The Materiality of Mediation - the Immateriality of Photography

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The Materiality of Mediation - the Immateriality of Photography Liv Hausken I would like to take my own, spontaneous reaction to Alice Miceli's video installation 88 from 14.

1 The Materiality of Mediation - the Immateriality of Photography Liv Hausken I would like to take my own, spontaneous reaction to Alice Miceli's video installation 88 from (2004) as my point of departure. Confronted with this artwork, the first thing that struck me had nothing to do with art as such, or video. It didn't even concern the way a selection of prisoner portraits from Pol Pot's death camp has been de-contextualized and re-contextualized in the Western art world. Rather, my first reaction had to do with the screen of falling sand displaying the 88 photographs. Exhibition view, PHOENIX Halle, Dortmund, Germany (2005) This falling sand seemed to demonstrate, in a powerful and disturbing way, the materiality of the photographs. This leads me to ask: what does this video have to say about photography? 1. The materiality of photographs It is often said that photography tends to disappear into its referent. Photographs seem to invite a pointing gesture on the part of the viewer towards the image as an effect of something physically existing in front of the camera at the moment of exposure. This gesture not only calls for the viewer to overlook the photograph as a picture (as several critics have argued), but also asks the viewer to neglect the material basis on which the picture appears, that is: the picture as a physical object. The negative of the analogue 1

2 photograph may be considered the exception to this tendency: in the photographic negative, both the pictorial nature of the picture and its material basis are hard to neglect. But otherwise, the positive image displayed on paper (or on the slide show screen) is easily ignored to the benefit of the photographic reference. We take the material nature of the photograph for granted, and easily neglect what has come to be conventional. If there were a general awareness of the materiality of the paper-based photograph, one might expect that the great interest in digital photographs would have stimulated conceptual work exploring the importance of the material difference between the printed photograph and the photographic image displayed on a computer screen. But this has not been the case. Instead, digital and digitized photographs have been included in the more general discourse on the dematerialization of information. This may sound like a contradiction, but the materiality of the analogue photograph has less to do with the paper on which it has most often been displayed than with the idea of the materiality of the photographic trace. The idea of digital image technology as implying a dematerialization of photography is therefore less connected to a change in the way photographs are displayed (be it on paper or screen) than to how the photographic information is (produced and) stored. It may also be argued that the storage of photographic information cannot exist without the instantiation of form into matter: specific information, digital or otherwise, is always embedded information. But the point here is that the popular imagination of digital technology as the dematerialization of information neglects not only the materiality of the encoded files, but also the materiality of the image as displayed. As Johanna Drucker has argued, "The existence of the image depends heavily on the display, the coming into matter, in the very real material sense of pixels on the screen." It probably goes without saying that a screen of falling sand is rather unusual for displaying photographs. Just as we easily neglect the conventional and what we take for granted, we normally notice the unusual and the unexpected. This loose material consisting of grains of rock may also be seen as rather provocative in its materiality: it is dusty, incoherent, detached, loose, streaming, uncombined, segregated, flapping; it is everything we may associate with matter without form or with form transformed into matter. This may explain my first impression of Miceli's video installation mentioned 2

3 earlier: The unusual and demonstrative materiality of the screen of falling sand demonstrates the materiality of photographs; the simple fact that photographs do not exist without coming into matter. 2. The material heterogeneity of photographs By demonstrating the materiality of photographs, the screen of falling sand also reminds the viewer of the material heterogeneity of photographs: that photographs can be displayed on paper or celluloid, on a slide projection screen or a computer screen, or as in the case before you, on a screen of falling sand. If these suggestions about the materiality of photographs make sense, photography must also be thought of as an idea, as a concept, as an ideal phenomenon. What I am suggesting is therefore three things: 1. Photographs depend on matter to appear and therefore to exist as photographs. 2. Photographs do not depend on one particular kind of matter (although some surfaces are more suitable than others for displaying photographs). 3. These two suggestions imply that there exists an idea of photography as such. 3. Photography as an idea During the last thirty years or so, one of the most common refrains in the songs of photographic research is a line saying that there is no such thing as photography, only photographs. In his 1988 collection of essays The Burden of Representation, John Tagg proclaims (twice) the very often-quoted view that: Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such. The subtitle of Tagg's 1988 collection of texts, Essays on Photographies and Histories, indicates that not only is there no such thing as photography, neither can there be a 3

4 uniform history of photographs. The only things that exist are photographies and histories, both in the plural. The whole question of finding photography's nature is itself considered misguided from the beginning. It is quite correct that photography is a heterogeneous phenomenon. In the video installation of Alice Miceli, a variety of photographic practices are indicated by the definition and redefinition of practices along the way from mug shots to art material. Projected on the screen of falling sand and displayed in a video installation, these images have an art function. For some viewers, these images have already attained an aesthetic function from their exhibitions in art galleries in Europe and the United States, such as at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1997). The presentation of this video installation (in festival programmes and on the gallery walls) gives a small piece of information about the circumstances under which these photographic images were produced, namely as portraits of prisoners in a Cambodian death camp during the regime of the Khmer Rouge, from April 1975 to February The inclusion of this information not only indicates a certain documentary aesthetic attached to the images in the art galleries. These images also serve a variety of different documentary functions from the varied documentary contexts in which they appear: their documentary functions in the Tuol Sleng museum in Cambodia located in the very same rooms were prisoners were tortured are different from the function they serve in the Yale University-run Cambodian Genocide Project, through which all the images have been loaded on the Web to help Cambodians identify missing relatives. These documentary functions are again different from those given by the variety of documentary settings like newspapers, magazines and books, from which some of these images have become well known in the West. In addition to these two functional categories, the aesthetic and the documentary, we may also add the function these images have served in the context in which they were produced: they were produced as mug shots, as standardized identifying portraits of criminal inmates normally used for disciplinary effect and legitimized by the need in modern societies for future surveillance of convicted criminals. Yet, the purpose of mug shots in a death camp is not quite obvious: In an article on the MoMA exhibition of the photographic prints, Lindsay French claims that the S-21 4

5 prisoners were photographed upon intake "[in] a demonstration of administrative thoroughness uncharacteristic of the Khmer Rouge." In his book Voices from S-21, David Chandler suggests a range of possible explanations, among them the terrorized desire of the prison staff to prove that their work had been carried out with extreme care. We may call this the administrative or psychological function of these images. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the tension in these mug shots between the criminal body and the innocent victim of genocide produces a twist on the well-known duality between the honorific and the repressive in the portrait genre. The head-on pose of the police portrait normally signals cultural subordination (in contrast to the cultivated asymmetries of the aristocratic posture). The exhibition of photographs from this mug shot archive transforms the repressive portraits of the criminal into a twisted version of the honorific portrait of the bourgeois subject; the honorific victim. I believe this twist is part of both the aesthetic and, to a certain extent, the documentary quality of these images. Alice Miceli's use of mug shots from the S-21 archive in her video installation demonstrates, as we can see, a variety of photographic practices and functions. In accordance with Tagg's argument, these photographs are also heterogeneous as far as what makes them meaningful. The different practices indicate various possibilities for interpretation. The same goes for different types of audiences, as may be briefly illustrated by the disparity between Cambodians and non-cambodians: the first category seeing images from their own history, some even recognizing someone they know, and the other category seeing images of cruelty and injustice somewhere else in the world images of others. As to the heterogeneity of technology in Tagg's argument, the photographic images in Miceli's installation indicate a technical transformation from analogue photographs in the original archive to digital video when displayed as part of Miceli's artwork. The work may also seem to point towards all the other technical differences involved in the different kinds of storage and exhibition of these photographic images as they have traveled between places and situations, be it the storage of the negative, analogue material in the Tuol Sleng archive, the digital storage in the Yale archive, the images professionally printed on silver emulsion on display at the MoMA, or the low quality print in a newspaper. There is a huge variation of practices and functions, meanings and 5

6 experiences, techniques and technologies involved in this example. Nevertheless, I will argue that in all these cases, we are in some way or another still talking about photography. (A) The immateriality of photography I am arguing, therefore, that photography is not a medium. Photography is a concept, an idea. This idea is embedded in history: changing technologies, practices and experiences constitute it. Photographs can neither be reduced to nor deduced from this idea. To study photography, it is therefore necessary to take concrete practices as one's point of departure. Otherwise, we will just reproduce an isolated idea of something seemingly existing outside history and never see anything but this idea. Taking actual practices as a point of departure makes it possible to study how different aspects of a photographic idea are revealed or articulated in each particular case. Alice Miceli's video installation seems to speak volumes about the materiality of photographs and the immateriality of the photographic as such. It also says that the materiality of photographs are mainly concerned with surfaces, the surfaces of what they portray and the surfaces on which they appear. Furthermore, this video installation demonstrates that a photograph doesn't say much, at least not on its own. (B) The materiality of mediation Photography is not a medium, but in their concrete manifestations, photographs can fulfill a mediating function. In Miceli's video installation, the sand mediates the photographs, just as the sand-based photographs are mediating the appearance of the photographed prisoners and, in a particular context, may be seen as mediating an experience of injustice. The sand demonstrates that a medium does not exist per se, but many kinds of phenomena may execute a mediating function. When something carries the function of mediation, it is a medium, and as a medium, it has a material dimension that makes a difference. Just as there is an internal relation between the photographic idea and the changing circumstances under which photographs are produced and experienced, there is an internal relation between the medium and what it mediates: Each is what it is by means of the other. They mutually refer to each other and make a unity without being identical. The sand gives the impression of movement in the images; the photographic images are flickering rather than being durably instantiated. The sand also invests the images with ideas of the worthless 6

7 and untrustworthy, with the allusion to the hourglass and the idea that the sand of life has almost run out, and perhaps also with well-known associations to dreams of sand as indicative of famine and loss. The screen of sand is not only a technical support to the photographs; it is its mediating material, making the images appear as embedded in sand. (C) How video complicates the picture The use of video complicates the picture. First of all, the video integrates the photographic material into a new entity that is different from the other entities to which it belongs: photographic archives, photographic collections, and photographic exhibitions. Secondly, the video weakens the material presence of the falling sand by transforming its presence into its auditive and visual appearance. Thirdly, the video draws the projected images together in the temporal stream of a fixed rate, rhythm and duration. The video therefore indirectly demonstrates the principal singularity of photographs and how they, in principle, can be experienced in a single glance but can also bear a longer period of scrutiny. The video also demonstrates how photographs can be transformed and remediated and yet still retain this insistence on pointing towards something physically present at the moment of exposure. To sum up on the more general issue of mediation: I have argued that even if the convergence of the formerly distinct media under the digital regime may spell the end of the media as we have known them, this does not imply the end of mediation. Furthermore, in spite of the idea of electronic media as abstract, disembodied and decontextualised information, we still need to consider the materiality of mediation. However, the materiality of mediation cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pregiven entity. It is always part of a complex whole and cannot be studied independently of its mediating function. References Drucker, Johanna (2001) "Digital Ontologies: The Ideality of Form in/and Code Storage: Or: Can Graphesis Challenge Mathesis?" in Leonardo, Vol.34, No.2 (2001), pp French, Lindsay (2002) "Exhibiting Terror" in Bradley, Mark Philip, and Patrice Petro 7

8 (eds) Truth Claims. Representation and Human Rights, Rutgers UP. Tagg, John Tagg (1988) The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Østerberg, Dag (1988) Metasociology. An Inquiry into the Origins and Validity of Social Thought, Norwegian University Press. Copyright Liv Hausken All right reserved Liv Hausken is Dr. art., Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, Norway. This essay was presented as a paper at the SCMS conference in Chicago, March, It has been further developed into an article to be published in the anthology Thinking Media Aesthetics (forthcoming). 8

Temporal Photography Johanna Drucker

Temporal Photography Johanna Drucker Since its invention, photography has functioned as a production medium and also as a meta-medium for reproduction, particularly within the printing trades. Both aspects