Fair Foto
Interview with Adam Broomberg
Photography has been a problematic medium since its invention. Due to its indexical qualities we often forget that the medium interprets reality and by no means represents “truth”. Subjects portrayed rarely have a say in the way they are represented and almost never receive financial compensation generated by their image.
We spoke with educator, artist and activist Adam Broomberg about his involvement with NFT (non-fungible token), the problematic nature of the medium and his initiative “Fair Foto”. Via blockchain technology, It aims to recalibrate power dynamics between photographer and the subject, protecting copyright and proposing an ethical pathway for the future of image making.
FOTODEMIC: How did you get into NFT and how do you interact with it?
Adam Broomberg: About three years ago, there were two pieces of writing that really caught my attention. One by a Mckenzie Wark, who is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the New School. She wrote a piece called “My Collectible Ass.” I’ll paraphrase it badly but it spoke about how once rarity was the commodity, increasing the value of the art work. Right now it is kind of inverted, speaking about how, in a way, the more the painting is disseminated on social media, like IG, the more it is copied - the more value it has. Mckenzie also spoke about the notion of the blockchain and decentralized economies and open-sourced intellectual ideas.
Then there was another piece by Jason Bailey, “Photography and the Blockchain,” and both of these pieces presented a kind of utopian vision of the future that meant that if we accept the fact that now most images are made of digital data, and you can actually verify the data and solidify it in a way and lock it, why not go back to what we believed fifty years ago, like Lucy Lippard wrote in the “Dematerialization of the Art Object”? Literally forty-fifty years ago we were prepared to buy something that was not physical. The problem with photography is that it has always been on the bottom of the food chain in terms of the art world. It doesn’t have the aura, the fingerprint of the artist and is also reproducible ad infinitum even if it is analog, never mind digital.
We have a potential to build a utopia, and what do we do? We go and replicate not even the 21st century but the 17th century. We are recreating colonial gestures.
I am a professor of photography at Hamburg University, and I started bringing this up in my class. After watching the blockchain and more recently the NFT environment for about three-four years, what happened now is like a perfect storm: you’ve got Covid, everybody is inside, you’ve got a generation that was brought up as gamers, with a particular aesthetic leaning, plus crypto currency became an attraction as a solid investment. And then technological development to the point where, if you ever spend time in the VR chat in a pair of Occulus glasses which cost around 200-300 dollars now, you are walking through a bar, a gymnasium, yoga center or a meditation room. It’s an unhinged and wild world. Then you’ve got other places on the metaverse, like Decentraland and other places which sound equally as insane. Decentraland started a few years ago and it’s a digital land, where plots of land were for sale, and what it originally looked like was, I don’t know,Trinidad? It’s basically looked ripe for colonization without having to kill the local inhabitants. At the time you could buy a plot of land 16x16. Two years ago it cost about 200-300 dollars and now its worth about six times that, while the currency, Manna, increased 600 times in value.
It’s a digital replica of the power structure of the world right now, where the middle-aged white men are in power. That is why I got engaged as an ally and collaborator with a number of people who would bring in a different vocabulary into this place.
I can’t take the art world response to this seriously. As we know about the art world is ripe with money laundering, and the least regulated economy on the planet. I also don’t take seriously their critique of the aesthetics of NFT’s. I don’t think that “quality” is a valid word when you are critiquing somebody’s work. My taste is very different to my little boy’s taste who is into Pokemon cards. He sits with me with one of those cards and he describes for half an hour what’s impressive and valuable about it, visually and conceptually, and I accept it. I am not judging any of the works that I see on the NFT. What I do judge is when I look at the demographic of the NFT world and see who is producing these works. When I look at the demographic of a place like Decentraland, I look at how the notion of the woman is depicted in these NFT’s and all of it starts to get really disturbing. You see that it’s 70-80 percent white, middle-aged heteronormative men who are running it, producing it, consuming it. I mean it’s Wall Street.
What freaks me out is that we have a potential to build a utopia, and what do we do? We go and replicate not even the 21st century but the 17th century. We are recreating colonial gestures. It’s a digital replica of the power structure of the world right now, where the middle-aged white men are in power. That is why I got engaged as an ally and a collaborator with a number of people who would bring in a different vocabulary into this place, for example, a friend of mine, Gigi, who is a transgender activist and an actress, and we made some pieces together.
The White Cube by Adam Broomberg in collaboration with Guy de Lancey and Brian O’Doherty.
A lot of conscription, description and education around NFT happened on the app called Clubhouse. I kind of felt like a spy in this space where I was listening in and contributing and questioning. I wasn’t there just to gather some information, just to mint some NFTs to make some money. I was there just listening to the language. And the language was quite interesting, it was quite evangelistic. When I listened to the language what I kept hearing was that it is decentralized, everybody could get rich, even if you are a teenager out in Siberia.
We were watching Black Lives Matter, we were watching institutions struggling with gender imbalance, inclusivity, race, LGBTQI issues and here we have a massive new economy being built, a digital parallel world that is completely oblivious to these completely real struggles that the rest of the world is going through.
It had all these promises, and what I realized was that a lot of the promises were actually euphemisms. Decentralized meant deregulated, that no one is watching. Of course there is gate-keeping there. Another promise was the progressive nature of this technology. I didn’t see or hear about any projects that were meant to benefit society in any way.
So this is what started really worrying me about it. In the interim we were watching Black Lives Matter, we were watching all of our institutions struggling with gender imbalance, inclusivity, race, LGBTQI issues and here we have a massive new economy being built, a digital parallel world that is completely oblivious to these completely real struggles that the rest of the world is going through. Which struck me as very strange. I read an article that in Decentraland they are building the biggest museum in the world. It may sound weird, “in the world,” because people exist in IRL —in real life— but actually the writer, Legacy Russel, a curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she talks about these digital places as essential reference points of our life here. The way we conduct ourselves in those spaces is very important. Where it comes to your point, that yes, it has become a boy’s club.
Literally what stopped me from taking pictures was exactly this: the notion of informed consent was a bunch of bullshit. In this new technology there is a potential to solve a lot of the ethical problems that photography has always had.
Is there an ethical, clean way of being a photographer?
No. No way. Even when you are taking a selfie. Literally what stopped me from taking pictures —and I did it for 10-12 or more years, from refugee camps to prisons, to psychiatric hospitals, to you name it— was exactly this: the notion of informed consent was a bunch of bullshit. I’ve made an entire book that took me three years, and everyone in that book was not aware of how their image would be used or disseminated or have any share in the money earned or say in how it’s used.
But, with this new technology there is a potential to solve a lot of the ethical problems that photography has always had. However this ecosystem has been built by people who are not concerned about ethics.
A member of my family went to a very elite university to study engineering and coding and in the four years of studying didn’t get 15 minutes of ethics. When you study medicine you learn ethics once a week and at the end you’ve got to sign an oath before you practice. Аre you building a bridge to transport soldiers or bread? No one has asked that question, it’s just build the bridge in the fastest and most efficient way.
“Going. Full time 1.” by Adam Broomberg in collaboration with Gersande Spelsberg and computational artist Isaac Schaal.
I think that the argument of relationship between truth and the image is an old one. It’s very conclusive that there is a very dubious relationship between the two.
What about the fears about the synthetic image compromising the credibility of all images and rendering them useless? Can we use this to solve that issue, do you see this as an opportunity to start again? Deconstruct the old notions of image being truth and create new strategies that help us move forward?
I think that the argument of relationship between truth and the image is an old one. It’s very conclusive that there is a very dubious relationship between the two. Probably a third of my class in Hamburg and also The Hague are making images —and I can go as far as to call them “photographs”— using 3d scanners, blender, unity, cinema 4d and unreal engine, and people are kind of a little bit up in arms about it. But I’d say that is exactly what happened when digital arrived and the analog people were rejecting it.
When you say that this is a chance to kind of start again, it is but we need to be careful. We know that when Kodak was invented, it was predicated to white skin. We also know that there is a bias built into these algorithms because they are mostly built by white men and unfortunately a lot of this technology it’s already been colonized. But it’s relatively new so we are not dealing with centuries of colonizations.
People are talking a lot about digital colonialism: access discrepancy due to internet speed or having the money to mint things or engage in this world, emphasizing discrepancy between rich and poor.
If you look at the work of the activist and artist Lajuné Macmillan, who deals with 3d archives. She noticed a chronic lack of black bodies and also black body movement. She also talks about digital black-facing, which is a very interesting and very common thing where people appropriate black body movement and can modify it and make a lot of money on Tik Tok and Instagram. But the point is that the technology is very new and there is time to deal with it.
People are talking a lot about digital colonialism, where they talk about access discrepancy to this stuff due to internet speed or having the money to mint things or engage in this world, emphasizing discrepancy between rich and poor. There are a lot of people doing work around that. At the moment I think that people are on the back foot a little bit, because everyone is screaming “Ethics!”.
Everyone involved in Fair Foto recognizes that the notion of photography has always been ethically problematic. The person behind the camera is in a position of power and the subject is powerless in terms of any kind of contract, whether it is financial, or how it’s going to be disseminated and in what context.
Can you talk about your idea of “Fair Foto”?
It’s really just an idea at the moment. We are in the process of gathering people from various sectors: technology, photojournalism, lawyers dealing with IP as well as talking to companies like ADOBE and Verisart who are involved in blockchain certificates. Everyone involved recognizes that the notion of photography has always been ethically problematic. The person behind the camera, which is generally a white man, is in a position of power, and the subject is powerless in terms of any kind of contract, whether it is financial, or how it’s going to be disseminated and in what context.
Steve McCurry’s image of the afghan girl is the most known example, which even my grandmother would recognize that it’s just wrong. A young girl who is meant to have a face covered is uncovered while being photographed. The image generates millions but the share is disproportionate, plus her life was affected radically and she had to go into exile because she was recognized. But on the other hand, this also works for photographers. Firstly, it has become impossible to control the dissemination of the images on the internet and verify our ownership of them. Also, wouldn’t you want to feel comfortable taking the picture of somebody that you know will have a say in the process of whatever life that picture has, both financially or politically? It’s a bit like having a prenup, or a will if you have a partner, or if you are planning to change it after a while.
There is multiple ways of making this contract so easy - simply sharing the email or using facial recognition. And blockchain technology built into the jpg or tiff or the raw file, locates the GPS location, the time but also the identity of the subject are built into the contract.
Sex Work by Adam Broomberg in collaboration with Aja Jacques and Segolene Hutter.
NFT seems like a great solution in terms of maintaining copyright, credibility and now you are introducing financial distribution models. Yet again, just it is challenging to be a photographer in a “clean” way, this method seems problematic due to power consumption. There is not a lot of quantitative data available to measure the consumption but some researches suggest that minting a token emits the same amount of CO2 between an artist studio’s electric use of a year to flying a jumbo jet for 1000 hours. Is there a conversation about reducing those emissions?
That is being addressed, they are responding to the pressure. Every time anyone says NFT, it’s like “fuck!.” It’s actually kind of pathetic. It started with the bitcoin, when to verify the value of the coin it had to be “mined.” It has to consume the same energy as it would to get the value of gold out of the ground. As if you must insist on that much damage to the planet for anything to be valuable.
There are platforms that don’t use Ethereum and there are platforms that don’t use the contract called “Proof of Work”, instead they use “Proof of Stake”. “Proof of Work” consumes an enormous amount and the other one uses barely anything. Again, you have rogue, hungry and greedy people moving very fast, but there has been so much protest about that, that it will change within months and it will be the standard. There are a lot of questions, but I think there are so many questions about photography as we know it, that something has to be addressed and I think that this model might be potentially helpful.
“21” by Adam Broomberg in collaboration with Gersande Spelsberg and computational artist Isaac Schaal.
What do you say to people who think that embedding this kind of tech inside an image is like nicknaming a nuke "the peacekeeper"?
The reason why you got that response and I got that response is because of the perception of the ethical police coming to attack once again a very brutal infrastructure.
This idea troubled many photojournalists, which I understand on the instinctual level, since their job is hard enough right now. There is no money in it, they can’t operate in most places. The point is I think that this is going to alleviate so much of that stress. The images will be trackable the moment they are broadcasted, they are not going to be used in any way that photographers don’t want them to be or aware of. They will be ethical because instead of bringing some flimsy signature on a consent form that has been badly translated to somebody under extreme stress in a way - that’s just not going to hold up in court. Photographers will know every time the image is being used. In my experience it has happened a thousand times, when I am not aware of how my image is being used and paid for without my understanding.
The images will be ethical because instead of bringing some flimsy signature on a consent form that has been badly translated to somebody under extreme stress in a way - that’s just not going to hold up in court. Photographers will know every time the image is being used.
Mirage by Adam Broomberg in collaboration with Gersande Spelsberg.
Last year, during the world wide reckoning with social justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, many called for protesters faces to be disguised and blurred to avoid prosecution. Can facial recognition component of this application compromise the safety of the subjects?
I like the idea of co-opting a nefarious technology and using it for something benevolent. But equally somebody just has to give you an email. Same way you have to sign into every single email right now, it’s the same consent. Do you want to control the cookies? Then you enter that into Creative Commons. You can do that between photographer and the subject: do you want to control your cookies? Yes. I give you permission to use this image for one year. In the worst case scenario, in the war zone you can’t be passing email across each other, people can be identified if they want to and the contract can be sitting there in both derivical and an economic sense, like an escrow account, if Steve McCurry’s subject gets to 23 years old and says: no more, stop! Or the model that Terry Richardson photographed at 16 and who now doesn’t want a picture of her naked out there still circulating, they can make it stop as well.
I think that every institution, every school is going through the same struggle. We’ve all got to start acting ethically because of the environment, inclusivity, bipoc, LGBTQI+ communities and our photographic practice needs fine tuning.
The way this thing needs to be built is by taking the key players from each sector of the industry from Kathy Ryan to Magnum to model agents, hearing everybody’s concerns, and try to meet them all as opposed to imposing. Essentially what this is, is just a legal document that is built into the photograph. It needs to be a document that can be adjustable, you can tweak the stipulations and it can be adjustable over time as well. Also for the photographer, if in ten-years time you regret taking the picture, if you want to remove it from the private sector, you would be able to do that. You can just kill it like you can burn the NFTs, you can just get rid of them.
I think that every institution, every school is going through the same struggle. We’ve all got to start acting ethically because of the environment, inclusivity, bipoc, LGBTQI+ communities and our photographic practice needs fine tuning. This is going to be a group effort from all of the sectors of photographic world. I don’t have the solutions, but what if this could be pointing us in the right direction?
CAPTIONS
The White Cube
“Inside the white cube we don't speak in a normal voice, one does not laugh, one does not eat, drink, lie down, or sleep, one does not get ill, go mad, sing, dance, or make love... Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the technology of aesthetics. Art exists in a kind of eternity. While eyes and minds are welcome, space occupying bodies are not. Emotions are turned into a consumer product” — Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. This was made as a collaboration with Guy de Lancey and Brian O'Doherty and all three of us share authorship, ownership and a fear of losing touch with reality. Adam Broomberg and Guy de Lancey collaborated with Brian O’Doherty to create a virtual gallery space in which his words, originally published in 1986, are chilling in their contemporary relevance. Here, none of the laws that govern our daily lives apply: gravity, morality, bodily, functions, geographic space or chronological time. Like in his original text Brian invites us to consider the architecture of the white cube; and by extension the moral, political and economic codes embedded in the virtual worlds we now increasingly find ourselves living in.
Going Full Time 1
My friend and collaborator Gersande Spelsberg had sex reassignment surgery 5 years ago. We asked an AI algorithm to change a photograph I took of her into what it considers to be a “man”. The dataset that trained the AI taught it to create a linear spectrum: Walk in one direction, become more feminine. Walk in the opposite direction, become more masculine. Hidden within the algorithm, however, are the human decisions and biases that went into its creation. These are revealed in the animation. The work was created by Adam Broomberg with Isaac Schaal and Gersande Spelsberg, who share equal ownership of the work and will share the primary and any subsequent sales on the secondary market. Adam Broomberg is a renowned contemporary artist whose work is held in collections such as MoMA and Tate Modern. This is his first NFT.
Verisart Certified: https://verisart.com/works/5ac0a8a6-37a3-4ec5-86df-af5ec729b5e8
Sex Work
We live in a society where services are bought and sold. My work, sex work (both on and offline) is one of these services. Providing sexual services should not be criminalised. We condemn the hypocrisy within our societies where our services are used but our profession or businesses are made illegal. This legislation results in abuse and lack of control over our work and lives. Sex workers should not be perceived purely as victims to be assisted, criminals to be arrested or targets for public health interventions – we are part of society, with needs and aspirations, who have the potential to make a real and valuable contribution to our communities. We oppose the criminalisation of sex workers, their partners, clients, managers, and everyone else working in sex work. Such criminalisation denies sex workers of equal protection of the law. This includes the right to form and join professional associations and unions that protect us both on and offline. The right to work, to choose one’s work, and to fair and safe working conditions are fundamental human rights. - Aja Jacques with Adam Broomberg and Segolene Hutter.
21
"This is the only picture I have of myself from before I transitioned. I was 21 and now I see how handsome I was. But then my body dysmorphia made me disconnected from the image I saw in the mirror, I saw a distorted image. This was 1999, being feminine gay wasn't accepted then so I was trying to look so macho. the next ten years felt like a vacuum, as if I was frozen. This is someone I have left behind and now I eat life." -Gersande Spelsberg. This work is a collaboration between the renowned artist Adam Broomberg, computational artist Isaac Schaal and the transgender actress and activist, Gersande Spelsberg.
Mirage
This was photographed on the Lido in Venice just a few weeks before Gersande Spelsberg, my friend and transgender actress and activist, had sex reassignment surgery. Bodies are harder to edit than pixels are. It takes
immense courage and endurance to transition and change the shape of skin, muscles, and tendons. This film
is a mirage, a little boy's daydream of the future. A message from her adult self to the past.
Interview by Alexey Yurenev
Artists bio
Adam Broomberg (b. 1970, Johannesburg) is an artist, activist and educator. He currently lives and works in Berlin. He is a professor of photography at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg and teaches in the MA Photography & Society program at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. For two decades, he was one half of the critically acclaimed artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin.
Broomberg has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at The Centre Georges Pompidou (2018) and the Hasselblad Center (2017), among others. His participation in international group shows include the Yokohama Trienniale (2017); Documenta, Kassel (2017); The British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern (2015); Shanghai Biennale (2014); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); Tate Britain (2014); and the Gwanju Biennale (2012). His work is held in major public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Baltimore Museum of Art, Centres Pompidou, Cleveland Museum of Art, MoMA, Stedelijk Museum, Tate, Yale University Art Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum. Major awards include the Arles Photo Text Award (2018), ICP Infinity Award (2014) for Holy Bible and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2013) for War Primer 2.
The works he has made as NFT's are all collaborations that deal with issue of diversity and inclusivity.