Nonhuman Photography
PART I

PART I/II

Abstract

Living in the media-saturated society of the 21st century has become tantamount to being photographed on a constant basis. Our identity is constituted and confirmed by the ongoing flow of photo streams on our mobile phones, tablets and social media platforms such as Facebook and Tumblr, not to mention the thousands of security cameras invisibly registering our image when we pass through city centres, shopping malls and airports. This photographic process is largely automatized: it is subject to the logic and vision of the machine. Even the supposed human-centric decisions with regard to what to photograph and how to do it are often reactions to events quickly unfolding in front of the photographer’s eyes, or responses to pre-established visual categories: landscape, portraiture, play, war. Human-driven photography – involving an act of conscious looking through a viewfinder or at an LCD screen – is only one small part of what takes place in the field of photography, even though it is often made to stand in for photography as such. Yet, rather than contribute to recent jeremiads about photography – what with it being seen as supposedly dying in the digital era because it is no longer authentic or material enough, or imploding due to its excessiveness and banality as evidenced on Instagram and in the much maligned selfie phenomenon – it also suggests that it is precisely through focusing on its nonhuman aspect that we can find life in photography.

Photography as philosophy

What is meant by nonhuman photography here is not just photos taken by agents that are not human, such as CCTV cameras, body scanners, space satellites or Google Street View, although some of these examples will be referenced throughout the piece. Yet the principal aim of this article is to suggest that there is more to photography than meets the (human) eye and that all photography is to some extent nonhuman.

Called Topia daedala (Images 1–4), this series of twelve black and white photographs arises out of an ongoing exploration on my part of various forms of manufactured landscape. Taken from two vantage points on both sides of a window, the composite images that make up the series interweave human and nonhuman creativity by overlaying the outer world of cloud formation with the inner space of sculptural arrangement. Remediating the tradition of the sublime as embraced by J.M.W. Turner’s landscape paintings and Ansel Adams’ national park photographs, the series foregrounds the inherent manufacturedness of what counts as ‘landscape’ and of the conventions of its visual representation. Through this, Topia daedala performs a micro-sublime for the Anthropocene era, a period in which the human has become identified as a geological agent whose impact on the geo- and biosphere has been irreversible. It also raises questions on the role of plastic – as both construction material and debris – in the age of petrochemical urgency.

is it possible to practice philosophy as a form of art, while also engaging in art-making and photography as ways of philosophising?

Topia daedala is not meant to serve as a direct illustration of the concept of nonhuman photography this article engages with. However, it does introduce us to a wider problematic of human-nonhuman relations, raising at the same time the politico-ethical question about our human responsibility in the world in which the agency of the majority of actants – such as wind, rain or earthquake – goes beyond that of human decision or will, even if it may be influenced by human action. The question of human responsibility in the universe which is quintessentially entangled, on both a cellular and cosmic level (with us all being ‘made of starstuff’), is an important one. Even if we cannot be entirely sure what this fragile human ‘we’ actually stands for, the responsibility to face, and give an account of, the unfoldings of this world – which is made up of human and nonhuman entities and relations – belongs to us humans in a singular way. Philosophy, in particular ethics, has typically been a way of addressing the problem of responsibility. But written linear argument is only one mode of enquiry through which this problem can be approached. Alongside philosophical writing, over the recent years I have been attempting to experiment with other, less verbal, modes of addressing ethical and political issues: those enabled by art, and, more specifically, photography. These experiments have been driven by one overarching question: is it possible to practice philosophy as a form of art, while also engaging in art-making and photography as ways of philosophising?

The reason photography may lend itself to this kind of cross-modal experimentation is because of its ontological, or world-making (rather than just representational), capabilities. We can turn here for support to literary critic Walter Benn Michaels, who, while upholding ‘the impossibility (and the undesirability) of simply denying the indexicality of the photograph’, also argues that ‘It is precisely because there are ways in which photographs are not just representations that photography and the theory of photography have been so important’. My proposition about photography’s ontological capabilities entails a stronger claim than the one made by Michael Fried in the Conclusion to his book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, in which photography as practiced by representatives of what Fried calls ‘the anti-theatrical tradition’ such as Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth or Berndt and Hilda Becher is positioned as ‘an ontological medium’, because it ‘makes a positive contribution’ to ontological thought via its engagement with issues such as absorption and worldhood. While for Fried photography just makes philosophy better, my claim in this article is that photography makes philosophy, full stop – and also, more importantly, that photography makes worldhood, rather than just commenting on it.

It may seem at this point that what was meant to be an account of nonhuman photography is revealing itself to be quite strongly attached to the concept of the human – as philosopher, photographer or art critic. This is true, because there is nothing more humanist than any unexamined singular gesture of trying to ‘move on beyond the human’. My ambition here, as in my other work, is therefore to explore the possibility of continuing to work with the concept of the human in the light the posthumanist critique, taking the latter seriously as both an injunction and a set of possibilities. The reasons for this proposed retention of the human have nothing to do with any kind of residual humanism or species nostalgia. Instead, they spring from the recognition of a strategic role of the concept of the human in any kind of artistic, creative, political or ethical project worth its salt, while also remaining aware of the fact that in many works of recent posthumanist theory the human has been successfully exposed as nothing more than a fantasy of unity and selfhood.

We are in (philosophical) trouble as soon as we start speaking about the human

This fantasy has been premised on the exclusion of the human’s dependency, both material and conceptual, on other beings and non-living entities. Seen as too Eurocentric and masculinist by postcolonial and feminist theory, the human has also been revealed by various sciences to be just an arbitrary cut off point in the line of species continuity on the basis of characteristics shared across the species barrier: communication, emotions or tool use. This (non- or posthumanist) human this article retains as the anchor point of its enquiry is thus premised on the realisation that we are in (philosophical) trouble as soon as we start speaking about the human, but it also shows a certain intransigence that makes (some of) us hang on to the vestiges of the concept that has structured our thinking, philosophy and art for many centuries.

Towards nonhuman photography (and all the way back)

By way of contextualising our discussion of nonhuman photography, I want to look at two important texts in photography theory in which the relationship between human and nonhuman agents, technologies and practices has been addressed explicitly: a 2008 essay by John Tagg titled ‘Mindless Photography’ and a 2009 book by Fred Ritchin titled After Photography. Tagg’s essay is a commentary on the supposed withering of the critical paradigm in both photographic practice and its interpretation, a paradigm articulated by Victor Burgin in his 1984 seminal text Thinking Photography and subsequently adopted by many scholars and students of photography.

in the London traffic surveillance system, the relationship between the embodied human subject and the technical apparatus has been irrevocably broken

In his article Tagg references two then recent phenomena which, in his view, had radically altered the relationship between photography and the human: the CCTV system introduced in 2003 to monitor the implementation of congestion charge in central London and the visual rendering of data captured by a radio telescope, in June 2005, of solar dust cloud radiation in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, with the data representing an event that ‘took place in 1585, or thereabouts’. While in the 1970s and early 1980s ‘photography was framed as a site of human meanings that called the human into place’, the more recent developments cited by Tagg are said to have undermined ‘this confident assumption’. Tagg seems disturbed by the fact that, in the London traffic surveillance system, the relationship between the embodied human subject and the technical apparatus has been irrevocably broken, with the technological circuit which consists of ‘cameras, records, files and computers’ doing away with visual presentation, ‘communication, psychic investment, a subject, or even a bodily organ’ – until the visual data concerning the car with a given number plate that has missed the congestion charge payment reaches the court. Tagg is similarly troubled by the severance of the relationship between photography and human sensation, between stimulus and response, in space photography. He goes so far as to suggest that in those new technological developments: “photography loses its function as a representation of the ego and the eye and even as a pleasure machine built to excite the body. In place of those figures, photography is encountered as an utterly dead thing; mindless in a much blunter sense than imagined [by Burgin] twenty-five years ago… [It is] driving towards a systemic disembodiment that, accelerating in the technologies of cybernetics and informatics, has sought to prepare what has been hailed as the ‘postbiological’ or ‘posthuman’ body for its insertions into a new machinic enslavement.” - John Tagg, ‘Mindless Photography'

Photography does not deliver life to the human any more and, for Tagg, it is only the human that can be both life’s subject and its arbiter.

Photography which is unable to provide stimulation and pleasure for the human is then immediately linked by Tagg with mindlessness, emptiness and, ultimately, death. It may seem that, with this articulation, Tagg is engaging in a belated attempt to rescue photography from its long-standing association with mortality established by canonical texts such as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and to retrospectively postulate the possibility of photography acting as a life-giving force. However, this no doubt radical possibility, briefly hinted at in the above cited passage, is immediately withdrawn. Photography does not deliver life to the human any more and, for Tagg, it is only the human that can be both life’s subject and its arbiter. This is of course a familiar philosophical gesture, first enacted by Aristotle, whereby technology is reduced to a mere tool for human existence, survival or improvement and is then assessed on the basis of how well it performs this function (rather than being understood as a dynamic network of forces the way Michel Foucault and Bernard Stiegler respectively suggest, or as an ‘intrinsic correlation of functions’ between the human and the apparatus the way Vilém Flusser apprehends it). Conceived in these instrumental terms, as the human’s opponent and enemy – and not part of the originary techno-logic that brings forth the human in the world, and the world itself as a space occupied by human and nonhuman entities – photography must inevitably fail.

It would be unfair not to mention the political motivation that underpins Tagg’s argument. His concern with ‘machinic enslavement’ is driven by what he sees as the deprivation of the human subject of both corporeal integrity and political subjectivity as a result of the encroachment of those new photoimaging technologies, in which ‘there is nothing to be seen’, on our lives. This concern no doubt becomes even more pressing in the era of global networked surveillance enacted by the likes of the NSA, GCHQ, Facebook and Google. Yet to blame photography for the immoral and inhumane actions of its users is to misidentify the enemy, while also weakening the power of a political critique developed in its ambit. In his essay Tagg takes some significant steps towards analysing the changes occurring to photographic practice at the beginning of the twenty-first century but then recoils in horror from the brink of his own analysis. What could have served as a stepping stone towards developing both a radical posthumanist photography theory and a radical posthumanist political analysis ends up retreating into a place of melancholia for the human of yesteryear, one who was supposedly in control of both his personal body and the body politic but who can now only tilt at windmills – which are turning into drones in front of his very eyes.

it might be just possible … to use an emerging post-photography to delineate, document, and explore the posthuman - Fred Ritchin, After Photography

If only Tagg had allowed himself to hear the exhortation from another photography theory radical, Fred Ritchin! Admittedly, Ritchin’s work is not free from a sense of melancholia espoused by Tagg: in After Photography Ritchin clearly reveals how he misses the time when people believed in images and when images could be used to solve conflict and serve justice. Yet, even though his book opens up with a rather dispiriting account of the changes occurring to the photographic medium and its representationalist ambitions, it ends with an affirmation of life in photography. Dazzled by the horizon of scale opened by telescopy and physics in a similar way Tagg was, Ritchin nevertheless admits that ‘in the digital-quantum world, it might be just possible … to use an emerging post-photography to delineate, document, and explore the posthuman. To dance with ambiguity. To introduce humility to the observer, as well as a sense of belonging. To say yes, and simultaneously, no’.

(Always) nonhuman photography

It is precisely in this critical-philosophical spirit, of saying yes and, simultaneously, no, that my opening proposition that all photography is to some extent nonhuman should be read. While I am aware of, and concerned with, ways in which the nonhuman aspect of photography can produce inhumane practices, I also want to suggest that it is precisely in its nonhuman aspect that photography’s creative, or world-making, side can be identified. Therefore, rather than contribute to recent jeremiads about photography, what with it being seen as supposedly dying in the digital era because it is no longer authentic or material enough, or imploding due to its excessiveness and banality as evidenced on Instagram and in the much maligned selfie phenomenon, I want to argue in what follows that it is precisely through focusing on its nonhuman aspect that we can find life in photography.

The photographic apparatus, which contains but also exceeds a discrete human component, was awaiting the very invention of photography.

This line of argument is partly indebted to the work of Flusser, who, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography writes: ‘The photographic apparatus lies in wait for photography; it sharpens its teeth in readiness. This readiness to spring into action on the part of apparatuses, their similarity to wild animals, is something to grasp hold of in the attempt to define the term etymologically’. Flusser builds here on the Latin origins of the term ‘apparatus’, which derives from apparare, ‘make ready for’ (as a combination of the prefix ad-, ‘toward’, and parare, ‘make ready’). This leads him to read photography as facilitated by, or even protoinscribed in, the nexus of image-capture devices, various chemical and electronic components and processes, as well as sight- and technology-equipped humans.

Flusser’s proposition challenges the humanist narrative of invention as an outcome of singular human genius: it recognises the significance of the technological set-up in the emergence of various human practices. This is not to say that these practices function outside the human but rather that the concepts of self-contained human intentionality and sovereign human agency may be too limited to describe the emergence of specific technological processes at a particular moment in time. Flusser’s idea seems to be (unwittingly) reflected in Geoffrey Batchen’s proposition outlined in Burning with Desire that photography was invented – seemingly repeatedly, by Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, Hyppolyte Bayard and William Fox Talbot, among others – due to the fact that in the early nineteenth century there already existed a desire for it. This desire manifested itself in the proliferation of the discourses and ideas about the possibility of capturing images and fixing them, and of the technologies – ‘the camera obscura and the chemistry necessary to reproduce’ the images taken with it – that would facilitate such a development. We could therefore perhaps go so far as to say that the photographic apparatus, which for Batchen contains but also exceeds a discrete human component, was awaiting the very invention of photography.

‘snap’ reactions are usually rechanneled through a whole database of standardised, pre-programmed, pre-existing image-frames

The above discussed ideas on the photographic apparatus will eventually point me not just towards rethinking the photographic medium but also towards a possibility (one that has been withheld by Tagg) of a posthumanist political analysis. For now, taking inspiration from Flusser, I want to suggest that human-driven photography – where an act of conscious looking through a viewfinder or, more frequently nowadays, at an LCD screen held at arm’s level – is only one small part of what goes on in the field of photography, even though it is often made to stand in for photography as such. The execution of human agency in photographic practice, be it professional or amateur, ostensibly manifests itself in decisions about the subject matter (the ‘what’) and about ways of capturing this subject matter with a digital or analogue apparatus (the ‘how’). Yet in amateur, snapshot-type photography these supposed human-centric decisions are often affective reactions to events quickly unfolding in front of the photographer’s eyes. Such reactions happen too quickly, or we could even say automatically, for any conscious processes of decision-making to be involved – bar that original decision to actually have, bring and use a camera, rather than not. This automatism in photography also manifests itself in the fact that these kinds of ‘snap’ reactions are usually rechanneled through a whole database of standardised, pre-programmed, pre-existing image-frames, whose significance we are already familiar with and which we are trying to recreate in a unique way, under the umbrella of so-called individual experience: ‘toddler running towards mother’; ‘girl blowing a candle on a birthday cake’; ‘couple posing in front of the Taj Mahal’. It is in this sense that, as Flusser has it, ‘weddings conform to a photographic program’.