Still Searching…

<p>An edge, boundary, or line of demarcation. Few concepts feel as critical to the contemporary discourse on migration as <em>border</em>, for every migrating subject must navigate a physical, political, or conceptual divide. Especially thick structures govern my own country’s national borders, whose markings, surveillance, and protection are the subjects of current debate. Soon they may be fortified at high costs, as US President Donald Trump has issued <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/executive-orders-protecting-homeland" target="_blank" rel="noopener">executive orders</a> proposing the construction of a new border wall between the US and Mexico.</p>

<p>I wrote in <a href="https://www.fotomuseum.ch/de/explore/still-searching/articles/29982_problems_of_happy_images" target="_blank" rel="noopener">my previous post</a> that individual images use the unavoidable division between being and appearance to create negative images of the world, and thereby to create glimpses of happiness as the opposite of the world we inhabit. That seems to be as true of individual prints or photographs as it is of unique paintings and drawings. But can the same be said of images in the mass?</p>

<p>PS to our previous blog, <a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/27022_on_the_invisible_image_and_algorithm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“On the Invisible (Image and Algorithm)”</a>.  As a friend suggested, we should have imagined Paglen’s photo of a secret military base in the so-called top-secret lab run by Sergey Brin “in an undisclosed Bay Area location”: here is the place for thinking about secrecy. In fact, Google seems intentionally to be creating an atmosphere of mystery around “a pair of otherwise ordinary two-story red-brick buildings about a half-mile from Google’s main campus” <span class="frzfn fn"><span class="marker">1</span><span class="text">Brad Stone, “Inside Google’s Secret Lab, Google X’s Silicon Valley Nerd Heaven – America’s Last Great Corporate Research Lab”, <em>Bloomberg.com/news</em>, 29 May 2013, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-22/inside-googles-secret-lab">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-22/inside-googles-secret-lab</a></span></span>. It is impossible to find much information on Google (sic!) apart from two journal articles. In the one published in <em>The New York Times</em> in 2011 we can read: “It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.” <span class="frzfn"><span class="marker">2</span><span class="text">Claire Cain Miller and Nick Biltonnov, “Google’s Lab of Wildest Dreams”, <em>The New York Times</em>, 13 November 2011.</span></span></p>

<p>In my last blog post, I sketched out some of the ways that traditional photography theory and practice seems to be at a standstill. Contemporary revolutions in photography, from omnipresent digital picture-taking to the advent of hundred-billion image repositories have prompted some practitioners, theorists, and critics to ask whether “photography” (at least as it was once understood) “is over.” I noted that the question has arrived at an ironic time – how could photography be “over” at the exact moment in history that it has achieved an unprecedented ubiquity?</p>

<div>In the last post, I proposed that 21st Century “photography” has come to encompass so many different kinds of technologies, imaging apparatuses, and practices that the kinds of things we easily recognize as photography (cameras, film, prints, etc.) now actually constitute an exception to the rule. I proposed a much broader definition – <em>seeing machines</em>. <br><br></div>

<div>Over the last few weeks I’ve been laying out some ideas about what photography has become, and have begun to articulate some of the ways I use to think about it. In previous posts, I wrote about replacing a more conventional idea of photography with the idea of seeing machines and put forward the idea of “scripts” to begin understanding how seeing machines function, i.e. how they act upon the world. I wrote about scripts as being the range of activities that a seeing machine “wants” to do, and the range of possibilities that those “wants” facilitate, and the range of possibilities that are foreclosed. <br><br></div>

<div>Decades ago, when I wanted to be a painter and also needed a job, I thought it might be good to get some hands-on art world experience. I went to a number of galleries to inquire if there might be any positions and—in the era before MFA, museum studies, and arts administration programs made that crazily competitive—was hired by Harold Jones, the founding director of LIGHT Gallery, which had recently opened on Madison Avenue. Harold, who had spotted me looking at shows there previously, took a chance, hired me, and in ways I still marvel at, changed the course of my life.<br><br></div>

<div>In <em>Blue Nights</em>, a 2011 book in which Joan Didion struggles to come to terms with her daughter’s death, she relates how, when she was briefly hospitalized herself, doctors urged her to undergo a medical procedure:<br><br></div><div><em>I recall resisting: since I had never in my life been able to swallow an aspirin it seemed unlikely that I could swallow a camera.</em><br><br></div><div><em>“Of course you can, it’s only a little camera.”</em><br><br></div><div><br></div>

<p>Last week I promised a discussion of Goshka Macuga, whose new show at Andrew Kreps Gallery is yet another example of the retrospectivity trend I’ve been tracking in these blog posts. Macuga’s work synthesizes a number of points that addressed in previous weeks: the obsession with modernism, the archival character of contemporary installation art, and the display of information and research.</p>

<div>A second approach for considering photographic realism is to define photography as a “reflective medium.” In a theoretical context, this term (“Reflexionsmedium”) featured prominently in Walter Benjamin’s dissertation <em>Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik</em> (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism). Benjamin writes, “Reflection constitutes the absolute and constitutes it as a medium” (“Die Reflexion konstituiert das Absolute und sie konstituiert es als ein Medium”). <br><br></div>