucian spirit to the quest for social harmony. But of course, post-photography does remain a problematic and uncomfortable label, just as our longing for linguistic convenience is also problematic from the start. The way ‹postness› is articulated in Western discourses on contemporary culture, the very notion generally acts as a refuge: Nishant Shah defines it as a space where one can afford to retreat, as a privileged exit. To follow postness in believing that we are all post-gender, post-race, post-feminist, post-internet and post-colonial is to accept, he argues, that questions «have either been resolved or have been arbitrated enough for us to move on».[4] Not only does postness imply or create a break with a past that is assumed to be dealt with and solved, it also crystallizes and purifies that past. In this vein, David Cunningham, at a panel discussion organized at Paris Photo 2016, argued that the term post-photography somehow suggests «that the preceding history of photography constitutes some kind of unified field in a way that it clearly doesn’t». [5] It implies the creation of a new paradigm that splits a complex and hybrid discipline into the two monolithic strands of post- and pre-post-photography. In fact, this is how a lot of people still think the recent historical shift ought to be classified.
If we look closely at digital and networked photographic media practices, though, there is no way of ignoring the fact that they include an endless amount of very different phenomena, techniques and cultures, each with their own histories and contexts. So what does the ‹post› in post-photography really refer to? Is it the ease of digital manipulation, which helped trigger a crisis of the real in the 1990s? Or the ephemeral properties of screen pixels as opposed to the immutability of the printed image? Is it the endless amount of images distributed online, which led to talk of a deluge of images in the 2000s? Or again the rise of the selfie, which made influencing more lucrative than social reportage in the 2010s, and food porn more popular than its once more customary counterpart? We could go on and on, evoking the increasing level of photorealistic CGI, or the blurring of lines between still and moving images, or current AI-driven cameras and software or the computational agency of machine vision with all its social and political ramifications.
In a diversifying world of technical images, it came as no surprise when commentators started to add a prefix to the medium’s traditional name. The first person to break this new ground seems to have been David Tomas, in 1988, although it is not clear whether or not he was actually talking about the phenomena that we have come to refer to when we use his term. In 1992, Geoffrey Batchen discussed artworks incorporating but not limited to photographs, arguing that we were witnessing post-photographic practices that belie the very concept of an autonomous medium. Although he was aware of some of the effects of digitization, Batchen did not even focus on them when suggesting that pure photography was coming to an end. However, the torch had been taken up. William J. Mitchell’s much more prominent account of what he called «visual truth in the post-photographic era» was published virtually simultaneously, and his book on proved a case in point – although, weirdly, the term-turned-adjective is only part of the title and is not elaborated upon anywhere in the text. More recently, Robert Shore and Joan Fontcuberta re-contextualized post-photography in the titles of a coffee table book and an exhibition.[6] Still, the term is far from being canonized. There is as yet no clear preference for it over so many other alternatives, each labelling photographic practice from a different point of view and all of them testifying to the fact that there is no uncontested notion of what photography has become after the fact.
Batchen argued that instead of giving access to reality, photography was beginning to provide merely a vocabulary of conventions. It is also true, though, that it had always partly been conventions that made for photography’s privileged relation to the world outside. Mitchell rightly says that while digital technology succeeded or displaced photography, it also made us understand that we had been caught in what he likes to call a merely Cartesian dream of a clear-cut separation between the imaginary and the real.[7] Mind you, we can’t be sure that we have left wishful thinking entirely behind us. Store identifies yet another version of the Cartesian dream in a post-photographic ‹I-document-therefore-I-exist› mantra. Of course, this perspective is at odds with Martha Rosler’s association of the documentary with modernism, and of post-photography with the latter’s decline.[8] In her view, the privileged viewpoints of witnesses are doomed.
But then the range of associations coming with every new contextualization of the term is not our only problem. Take, for example, Nicholas Mirzoeff, who seems to be fine with run-of-the-mill definitions of what post-photography is. He argues that it is a «photography for the electronic age» which no longer claims to picture or «index» the world. Instead, he says, post-photographic practices venture to explore the possibilities of the medium. Yet this does not prevent him from crowning Nan Goldin as the first post-photographer of note.[9] Why? Her oeuvre, he says, reflects her growing disenchantment with the modernist ambition to change the world, and with the role that photography would have played in this important process from a modernist’s perspective. What makes this strategy of displacing post-photography worth mentioning here is that it so obviously depends on a unifying idea of what photography was before it was officially declared post-photographic. Never mind the question as to whether this critique of Goldin is quite to the point; if exposed to this kind of simplified modernist mission statement, photography was indeed always at least partly ‹post› itself. If this point reminds you of Cunningham’s above-quoted remarks, it will probably also recall the postmodernist critique that prepared his view.[10] Photography helped deconstruct artistic modernism no less than it was deconstructed in the process. It was welcomed as an artistic tool for attacking aesthetic concepts of originality and authorship only to sacrifice part of its own identity in the era of its digital recoding, and in his exploration of what he considered photography’s «last gasp» in art, George Baker made it clear that the concept of postmodernism provided the most useful framework for explaining the implications of this shift.[11] We ought to look at post-photography’s relation to traditional lens-based images in a nod to the survival of modernism in contemporary art. The latter is replete with antagonistic gestures aimed at the former, but it also embraces and expands it.
The strength of the term ‹post-photography› might be precisely that it is open to discursive appropriations on all sides. Granted, post-photography has been evoked to address a growing range of aspects, to the point where it risks feeling like a label too vague to have any meaning at all. It may always remain equivocal and it may often leave us confused. But that’s not so bad after all. For an analysis of contemporary photographic practices to cover all the aspects mentioned above, it has to bid farewell to the idea that there was ever such a thing as photography to begin with. With this in mind, it seems legitimate to use post-photography as an umbrella term that recognizes the need for new frameworks and tools to talk about photography, while at the same time allowing many voices to join in a discussion from this starting point. In fact, there is a productive aspect to recognizing the importance of such a shift and the need to rethink our approaches to ideas of photography. We agree with Cunningham that we should welcome any opportunity to rethink, as a side effect of unthinking photography-as-we-know-it in our focus on present trends, the entire history of the medium. It is important to acknowledge «the ways in which digital processes transform, but also intensify and expand aspects» that were part and parcel of photography for a long time, if not from the outset.[12] We prefer to argue that photography, in the way it was taken for granted, never reigned alone, and that Roland Barthes’s insistence on the chemical basis of photography tends to assume dogmatic overtones when quoted without reserve.
This essay has revolved around the basic question, what’s in a name? There’s too much in ‹post-photography› and too little, but that’s how we like it. To reiterate: late in the twentieth century, someone created the term post-photography. This made a lot of people very angry and, no less than what Douglas Adams once said about the creation of the universe, has been widely regarded as a bad move. It only sunk in slowly, and to date, denial looms large amongst professionals and aficionados. Fair enough; it may soon run its course. Even postmodernism feels old-fashioned today. But then post-photography is just an excuse. It’s a trap, it’s a decoy, it’s meant to challenge the logic of medium specificity which underlies so many notions, practices and beliefs about what is worth taking into account. Post-photography makes room for so many practices beyond photography with a capital ‹P› to be included in our debates. It allows us to move beyond disciplines and traditional canons of photo theory. It prepares the ground for making sense of the diverse eco-systems of image production and consumption that we live in today. We can reappropriate this ‹post› to suggest moving past the question of what photography essentially is, and privilege questions as to what photography is becoming in social, aesthetic and political terms.[13] If photography is to be understood as a cultural challenge, we must base our analysis on its post-medium condition, which is palpable within and without art. And that is what the post-photography research project at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts is about: photography after pre-post photography.
Wolfgang Brückle studied art history and German philology at the Universities of Marburg, Dijon, and Hamburg where he passed his exams and, in 2001, received his PhD degree with a study on art in the service of the representation of power in fourteenth-century France. He was an assistent curator at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and an assistent professor and senior research fellow at the universities of Stuttgart, Bern, Essex, and Zurich. Curatorial activities related to, and research on, medieval art, art theory, museum history, contemporary art, and media history, with a special focus on photography-related topics. Since 2013, he has been a senior lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences & Arts. He also teaches frequently at the universities of Zurich and other Swiss universities. With Rachel Mader, he co-edits the scholarly HSLU book series «745». From 2018 and 2019, he has been the head of two SNSF-funded research projects on post-photography. Biography as well as a list of publications are here.
Marco De Mutiis works as Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur, where he leads and co-curates the SITUATIONS programme and also deals with issues related to digital infrastructures, online museums, and photography in its networked and algorithmic forms. He is currently also part of a SNF funded research project titled “Post-Photography” with the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, researching on computer games and photography, specifically looking at simulations of photography, photorealism in games, photo modes, photographic playbour and screenshotting practices. He is also a co-initiator, core member and networked mastermind of the rogue collective behind You Must Not Call It Photography If This Expression Hurts You. marcodemutiis.com