The Regime of Imaging

Every image is a distribution of the sensible. Is an operation. These are terms we become familiar with in the writing of Jacques Ranciere in The Future of The Image.  He writes of regimes and operations of imageness which are historical and many.  He says that images are not only perceived by our visual sense, but include things tactile, or acoustic or conjured up words. Flaubert creates images as does Bresson as does Schubert as does perfume and coffee. Images exceed the visual form. He wants us to know visibility and images are separate but interrelated.

The alterity of the image, this other of the image, what the other is he speaks of is less straightforward. It is something visible and something hidden something said and unsaid. Alterity is a complex turn of otherness, that other, not us, the foreign, outside us and the other inside us, and the other which 'includes procedures which create and retract meaning, that insure and undo links between perception, action and effects.' It is a kind of dissemblance of ourselves and our perceptions. It is both close enough and very far away. It is recognizeble enough to be unknown.

Therein is the play and pleasure of imaging of imageness. Something shown and something hidden. But the image is always an event, hovering between a resemblance and dissemblance, between the beholder and what is seen in the image and our sensibility and its distribution, between what is withheld and what it shown, taking hold of the uniqueness of each of us and our given perspectives and blindspots. The image then is never one thing. Not an elsewhere brought to us but operations that make up the artistic nature of what we are seeing.

"'Image' therefore refers to two different things. There is the simple relationship that produces the likeness of an original: not necessarily its faithful copy, but simply what suffices to stand in for it. And there is the interplay of operations that produces what we call art: or precisely an alteration of what we call resemblance. This alternation can take a myriad of forms."

Ranciere writes of these 'operations; (as) relations between a whole and its parts; between a visibility and power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happened to meet them.' In the play of operations both in making images, sequencing them, the context in which they are shown, the reader and beholder who encounters them, there are 'operations that couple and uncouple the visible and its signification or speech and its effect, which create and frustrate expectations.' (2). Ranciere writes this in relation to the cinema but this can also be said about the photographic image.  (page 4 and 5 The Future of the Image)

When the regime of representation is overtaken by the aesthetic regime emerging in the 19th century with the novel and photography we move from the production of resemblances to dissemblances.  This seems odd, this idea of dissemblance in relation to photography. As of course we think of photography taking a picture not just of the world but from the world. Machine seeing depicts what it sees as it sees, it resembles what's out there. But what if it does and does not. What if certain images make the world not exactly uncanny,  presents the world or things not as we think we know them but as something else. What if there is a disjunction between a photograph and what it purports to see. Or what if from the outset it sees and constitutes something differently. What if it dissembles the world. Gives another world. What if this dissemblance is not specific to images or photography but perhaps the project of art in a very wide sense of art. This aesthetic regime forges an ongoing repertoire of operations that dissembles the world as image as a sensible experience.

So what are strategies to dissemble, what are operations that can say and not say things, that hide things to show things, or show things for a moment only in the next to cancel them out, to hide and show things to better create things yet seen. For Ranciere today's images can be classified in into three major categories but each category can not but intertwine with the others. These are what he calls the Naked image, the image that wants to be witness to the world, the image that purports to be a fact, that something happened, that records, that history speaks through, that pictures history, what he would calls visible and sayable, the naked picture speaks as document. It does not dissemble or play with the rhetorics of exegesis.

For some time I took many pictures that might be called Naked Images. Images that refer to themselves, that seem to have a pure reference to themselves, you are seeing what you are seeing, something that was, is here now represented in front of you.  Perhaps the above refers to itself as explicitly the Naked Image of a young girl under pictures of what appear to be her extended family over generations. It is a document of the document of pictures. For some time I pursued such pictures. The camera allowing me an entry and intimacy, even if only for the briefest moment, to people and their lives, to the world I saw. But to what end and for what purpose.

I stopped taking pictures. I did not want to take such pictures because in a sense what they were showing me were much more complex than I could understand, than I was picturing. At the surface of things I could not see enough.  I could not see myself in the picture and the person picturing.  Years later I made the pictures below which were pictures reading pictures.

The second category of image is the Ostensive image, which is the image that is a presence unto itself, it says I am a picture and only a picture.  Or I speak through what can't be spoken.

My presence as an image speaks not only itself but as a larger conceptual idea or feeling. Such pictures announce themselves as Here I Am, but not just I as a particular but as a larger affect or idea that I point to.

Below is an image from a newer series where I am making pictures from pictures. As the dot paintings of Damien Hirst have become iconic of contemporary art I wanted to picture of them with an Icon of the Byzantine church.  

These leads to the third category which is in a sense making pictures about the operations of pictures, the Metamorphic Picture. These pictures which can not be separated from commercial images say a complex of semiotic things including harkening back to other images, critiquing them, making non-art images into art. Perhaps not art, but perform inside the rhetorics of the aesthetics of art. 

The image comes from the message 'Twitter is Over Capacity' which you get when from twitter when can't just yet post your message.  But it's with out the twitter signage or logo. 

This picture titled Auction is also made of many many pictures. It's hard to read at this scale but composites several pictures of art auctions with very notable history paintings and in the center a picture of Toussaint L'Overture, the liberator of Haiti.

All images no matter which category say as much as they show, and show something other than what they say or more that what they say or what can be put in words.  A way to think about this is that there is something irreducible about pictures, about images, there is this play between what is being said and shown and not shown.  Roland Barthes wants to tell us this with his distinction between the studium and the punctum. But for Ranciere there is more to images then Barthes's dichotomy, there is always a play between the stadium, what the photographer has seen, the self evidence of the image presented, a material to be decoded, and the punctum, that pricks us and touches us affectively and personally. There is a play between the social circulation of images, the way we read them and a way the artist dissembles, remakes, sees and creates the event we have not seen before. It's not that we haven't seen the image before it's more like we haven't seen it quite this way.

Over time this play of reading, seeing, picturing, imaging and the rhetorics of the image interest me as that which I want to see in a picture, that I want to see in imaging. I want to use photography to see pictures. To see the picturing of pictures, to picture images, to constitute an image by making a picture.

This first operation for me is seeing the camera seeing. So the above picture, with only the date, time and the number 48 next to the red heart and the plus sign next to it becomes the picture that intrigues me. As I write in my book Image Photograph, right at the outset: 'What is recorded is not simply, nor principally, that which is in front of the lens, in the picture, in the photograph—but the event of its recording. The photograph is a seeing, a kind of seeing, camera seeing. In seeing-reading photography, it is the event of the seeing that I see.' (Marc Lafia, Image Photograph)

I want to put this event into the picture. I want to see this event. But I don't want to do it in this ideological way that was prevalent when I was in school, to look at the image to 'strip the visible world of its glories, to expose its spectacles and pleasures, as a great web of symptoms and a seedy exchange of signs, as so many encoded messages whereby a society or authority legitimates itself,' (p10, ibid)

By its very nature the camera, and you will see that this camera has a very wide definition for me, so much so that I would suggest a blogging form like Tumblr is a camera as it makes images visible, it allows us to see images, to rephotograph images, to index them, to write over them with any number of filters, this tumblr has a way of seeing.  One could argue that the web browser that reads the html that encodes and formats the page and its media is a camera and inside this is the camera of tumblr and what appears there can be variably seen can be photographed again by 'shift command 4' another software camera on our desktop. We can say at this point with our electronic media playback and recording, picturing and seeing, reading and writing have become so attenuated that these once discrete functions are now so tightly coupled, it becomes increasingly difficult to see them as distinct. And these relations are not simply about the digital replacing or synthesizing the analog but a new regime of visuality creating hybrid modalities of seeing/recording/interacting/programs.

There is something in recording and playback, in the always-already-recorded, in these new modalities and operations that are quite similar to those operations described in Ranciere in the operations of montage in Bresson and later quite extensively in Godard's Histoire du Cinema. 
What he is saying that is specific to cinema as we knew it can give us insight to what happens in these new couplings I describe above.

But let's start with the simple montage which happens all the time in Tumblr and on your desktop. Below are again works from the Tumblr series. Here there is never one image but two, two actual images of image and writing and sometimes text that set up this saying of one thing and then another or two things that are both themselves and something else.

Over time the rhetoric of images can take on certain conventions, hardened or be periodized as regimes so over time artist devise new strategies to disrupt these conventions to break through the image that can no longer be seen, that not can longer speak.

One of the things that drew me to making the tumblr series was the relations of words to the image,

I found in the tumblr series a continual movement of image in circulation inflected by the users who come across them and the chance encounters of on image coming up to another. I begin to photograph these as I have told you. 

But let me start now at the beginning of the book and the idea that I could only see an image when I photographed it. More precisely I could only see photography when I took a picture of photography. 

But let's go back. Because all image operations happen in a context.  Who are all these pictures for? Below are images of sellers of photographs. But let's start with this picture I took at Sotheby's. 

The photograph in the photograph you may well recognize is by Dorothea Lange called Migrant Mother taken in 1936. The photograph made Lange quite famous and not until1978 was the woman Florence Owen Thompson, identified stating that she wished the picture was never taken and that she never made a penny and the photographer had promised to send the picture and never did. That day the picture sold for $42,000. This tells us the picture will be cared for, that there is vested interest in this image, and as such the story of this picture, whatever story that maybe and become will carry forward. 

Pictures have a strange way of taking on a life of their own. And they are commodities on a global market, sold everyday. These pictures are of an art market, specially an art photography market held every year the Park Ave Armory. 

The market has moved to bigger and bigger pictures. It is hard to tell the size of an image online though of course you can get a sense of it in relation to someone standing next to it. But in a magazine for example in the image below, you really can't tell. 

Here the same image above in the magazine, 'I'll be Your Whore' is seen next to collector Lucy Roreck. 

And as I said, I want to talk about this idea of the picture we talked about in my very first talk. This distinction between Picture and Document and its relation to Program and Apparatus.  But let's talk first of the title of the book, Image Photograph.  

As I say in the beginning of book and part 1 of this talk and the blog post before, I want to image photography.  I want to see photography seeing.  I sometimes think of my book and my work and the images as a narrated archive which uses photography not as in absorption, more in the sense of document, as in images employed in a larger montage constructing an archive around a new condition of imaging, where in the beholder is the photographer himself. This sounds rather paradoxical, but within our always-already-imaged network culture, what can imaging allow us to see or how to see but this new imaging of ourselves in the very realm of the virtual and the very real online 

As written by Jeff Wall in his essay Marks of Indifference to writings of Jean Francois Chevrier and Michael Fried on the Tableau and the Picture, the advent of art photography takes flight after conceptual art as photography move beyond its period of reportage (Winogrand, Frank, Arbus) and its deadpan, deskilled use in conceptual art (Smithson, Ruscha, Grahmn) to know itself as an art of depiction that turns to Picture making. 

I have written about this before but it may be worth restating again. 

In the late 70's the critic Douglas Crimp wrote an essay entitled Pictures and a group of artist including Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Sherry Levine were later given the name The Pictures Generation. At this same time, the idea of the Picture or tableau was introduced with large scale photography with Jeff Wall, certain French photographers and the Dusseldorf School. These new photographic works following in the wake of conceptualism furthered the relationship between painting and photography in what had started with Rauschenberg's use of photographs in his paintings, onto Warhol, Richter, Polke and so many others mixing and moving freely between the two. 

Jeff Wall argued in his essay "Marks of Indifference", after the reductivism of conceptual art, photography realizes that what is essential about itself, is depiction. With this understanding the restoration of the concept of the Picture as a central category of contemporary art returns.  All western art before 1910 was grounded in the regime of depiction. Painting had done away with depiction as early as Malevich. Without depiction art would need an alternative validity and so we had the radical self-critques of a variety of avant-gardes,  all in search of what is essential about art or what makes art. Perhaps the most rigorous of these self-critiques is conceptual art in which photography is employed to document much of the work in a deadpan, amateur, non-art or un-aesthetic way.  

After photography's self critique through conceptualism, we start to see these extraordinary large photographs. The scale, consideration, composition and planning of these works have lead historians and philosophers including Michael Fried and Jean Francosie Chevrier to speak about these works with the idea of the tableau and history painting. Like history painting the photographic tableau amalgamates the art forms of photography, theatre and of course cinema. Think not only of Wall but Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gursky, Struth and in another direction Cindy Sherman and many others. 

All these photographers emerge in a period prior to web 2.0. If one thinks the digital changed photography Network Culture changed our relations to the image and imaging in an even greater way.

What the pictures generation worked through in their conversation with images as to authorship, appropriation, remix, versioning, the circulation and context of images, high and low images, authority and ownership of images, all of these issues are amplified in network culture because it's a readable and writable space continually variable, continually creating montage.

Below is a picture of the landing page for artists within the interface for artandculture, an online company I founded in San Francisco in the late nineties. A group of us designed this software to allow for both the didactic and surprising contextualization of variety of art practices. The cloud in the middle continually shifts and updates as it learns more about you. You see my name in the middle around me other proper names and keywords. As I and others go through the system and view and like more things and assign more attributes to my work and my interest the cloud changes setting up a variable context around me which in turn continually re-defines me.

This is happening all the time today but it's not new to the web, it's just more fluid and more pervasive so much so that we don't even see it or take notice. We are continually entering ourselves into these vast networks and creating enormous amounts of data about ourselves. Pictures of ourselves. Each picture in some sense resides in a cloud of other data, so just as pictures are valued or  take on meaning in specific cultures and markets, so they do in the context of other information, in other context which ascribe radically different values to them. 

Below is an image of a photograph being indexed by a software form factor. You can see it says photo on the upper left, and in the middle is a photograph of a cowboy and on the right it has three tags. All of it to me is a photograph, not just the picture in the middle but the whole of it. 

What you see below is the same image of the cowboy you see above. Above the image in red is a text about the sale of this image for over a million and a quarter dollars. Now to the right you see the image of the cowboy with Marlboro above it. 

What's going on here? How can an image made on assignment by a commercial photographer for a major brand be rephotographed by an artist and sold at a major auction house in the context of the art market?  By disassembling the brand from the image, perhaps Prince had liberated the image, made it his own. His seeing of the image, his seeing the picturing of the image as it works in a commercial context, his re-photography is a re-imaging. This re-imaging, restating, remixing is not at all unique to Prince only he worked with, at least in its time, a highly recognizable image. Warhol did the same with Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, and you can say in a way artists have reworked, restaged images and motifs from day one. In the context of the network, this is happening all the time. Ask yourself what the new owner of this picture was buying when they bought this image. They are buying the story that comes with it. They are buying the provenance of the picture. They are buying the market space that insures it value. Do you see any of that in the image? 

Cut, copy, paste, decontextualize and recontexualize. 

You are being seen and scanned all the time. You are continually being transacted as an image. Not just a photographic image but a bio metric image, a credit image, a security risk image - all of us live in the regime of imaging. Not the regime of the image but the regime of imaging. 

Ground zero of this is the network and increasingly the Internet of things. I want to take pictures of our  network culture as the uncanny and strange thing it is though it appears so very familiar.  Again, the above is a photograph. Its not a screen shot.  Just as this is.

The Regime of Imaging emerges in the pervasiveness of these new imaging tools and environments. These tools alter our perceptions, our seeing, giving us an increased repertoire of imaging.  Let's now in our next post more closely read these tropes as we discussed above the context and history in which they have emerged.

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Thanks to David Bate and his talk, The Alterity of Images