Watch the presentations of the second segment of our event 'Talks on everyday imaging – the analogue and digital realm of the vernacular' featuring Annebella Pollen, Joanna Zylinska & Joachim Schmid.

Annebella Pollen – Learning from photographic mistakes

My talk begins with a single photograph. It is a modest effort; a portrait where a finger has encroached in front of the lens, and the subject’s feet are all that is visible. A glossy colour print, developed by a high street processor, it is typical, perhaps, of amateur photos in the 1980s, as described by their critics: hapless snapshots, produced on simple-to-operate equipment and printed by the million. I came across this photo when researching the archive of a major competition staged in Britain on 14 August 1987, organised by a cancer charity. They hoped everyone in Britain would take a photograph of everyday life on one ordinary day. The amateur submissions, accompanied by a pound donation, would be judged by professionals and assembled into a ‘family album of the nation’. The ‘finger-in-the-lens’ photo didn’t make the final cut. Instead, it joined the c.50,000 rejects that were deemed too ordinary and too amateurish: the blurred and over-exposed, the out-of-focus and indistinct. Yet for me, among the c.50,000 photos I surveyed in that archive, it stood out. It made me laugh and it impressed me with its self-consciousness. This was not only an example of an amateur photo taken on one day in 1987, but it was also a photo about amateur photography. Its erroneousness became symbolic, and its submission to a competition showed the awareness of its maker. It provided a counterpoint to the critiques of amateur photographers as unthinking button-pressers unthinkingly reproducing cliches. There was another element, too, that intrigued me. In the top right-hand corner, the photo-processor had applied a Quality Control sticker signalling the print’s inadequacies. Ostensibly offering technical guidance aimed at improving camera mastery, the sticker is revelatory of photo-processors’ judgements. These betray aesthetic and moral values, revealing the motivations of the industries that sustained commercial print photography by reinforcing norms and modelling behaviour. In my talk, I use this single image to discuss wider frameworks in everyday photography. I argue that the ‘bad’ photo - where the subject cannot be seen - might not be a failed photograph, even though I rescued it from the ignominy of a reject pile. It is a photo that tells us about cultural expectations of success and error, accident and intention, wit and ambition, personal experience and business strategies. It offers photographic lessons and mistakes we can learn from.

Annebella Pollen is Professor of Visual and Material Culture at the University of Brighton, UK. She is widely published in photography studies including the books Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life(2015), Photography Reframed: New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture (2018, co-edited with Ben Burbridge) and, most recently, More than a Snapshot: A Visual History of Photo Wallets (2023). She is currently a recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, which she is using to develop a book and exhibition on the long history of photography by children.

Joanna Zylinska – On Our Photographic Future

The notion of ‘our photographic future’ that frames Joanna Zylinska’s talk is something of a dare. It critically probes the oft-predicted death of photography, while suggesting that photography cannot be just forgotten or abandoned because it has actively shaped our present onto-epistemological horizon – and its technical infrastructures. The postulate of ‘our photographic future’ also entails a reckoning with the fact that the photographic medium itself is currently undergoing a radical transformation. Indeed, the distinction between image capture and image creation is increasingly blurred – in photogrammetry, computational photography, CGI, or text-to-image image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Finally, the interrogation of our photographic future also highlights some planetary-level concerns about our human positioning in the world and our relationship with technology, at a time when our very existence is being increasingly challenged by attempts to envisage what comes next. A climate collapse? Cross-species extinction? Another pandemic? A third world war? Death by AI? Or maybe a sunnier tomorrow, for all of us? The talk will include the screening of Zylinska’s short film, A Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty) (2021, 9’25’’), which offers a gender-fluid narrative of post-apocalyptic survival produced in co-creation with AI. Remediating Chris Marker’s famous apocalyptic photofilm, La Jetée, it demonstrates that imaging machines can dream up unexpected futures.

Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). An advocate of “radical open-access,” she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence. Her new book, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in November 2023.

Joachim Schmid – ‘Bilder von der Strasse’ & ‘Other People’s Photographs’

The presentation will showcase some of Joachim Schmid’s photoworks, which are derived from the photographs of others. These photoworks are accompanied by the thoughts that he had before, during, and after creating these pieces. The main focus of the presentation will be on two major projects: Bilder von der Strasse (1982–2012) and Other People’s Photographs (2008–2011). Bilder von der StraBe (Pictures from the Street) is a thirty-year project that commenced in 1982 and concluded in 2012. Throughout this duration, Mr. Schmid collected one thousand lost or discarded photographs from pavements around the world. This collection has been widely exhibited and has been published as a complete set of publications. The books, organised into four volumes, present each discovered photograph or its fragments in their original size and in the chronological order of their discovery. The only artistic intervention is the inclusion of the date and location where each photo was found. The work documents people’s utilisation and mistreatment of photographs. Almost all the photos in the collection depict people, with over half of them being torn or defaced in some manner. This act of discarding or damaging individual photographs appears to signify a desire to erase memories of specific moments in people’s lives. By encouraging viewers to imagine the stories of those depicted, the project raises inquiries about emotionally charged events that might warrant such destruction. Created systematically, it serves as an inventory of lost photographs and memories that hint at the enigmas of people’s private lives and their endeavours to document and obliterate them. Other People’s Photographs, compiled between 2008 and 2011, is a series of ninety-six books that delve into the themes and visual motifs presented by contemporary everyday amateur photographers. Mr. Schmid has gathered and arranged images from photo-sharing platforms like Flickr to create a library of modern vernacular photography in the digital age. Each book in the series comprises images centered around a specific photographic event or concept. The arrangement of photographs unveils recurring patterns in popular modern photography. The approach is encyclopaedic, and the volumes could theoretically be infinite but are arbitrarily restricted. The selection of themes is not systematic and does not follow established criteria. The project’s structure mirrors the multifaceted, contradictory, and chaotic nature of modern photography itself, based solely on the motto “You can observe a lot by watching.”

Joachim Schmid (born in 1955) is an artist and photographic critic based in Berlin who is primarily known for his work focusing on vernacular photography. Schmid attended the University of Design in Schwabisch Gmund and the Berlin University of the Arts from 1976 to 1981. His career initially began by writing essays for Fotokritik, where he quickly gained recognition for his unwavering critique of established concepts in art photography with which he advocated for a comprehensive and inclusive assessment of photography as a cultural endeavour. In the late 1980s, Schmid began creating his own artworks and projects using imagery not produced in an art context. Besides many projects like The First General Collection of Used Photographs (1991) & The ABC of Popular Desire (2013), one of his most renowned works is the series titled Other People’s Photographs (2008-2011), in which he self-published ninety-six books featuring photographs sourced from online platforms such as Flickr. These selections of images were arranged based on recurring patterns & structures, highlighting how the meaning of images can be transformed when detached from their original contexts.

The keynote speech of the event, given by Geoffrey Batchen, is available on this link. 

Watch all three presentations of the segment 'Crash course on analogue everyday photography – vernacular photography outside the realm of the digital' here. Also, the event's Hungarian-themed lectures are available on this link.

Event Concept: Róza Tekla Szilágyi, Endre Cserna 
Video: Zsuzsi Simon, Benedek Bognár
Music: Áron Lörinczi 
Design: L2 Studio

The lecture took place on November 2, 2023, in Budapest, Hungary.

You can find the original event description of 'Talks on everyday imaging – the analogue and digital realm of the vernacular' here.