This text has been adapted from Joanna Zylinska, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023), forthcoming.
I’m not sure what photography is. It’s everything and everywhere, like a spirit that’s left its body. Photography is not tied to the camera—or any apparatus—anymore. As many thinkers have postulated, photography is now more of a state of being, an event. It has become a fiction; a fabrication. I know it when I see it; I can feel it in the air around me when it’s happening, with or without an apparatus present. Maybe it’s a statement of our surveilled and documented existences. We and the world around us are reconstituted in parallel image universes. It seems impossible to make work that doesn’t use or acknowledge photography, because it’s now an elemental part of being.
(Artist Victoria Fu in Why Photography?) (1)
Despite the proliferation of photographic images and the expansion of the “photographer” designation from professionals and hobbyists (aka “amateurs”) to arguably “everyone,” the question of photography’s future haunts the image-making industry, its clients, and users—as well as those occupying that narrower sliver of photography’s art-based milieu, i.e., photographic artists and curators. In 2019 the popular photonews website Petapixel published an article about what it meant to be a photographer at the present time. The article, as is often the case with online “content” these days, featured a video conversation between photographer-journalists from cognate websites, Patrick Hall of Fstoppers and Pye Jirsa of SLR Lounge, titled “Is Photography as We Know It Dying?” (2). This debate is worth looking at more closely because the issues raised by it are indicative of the broader tendencies in current photographic consumption. It also provide us with some conceptual tools and ideas for how we can talk about photography today—and for how we can locate photography in disciplinary and technical terms.
The key tendencies in photography identified by the two experts on the Petapixel website seemingly go against the grain of the beliefs held by photography websites’ most faithful readers. Having acknowledged that the digital has both democratized photography and raised the bar, Hall and Jirsa admit that photographic practice itself is changing, with a lot of things “falling to the wayside”: heavy gear, strobes, complex editing. With the industry moving more and more toward phone photography, “all that matters is the final image,” they conclude—a statement that must sound like anathema to “serious photographers”(3), be they artists or amateurs. This statement recognizes the fact that the ability to engage an audience and having a following matter more than any single image, with a photographer having to be “like a TV channel or TV show.” The more nebulous categories of enjoyment and authenticity are said to have replaced the old-style expectations of technical perfection and expert professionalism. Confirming that photography as we know it is indeed dying, with that “we” referring to the upholders of the photographic tradition and expertise—which the core readers of Petapixel are largely expected to be—Petapixel author DL Cade nonetheless summarizes the analysis on an upbeat note: “As the bar to entry drops and more and more people outsource their creativity to the latest Instagram trend or some AI-powered post-processing slider, creativity and technical know-how are only becoming more rare and valuable than ever.” (4)
The above discussion has identified some important trends with regard to photographic practice today. These trends include miniaturization; increased role of software in image making, including at the image-generation stage; closer integration between photographic gear, clothing and the photographer’s body—which is another step in what used to be known as “media convergence” and which now involves many photographers becoming one with their cameras; and, last but not least, the proliferation of images that are produced neither by nor for the human. (5) Indeed, algorithmic image generation enabled by models such as DALL·E 2, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion problematizes even further the agency of the photographer as image creator and copyright owner. Echoing Paul Virilio’s argument from The Vision Machine, artist Trevor Paglen, who uses images from satellites, surveillance cameras, and AI databases in his work, argues that “Something dramatic has happened to the world of images: they have become detached from human eyes. Our machines have learned to see [w]ithout us…” (6) In response to the question posed in one of his online contributions written for Fotomuseum Winterthur, “Is Photography Over?”, Paglen goes so far as to claim that ““photography,” as it has been traditionally understood in theory and practice, has undergone a transition—it has become something else, something that’s difficult to make sense of within the existing analytic framework.” (7)
A new analytic framework therefore needs to be envisaged—not just to understand photography but also to get a clearer picture of the world that is being imagined and imaged by it. Building on the legacy of ghost and spirit photography, a practice combining imagination and charlatanerie to make up for personal losses before the Great War, and collective loss in its aftermath, I suggest that photography and post-digital image making can be mobilized today to help us imagine, visualize, and frame not just the present but also the future—and to image and imagine ourselves as part of that future.
My primary concern is not therefore so much with the ontology of the photographic image, but rather with what I am calling “a photographic future.” I am mindful of David Campany’s warning that, “if you start attributing temporalities to technologies or platforms, before long you end up making a whole set of presumptions about how viewers interact with them. It can be reactionary and very passive.” (8) I am thus more interested in what is happening to us humans—and to what we humans have called the world, with its plethora of other inhabitants and forces—as surrounded or even shaped by photographic and post-photographic images. Yet it is worth emphasizing that images cannot ever be fully discretized from our human affective, cognitive, and material frameworks and modes of framing “the world”—and, even more strongly, that the formation of images through perception is a driving force of life in various organisms, from people through to paramecia. Imaging can therefore be assumed to be a primary and constitutive force of life, and a condition of the emergence of intelligent behavior. In other words, I see images as existing with us humans in a dynamic relationship of mediation, being constitutive of the formation of our memory, perception, cognition, and consciousness—and also of our world-building.
My current work, including my forthcoming book, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (from which this essay has been adapted), is designed as a reckoning with the force of the photographic legacy, imagery—and imagination. It is also an attempt to re-view and re-vision ourselves as photographic agents and subjects, at a time when our future as the dominant species is being increasingly put into question, be it by neural networks or image networks, virus clouds or data clouds. There is a lot at stake in this re-vision but there is also a look to look forward too. I want to finish my short text by embracing Paglen’s joyfully exuberant proclamation, one which could also be read as a warning:
Without question, the 21st Century will be a photographic century. Photography will play a more fundamental role in the functioning of 21st Century societies than 20th Century practitioners working with light-sensitive emulsions and photographic papers could have ever dreamed. So while in one sense photography might be “over,” in another, it’s barely gotten going. And we haven’t seen anything yet. (9)
Notes:
1 Victoria Fu in Behzad Farazollahi, Bjarne Bare, and Christian Tunge, with Susanne Østby, eds., Why Photography (Milan: Skira, 2020), 77.
2 In DL Cade, “Photography as We Know is Changing, and it’s Your Job to Change with It,” Petapixel, November 8, 2019, https://petapixel.com/2019/11/08/photography-as-we-know-is-changing-and-its-your-job-to-change-with-it/?mc_cid=947c856268&mc_eid=5bb11290a7.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 See Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
6 Trevor Paglen, “Artist’s Notes” for the solo show, A Study of Invisible Images, September 8-October 21, 2017, Metro Pictures, New York.
7 Paglen did four postings for the Fotomuseum Winterthur blog under the overall “Is Photography Over?” title. This quote comes from posting 2, “Seeing Machines”, which develops ideas raised in the first posting (“Is Photography Over?”). March 13, 2014, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26978_seeing_machines
8 David Campany interviewed by Duncan Wooldridge, “Tomorrow’s Headlines Are Today’s Fish and Chip Papers: Some Thoughts on ‘Response-ability,’” in Ben Burbridge and Annebella Pollen, eds., Photography Reframed: New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture, 2019 edition (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 32.
9 Trevor Paglen, “Is Photography Over?,” posting on a blog for Fotomuseum Winterthur, March 3, 2014
Joanna Zylinska, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI
288 pp., 6 x 9 in, 31 b&w illus.
Paperback
9780262546836
Published: November 7, 2023
Publisher: The MIT Press
You can order the book via this link.
