Here: The Apparatus That Pictures

The seeing of seeing. The picture of visioning. I want now to turn our attention to imaging. Not images, not pictures, but imaging itself. How can we see the picture of pictures? A picture of a picture's picturing.

Along the way I want to see if we can make a distinction between series and variability. I think this may help us better understand what I mean by the 'picturing of picturing' or the 'apparatus that pictures'.

We know that the camera is a picturing machine. A machine indifferent to what it sees.

In his essay, Marks of Indifference, Jeff Wall gives a good description of the camera apparatus:
“Photography constitutes a depiction not by the accumulation of individual marks, but by the instantaneous operation of an integrated mechanism. All the rays permitted to pass through the lens form an image immediately, and the lens, by definition, creates a focused image at its correct focal length. Depiction is the only possible result of the camera system, and the kind of image formed by a lens is the only image possible in photography.'

Long before cameras that could fix an image to a substrate we had optics. This is the reason so many paintings look photographic because painters used optics to fix an image on the canvas in all its exact and correct proportions which then than draw by hand. David Hockney and his physicist colleague, Charles Falco in their book and film, Secret Knowledge, have argued that there were three optical instruments that aided painters; the camera lucida, the camera obscura and the concave mirror. In making this claim, according to some critics they've taken away the mystery and awe we have for works of such masters as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and others taking away credit from the unique vision of their talents and accounted for them by virtue of machine vision.

I want to make clear that the use of optics does not mean that someone like Vermeer was simply copying what he saw. I like what Jonathan Cary has said about Hockney's claims in reference to Gericault's Raft of Medusa, and I think Hockney would agree, that the ingredients of illusion are often contextual and non-optical, Cary citing how Gericault used many textual reference for his painting. In other words a optics alone do not make an image.

Further is Jacques Ranciere's notion in speaking of the regime of representation that representation is not resemblance which leads me to suggest that one must not think of photography as copying or directly dipticting but a continuing of a redistribution of the relations between the visible and the sayable specific to the representative regime in the arts brought about by painting and the novel. This regime is one of a certain alteration of resemblance. It is according to Ranciare as constituted in the 19th century 'a way in which things themselves speak and are silent.' 'Silent speech is the eloquence of the very thing that is silent, the capacity to exhibit signs written on a body, the marks directly imprinted by its history, which is more truthful than discourse proffered by the mouth.' But this is to say this things do not appear in and of themselves in the simple act of recording. In other words there is no simple act of recording. P13 The Future of the Image

Ranciere gives us in The Future of the Image a description of the photographic image that evolves over time but even from the very beginning does something more than resemble in its depiction. In fact he states today's image, or at least images in the realm of contemporary art work against resemblance.

Though he says this in the context of the end of the representative regime and the advent of the aesthetic regime or modernity as a turn away from figuration and narration, a turn away from mimesis or intimation he is telling us that the mimetic was and is a set of rules. This invites us to consider that mechanical vision may not be what we reflectively take it to be and that is to make a analogous copy of something out there in the world, to mechanically make an identical image of the phenomenal real. No the camera is not taking a picture of you or me or anything. Rather it is a formation of matter as only a camera can. What then is the image the camera takes but the image of the camera's picturing.

If this is the case, and no matter how we parse the photographic image as did Roland Barthes in his distinction in reading photographs in two modes, between the stadium, the schema or the thing recorded and the punctum, the wound in the image that touches us, that speaks silently to us, there is the camera's picturing. There is the camera imposing form on matter not simply recording or representing matter. And though the aesthetic regime of the image exceeds the normative codes of representation that might to some feign to present the real, there seems always to be an experiential realm that sees a picture in an image. I don't mean a figurative picture necessarily but a picture.

In fact it may be fair to say that in Jeff Wall's article referred to above, he is simply saying that the camera as a technical instrument can not anything but depict and with this as its sole and exclusive utility the artist who uses the camera is beckoned to make Pictures.

This notion of the picture comes out of the history of the tableaux and painting and the academy. Such pictures and the rules to define them come are much discussed in the regime of representation that Ranciere, Michael Fried, Jean Francois Chevalier ... and many others have written about.

In a bit I want to talk further about this idea of the picture. But first I want to talk about the event of recording. Not the scene in front of the camera but the scene the camera creates. Needless to say more and more there is no scene in front of the camera but a software program creating a scene from a variety of pictures with layering and lighting effects. Such pictures are composed and conceived in a much wider context than we often consider.

For our argument to focus on the picture alone is to make ourselves blind to the picturing apparatus, the program of pictures that not only includes its technical apparatus but its programs of reception, dissemination and circulation.

We have spoken about this in the first talk Photograph, Picture, Program so I want now spend some time on this idea of The Apparatus that pictures.

Let's start in the middle of my book Image Photograph which you've been given to read. Let's take a look at the Tumblr Series

I'm pretty sure most all of you are familiar with the blogging platform Tumblr. On it many people share photographs. Photographs that others can comment on and pass on to others.

Here you are seeing an archive view of works, some found and altered, some just found as I found the in their circulation on line. All the time these works are changing.

I decided to fabricate these works and scale them up because I felt on the computer screen we could not really see them. They disappeared in a sense behind the small screen. If you look on the right, the picture of the skulls, you can see see a good number of names of users who have posted liking this picture. The number of likes continually change as do the names and comments next to the image. This I consider a picture of the seeing of seeing. Of seeing an image of images in continual exchange in circulation.

I wanted to take this picture and make it a photograph. I wanted to make it an object to be beheld. I wanted to make it a material object. Not just an image. But an object. A thing in this world. A materialization that is most often thought of as immaterial. An image on a screen. You click off it and it goes away. But this the image on the screen, this image in the network is very material and its appearance absolutely depends on the vast technical and material infrastructure that realizes it. Its circulation takes a great many bodies and each of them leaves a trace of themselves on this image. You see that moment by moment.

Images today are in conversation. In circulation and the formats and programs they present them in carry with them a social body, a technical infrastructure that is written all over the image. This is the image of the image in circulation, the social conversation on and off screen of the image. The image made as a picture. The picture being the image materialized as a photograph.

So what is an Image Photograph?

I think of it as a continuum between Image Photograph Program.

Now as i said I want to move backwards and forward from here. So let's take the start of the book and

the statement 'photography as an image'.

At this point, and especially at the point of the digital, when analog photography, chemical photography gets synthesized and becomes digital, photography becomes a memory of itself. It is both what is was and something else but it is not quite what it was. The digital allows us to see photography and how photography saw things. From photography to electronic culture and electronic instruments we move from photography to a vast instrumentation of the visual. Photography then constitutes a small part of the visual realm or visuality. Think only of radio telescopes, MRI's, sonar, data mining, the web browser as a camera and the many instruments that have changed our sense of perception, of what we can perceive. In this realm, somewhere in it is photography as we generally think of it. What interest me as I have told you is photography's seeing.

Take these two images from the book. And when I say image, I want to talk about that. Image Photograph are they the same? Does it help us to make a distinction. I will return to that later, that is the embodied experience of the beholder of the image, the perceivers relation to the image photograph in terms of scale, context, duration and all those qualities of what it is to behold.

This beholding is what interest me in the Magritte image on your right. At the MoMA show on Magritte I saw the painting you see in front of the man seeing it. Moments later I saw this young man wearing a black suit with a white collar with very black hair cut very much like the figure in the painting. It excited me tremendously and so I asked him to pose for me in front of the painting and so positioned him as you see him in the picture. I like this image very much as the figure does not look back at us as one would expect in a mirror. The figure keeps looking forward. And I think that's what photography works are like, they are looking onward and past us though we are convince the image looks back at us. Perhaps I see the bite of the absolute other in photography and not the pure pleasure of presence.

As to the book case on the left, I wanted to show how photography sees it in so many colors and variants, to show that on the other side of the camera what is there and constituted there is a camera seeing. Today's camera, a software camera, brings to seeing and recording instantaneously multiple effects, it brings to recording the whole arsenal and history of photographic techniques in a phone. Of course not the whole of it such as a large format camera, at least in your phone, but it brings to one a very extensive repertoire of camera seeing.

This regime of the visual changes our experience, our perceptions of the world, our being in the world. I think the imaging of these instruments very much furthers this idea of the optical unconscious that Benjamin writes about in his short history of photography, and furthers our sense of intimacy and touch that McLuhan talks about in terms of the altering of sense ratios that happens from the movement of print to the electronic age. I hope to put forward a photography about perception as a result of the digital and network culture. I believe network culture is a new regime of the visual as is our networked and mobile phones. It extends our site and seeing globally instantaneously. Does it change anything in terms of the political, I don't know. But it certainly changes our senses of solitude, revery, memory, the image, imaging and I want to photograph this not simply use the new to create images that come from the seeing of the old environment but to record, document and make pictures of this new regime of seeing and recording. I want to do it as it is lived.

These composite image above are pictures of myself in video chat with others on a service called chat roulette. Here the photographer, myself is seen at the same moment as the subject. That I found absolutely unusual. To record the photographer and the subject simultaneously. I do not think of these nor the above images as representations but the presentation of presence. They are an event constituted by photography itself. But it is a presence in the forms of its circulation, in fact its presence is the form of its circulation of an imaging of its apparatus. Not the camera instrument alone, but the network relations that put seeing into view. That put imaging on.

I like the image of imaging. I like the event that is an event only if seen through the camera. The image today is the moment lived. It is the camera that creates the stage for the living moment. We live to be imaged and live again in the network of images. Unlike the Magritte picture, here what the camera sees faces us. And though as I said above, this image looks past us not at us.