Nonhuman Photography
PART II

PART II/II

The Automated Image

Through the decisions of artists and amateurs about their practice, photography becomes an act of making something significant, even if not necessarily making it signify something in any straightforward way. It is a practice of focusing on what is in its very nature multifocal, of literally casting light on what would have otherwise remained obscure, of carving a fragment from the flow of life and turning it into a splinter of what, postfactum, becomes known as ‘reality’. Traditionally, this moment of selection – referred to as ‘decisive’ by followers of the documentary tradition in photography – was associated with the pressing of the button to open the camera’s shutter. However, with the introduction of the Lytro camera on to the market in 2012, the temporality of this seemingly unique and transient photographic moment has been stretched into both the past and the future.

Giving us an illusion of control over technology by making cameras smaller and domestic equipment more user-friendly, the technoscientific industry actually exacerbates the gap between technology and the human.

Lytro captures the entire light field rather than a single plane of light, thus allowing the photographer to change and readjust the focus on a computer in postproduction. Interestingly, Lytro is advertised as ‘The only camera that captures life in living pictures’ – a poetic formulation which is underpinned by the ongoing industry claim to ‘absolute novelty’, but which merely exacerbates and visualises the inherent instability of all photographic practice and all photographic objects. Lytro is thus just one more element in the long-term humanist narrative about ‘man’s dominion over the earth’, a narrative that drives the progressive automatisation of many of our everyday devices, including cameras, cars and refrigerators. Giving us an illusion of control over technology by making cameras smaller and domestic equipment more user-friendly, the technoscientific industry actually exacerbates the gap between technology and the human by relieving us from the responsibility of getting to know and engage with the increasingly software-driven ‘black boxes’.

In the light of the dominance of the humanist paradigm in photography, a paradigm that is premised on the supposed human control of both the practice of image-making and the equipment, it is important to ask what gets elided in such conceptualisations. Of course, I am not the only one who is asking this question: the problem of nonhuman agency in photography has been explored by other theorists, artists and curators.

One recent photography event that brought many of these ideas to the fore was Drone: The Automated Image, a series of shows taking place under the umbrella of the photography biennale Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal, curated by Paul Wombell, in 2013. The uniqueness of this 13th edition of the Montreal biennale lay not so much in highlighting the machinic aspect of photographic and video practice, as this aspect had already been mobilised in the early days of photography – for example, in the works of Alexander Rodchenko or László Moholy-Nagy. Drone: The Automated Image (which was concerned with much more than just drones) took one step further on this road towards not just nonhuman but also posthumanist photography by actually departing from the human-centric visualisation process. In many of the works shown, the very act and process of capture were relegated to a computer, a camera mounted atop a moving vehicle, a robot or a dog.

To mention just one example, Canadian artist Véronique Ducharme presented a photography-based installation called Encounters, consisting of images taken by automatic hunting cameras. As the artist herself explains: Over the course of one year, automatic cameras, installed in various parts of the Quebec landscape, recorded images from the forest. The images included animals, sunrise, wind and other actants susceptible of triggering the shutter of the cameras. These digital images, including the ‘mistakes’ of the cameras (i.e., blacked-out or overexposed images) were then transferred onto slide film in order to be projected in the gallery space using slide projectors. Accompanied by its rhythmic mechanical click, each machine has been programmed to sporadically and unpredictably project the images around the space, leaving the viewer entangled within the dialogue created by the machines and the images.

Does photography demand a presence or are photographs taken using appropriated cameras controlled from another country in another time zone just as valid as “created” images?’

Ducharme’s project offers a thought-provoking intervention into the debate about (human) intentionality in photography theory, whereby the former is seen as a condition and a guarantee of the medium being considered a form of art. Photographic agency is distributed here amongst a network of participants, which includes not just nonhuman but also inanimate actors – even if ‘the beholder’ of the installation is still envisaged to be a human gallery-goer.

Ducharme’s work has similarities with another project which foregrounds and remediates nonhuman photographic agency without reneging on its human dimension: Stolen Images by British photographer Juliet Ferguson, published in the London independent photography magazine Flip in 2012 and online in Photomediations Machine in 2013. Accessing CCTV cameras using appropriate search terms via Google as part of her journalism job, Ferguson was able ‘to see through the all-seeing eyes of the CCTV camera places’ what she would not have access to in the real world – without leaving her sofa. The process led her to reflect ‘on what it means to take a photograph’ and to pose the following questions: ‘The majority of the cameras I used I could pan, zoom and focus. Is this any less photography than someone using a fully automatic camera and taking a picture from a designated panorama point at a beauty spot? Does photography demand a presence or are photographs taken using appropriated cameras controlled from another country in another time zone just as valid as “created” images?’. Ferguson has revealed that, in the process, she began ‘to see a certain beauty in the images as they became removed from their original intention of surveillance. Instead, they offered a unique perspective on the ebb and flow of a day, from a vantage point and rigidity that ordinary photography doesn’t offer’

The Photographic Condition

These two projects discussed above demonstrate that art practice is merely part of a wider photographic condition, with things photographing themselves, without always being brought back to the human spectrum of vision as the ultimate channel of perception and of things perceived. Naturally, humans form part of this photographic continuum – as artists, photojournalists, festival organisers, computer programmers, engineers, printers, Instagram users, and, last but not least, spectators. However, what the examples just presented make explicit is that we are all part of that photographic flow of things being incessantly photographed, and of trying to make interventions from within the midst of it. In this way, Ducharme’s and Ferguson’s projects fall into a category that we might term ‘insignificant photography’ – not in the sense that they are mindless (as Tagg would perhaps have it), irrelevant and of no consequence, but rather in the sense of allowing us to see things that have been captured almost incidentally and in passing, with the thematic ‘what’ not being the key impulse behind the execution of the images.

The separation between the mechanism of photography as ‘objective observation’ and the human-centric notion of the ‘intentionality’ of the photographer has been used as a disciplinary device in art history

It is worth emphasising that this idea of insignificant photography has not just come to the fore with the development of networked digital technologies but was actually present in the early discourse of photography, even if the latter tended to confine photography’s nonhuman aspect to the fairly conservative idea of ‘objective observation’. Steve Edwards explains that: Throughout its history, the camera has repeatedly been seen as an objective machine that captures information without any interference from the artist. … in the early years of photography this was an often repeated theme: it was assumed that the sun made the picture, or the camera did, or even that the object in question depicted itself (Talbot spoke of his country pile, Lacock Abbey, as the first building ‘that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture’).

The separation between the mechanism of photography as ‘objective observation’ and the human-centric notion of the ‘intentionality’ of the photographer has been used as a disciplinary device in art history: as signalled before, the elevation of photography to the status of art has been premised upon it. It is this separation that the work of many contemporary photographers such as Ducharme and Ferguson troubles to a significant extent.

it is ‘precisely in its efforts to arrest duration, to capture or still the flow of life – beyond singular photographs’ success or failure at representing this or that referent – that photography’s vital forces are activated’

So what is meant by this notion of photographic condition, and does the postulation of its existence stand up to philosophical and experiential scrutiny? To explore these questions, let us start from a very simple proposition: there is life in photography. If living in the so-called media age has become tantamount to being photographed on a permanent basis, with our identity constituted and verified by the ongoing development of our photo galleries and photo streams on mobile phones, tablets and social media platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest, not to mention the thousands of security cameras quietly and often invisibly registering our image when we pass through city centres, shopping malls and airports, then, contrary to its more typical Barthesian association with the passage of time and death, photography can be understood more productively as a lifemaking process. As Sarah Kember and I argue in Life after New Media, it is ‘precisely in its efforts to arrest duration, to capture or still the flow of life – beyond singular photographs’ success or failure at representing this or that referent – that photography’s vital forces are activated’.

Photography lends itself to being understood in a critical vitalist framework due to its positioning in a network of dynamic relations between present and past, movement and stasis, flow and cut. In making cuts into duration, in stabilising the temporal flow into entities, photography is inherently involved with time. Significantly, for vitalist philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, time, duration and movement stand precisely for life itself. As Bergson provocatively asks, ‘But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space?’.

to acknowledge the life-making aspect of photography is not necessarily to condone the politically suspicious yet increasingly widespread technologies of ubiquitous surveillance, control and loss of privacy enabled by various kinds of cameras.

Photography’s proximity to life is therefore revealed in its temporal aspect, which is enacted in photography’s dual ontology, whereby it can be seen as both object and practice, as both snapshot and all the other virtual snapshots that could have potentially been there, and, last but not least, as both being something here and now and as something always unfolding into something else. It is also in this dual ontology that the nonhuman side of photography comes to the fore, enacted as it is through agents as diverse as CCTV, aerial camera systems, satellites, endoscopy equipment and webcams as well as camera and mobile-phone-sporting humans. It is perhaps worth making a quick reservation here that, to acknowledge the life-making aspect of photography is not necessarily to condone the politically suspicious yet increasingly widespread technologies of ubiquitous surveillance, control and loss of privacy enabled by various kinds of cameras. However, much has already been written about the latter, with little acknowledgement so far of the vital potentiality of photography – which, in an ontological sense, does not have to be agent of control, even if it often is. There is therefore a danger of moralising photography in academic and public discourses before its potential has been truly explored. The foregrounding of the inherently creative power of photography as a practice is part of the philosophical argument of this article, although issues of politics never disappear from its agenda.

Photography and life

The on-off activity of the photographic process, which carves life into fragments while simultaneously reconnecting them to the imagistic flow, may allow us to conclude not only that there is life in photography, but also that life itself is photographic. Interestingly, Claire Colebrook explains this process of creative becoming in and of life by drawing on the very concept of image production, or ‘imaging’. She writes: ‘All life, according to Bergson and to Deleuze after him, can be considered as a form of perception or “imaging” where there is not one being that apprehends or represents another being, but two vectors of creativity where one potential for differentiation encounters another and from that potential forms a relatively stable tendency or manner’. This idea has its root in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, where our experience of the world, which is always a way of sensing the world, comes in the form of images. We should mention here that, on the whole, Bergson is somewhat hesitant about the role played by images in cognition: in Creative Evolution he dismisses them as mere ‘snapshots’ of perception, post-factum reductions of duration and time to a sequence of the latter’s frozen slices.

photography is one possible (and historically specific) enactment of the creative practice of imaging, with the cuts into duration it makes always remaining connected to the flow of time.

It may therefore seem strange to be revisiting the work of a philosopher who only used the concept of photography negatively, to outline a ‘better’, i.e. more intuitive and more fluid, mode of perception and cognition, in an attempt to say something new about photography. However, my argument here, as in my previous work, is that Bergson’s error is first and foremost media-specific and not philosophical per se: namely, he misunderstands photography’s inherently creative and dynamic power by reducing it to a sequence of already fossilised artefacts, with the mind fragmenting the world into a sequence of ‘snapshots’. This is why I want to suggest that, its mystical underpinnings aside, we can mobilise Bergson’s philosophical writings on duration understood as a manifestation of élan vital to rethink photography as a quintessential practice of life. Indeed, photography is one possible (and historically specific) enactment of the creative practice of imaging, with the cuts into duration it makes always remaining connected to the flow of time.

If we accept the fact that cutting – be it with our visual or conceptual apparatus – is inevitable to the processes of making sense of the world, then we can see any outcomes of the photographic cut, i.e. photographs and other products of the image-making process, as temporary stabilisations of the flow of duration that still bear a trace of life – rather than as frozen and ultimately deadly mementoes of the past. It is important to point out that, in order to recognise any kind of process as a process, we need to see it against the concept of a temporary stabilisation, interruption or cut into this process. A photograph is one possible form such stabilisations take, and a rather ubiquitous one at that. It is precisely because of its ubiquity and its increasingly intuitive technological apparatus that it serves as a perfect illustration of Bergson’s ideas – or rather, of my own ‘differentiated reading’ of Bergson. Bergson himself foregrounds this mutually constitutive relationship between process and stoppage when he says that ‘Things are constituted by the instantaneous cut which the understanding practices, at a given moment, on a flux of this kind, and what is mysterious when we compare the cuts together becomes clear when we relate them to the flux’. This supposition allows us to posit photography as an ultimately salutary and creative force in managing the duration of the world by the human as a species with limited cognitive and sensory capacity.

The notion of the creative role of the imaging process in life has also recently made its manifestation in the work of radical biologists, such as Lynn Margulis. As she puts it in a book co-authored with her son Dorian Sagan, ‘All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive – it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger’. This act of perception, which involves the seeking out and recognition of something else, involves the making of an image of that something else (food, predator, sexual partner), one that needs to be at least temporarily fixed in order for the required proximity – for consumption or sex – to be accomplished. We could perhaps therefore suggest that imaging is a form of proto-photography, planting the seed of the combined human-machinic ‘desire’ explored by Batchen that came to its own in the early nineteenth century.

To speak of the photographic apparatus is of course not just to argue for a straightforward replacement of the human vision with a machinic one, but rather to recognise the mutual intertwining and co-constitution of the organic and the machinic

After Bergson, images (which are not yet photographs) stand for ‘a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed half-way between the “thing” and the “representation”’. It is precisely through images that novelty comes into the world, which is why images should not be reduced to mere representations but should rather be understood as creations, ‘some of which are philosophical, some artistic, some scientific’. To put this another way, the creative impulse of life takes it beyond representation as a form of picturing what already exists: instead, life is a creation of images in the most radical sense, a way of temporarily stabilising matter into forms. Photographic practice as we conventionally know it, with all the automatism it entails, is just one instantiation of this creative process of life.

If all life is indeed photographic, the notion of the photographic apparatus that embraces yet also goes beyond the human becomes fundamental to our understanding of what we have called the photographic condition. To speak of the photographic apparatus is of course not just to argue for a straightforward replacement of the human vision with a machinic one, but rather to recognise the mutual intertwining and co-constitution of the organic and the machinic, the technical and the discursive, in the production of vision, and hence of the world. In her work on the use of apparatuses in physics experiments, the philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad argues that such devices are not just ‘passive observing instruments; on the contrary, they are productive of (and part of) phenomena’. We could easily apply this argument to photography, where the camera as a viewing device, the photographic frame both in the viewfinder and as the circumference of a photographic print, the enlarger, the computer, the printer, the photographer (who, in many instances, such as surveillance or speed cameras, is replaced by the camera-eye), and, last but not least, the discourses about photography and vision that produce them as objects for us humans are all active agents in the constitution of a photograph. In other words, they are all part of what we understand by photography.