After the End of Photography

Introduction 

Bert Danckaert’s photographs belong to contemporary art’s photographic discourse. Situated at the intersection of the traditions of topographic documentary and modernist abstract art, they attract attention through formal mastery directed towards aesthetic experience. Photography of this kind is relatively little known in Poland and, for historical reasons, analogies with Danckaert’s work would be difficult to find in the mainstream of Polish artistic production. Atlas Sztuki’s initiative to introduce the Belgian artist’s work to a Polish audience thus seems all the more interesting. While Danckaert’s activity is accompanied by a number of outstanding authors whose critical discourse surrounds his work, the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki may also serve as a point of departure for broader reflections on the condition of the medium invented by Niépce, Talbot and Daguerre 175 years ago. 

After the End of Photography

Contemporary debate on art is framed by Arthur C. Danto’s After the End of Art (1997) and Hans Belting’s Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (1983). Meanwhile, an awareness of exhaustion is slight in current photographic theory and philosophy. The prevailing enthusiasm is expressed in the titles of monumental publications such as Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008) and Marvin Heiferman’s Photography Changes Everything (2012). Even scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell, who deal daily with the boundlessness of visual culture, are more likely to ask “What do pictures want?” (What Do Pictures Want?, 2005), while Fred Ritchin seeks to give photography a humanist dimension in an age of excess (In Our Own Image, 1999). Compared with Danto’s radical gesture, Ritchin’s restraint is characteristic: avoiding a diagnosis of death or a metaphor of the end, he titled one of his more recent books After Photography (2008). The writers’ relatively good spirits result, on the one hand, from photography’s attainment of equal status with art and, on the other, from the ubiquity of photographs, of which, as statistics show, incomparably more are taken around the world than ever before. At the same time, photography’s triumph contains something of the decline already sensed by modern critics, Charles Baudelaire foremost among them. It is as though admission to artistic salons could occur only after the end of art, and the infinite number of images meant that they lost not merely autonomy but simply meaning. Going against the current of photographic discourse, it is worth asking whether this theoretical reflection makes sense. Might photography have ended? If so, what symptoms indicate the twilight of its 175-year history, and exactly when did the end occur? 

That-Which-Never-Was

Decades of struggle to have photography treated as equal to painting and photographers as artists ended in unexpected success. This resulted less from the effectiveness of artistic tirades by photography’s leading lights than from the exhaustion and abdication of art, which — as Arthur C. Danto put it — ended when Andy Warhol exhibited Brillo Box (1964). If a group of soap-pad boxes symbolises the end of art, photography’s success as art seems embodied in Jeff Wall’s Milk (1984). Anointed years later by Fried, Wall is a photographer whose ambition became — as he himself immodestly admits — to equal the great masters of modern painting, Édouard Manet for example. Carefully, even laboriously conceived, directed, lit, photographed, assembled and exhibited as photographic lightboxes, Wall’s pictures attract attention and become a kind of trap for viewers. Like spilt Milk, they appear to show a situation caught casually in a fraction of a second, while in fact they are the result of a complex creative process. After Jeff Wall, ambitious “artists using photography”, as they customarily describe themselves, enthusiastically question the photographic noeme set out by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). Photography is no longer that-has-been. After Jeff Wall, it presents that-which-may-have-been, that-which-never-was, or that-which-was-invented-by-the-artist. 

To illustrate the change better, I will recall an anecdotal situation from a meeting devoted to the photographs of the young artist Julia Staniszewska. At the meeting at Warsaw’s Archaeology of Photography Foundation on 28 April 2011, following an intense discussion lasting more than an hour, one participant, a middle-generation photographer, revealed aloud and incredulously that she had been certain of the truth of the situation photographed by Staniszewska — a situation that was a striking translation of the artist’s invention into a photographic image. The difference seems not merely generational but epistemological. Today, no reasonable person — not only young people raised on digital images, which by definition permit and even demand processing — will believe in the truth of an image, even when the pictures are tagged #raw #nofilter #realphoto.

The discussion of Staniszewska’s work touched interestingly on Zofia Rydet, the late outstanding artist who became famous for photographic series such as the documentary Little Man and Sociological Record. Continuing the theme of epistemological change, one may suppose that photographs made in the spirit of Henri Cartier-Bresson or August Sander — masters who, like Rydet, worked before the end of photography — seem impossible, artificial and almost staged from today’s perspective. 

Three Hundred and Eighty Billion and One Million 

The quantitative leap into a new image reality can be associated with Erik Kessels’s installation Photography in Abundance, shown at FOAM in Amsterdam in December 2011. Invited to participate in the project What’s Next? The Future of the Photography Museum, Kessels responded somewhat demagogically by deciding to print, in postcard format, the one million photographs uploaded to Flickr by users in a single day and then scatter them through the gallery. The absurd gesture of materialising digital files visualised the excess and redundancy of all those photographs. Kessels’s exhibition resembled a rubbish dump through which visitors waded knee-deep. From its inception, photography accelerated production and intensified circulation, but also banalised the reception of images. Yet in recent years, freed from every analogue restriction, it has proliferated as never before, fulfilling ominous prophecies of a “visual flood”. Kessels chose Flickr deliberately. Had he decided to print a day’s yield from more popular social-networking sites, even the largest Dutch museum could not have contained all the prints. Around 380 billion photographs were made in 2011. Facebook received between 300 million a day on weekdays and two billion during holidays, while Instagram’s 100 million users added 27,800 photographs to their accounts every minute. 

But that is not all. Kessels’s installation is largely a product of ubiquitous mobile-phone cameras, but what are we to make of Google Glass, available from electronics shops since 2013? How can an experience of the world mediated by an apparatus that records and shares a stream of images, films and photographs be shown in an exhibition? By putting on the glasses, but also by continuously snapping and recording pictures and films, the user becomes a mobile CCTV camera or, rather, an advanced operator of Google Street View cameras. More important than the more or less reflective recording of images of reality is the change in the user’s consciousness: willingly or not, they assume that everything is, in fact, photography. 

In this context, the philosopher Vilém Flusser’s words about users of the apparatus as functionaries who execute its programme and record everything, everywhere and at every moment for the system proved prophetic. A hundred years before Google Glass, Kodak — once a powerful company, now part of the industry’s history — launched a new camera advertised with the slogan You press the button, we do the rest. Today one can press the button or select a photograph later from a stream of recorded images. Significantly, there is no longer any rest.

Contrary to Flusser’s assumption, however, the functionaries of the apparatus do not record that-which-was. Camera applications and software not only automatically improve contrast, reduce red-eye, emphasise facial contours, matt excessively shiny foreheads, and filter, smooth and model the image appropriately; inevitably, given the poor optics of miniature cameras, they also create the image by using algorithms to compare the photograph with those already made and shared on social networks, so that it corresponds to the author’s conception of themselves. Characteristic, too, is the introduction of popular modes that eliminate the so-called background intruder — hence the additions unnoticed by the photographer and celebrated by Roland Barthes and many theorists — or compose a photograph from a sequence of images so that everyone has their eyes open, is smiling and looking at the lens, and is not blurred. This new, improved world of visual communication has nothing in common with the “reality in crisis” so eagerly described by postmodernists such as Andy Grundberg. We appear to be dealing with multiple dimensions of reality, and photography no longer merely fails to show that-which-was; nor does it mediate an image of reality. Together with a range of advanced digital techniques, it simply produces it. The popular, photograph-saturated Google Maps application and Google Street View, also used by photographers such as Jon Rafman, bring to mind the imperial cartographers in Jorge Luis Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”. “In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers produced a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire and which coincided point for point with it.” What until recently seemed a Baudrillardian fantasy about hyperreality has become commonplace. Today we find ourselves at a point where the real empire appears tightly covered not by one but by successive layers of useful maps. Press reports that the ocean depths have begun to be photographed and made available online testify to progress in cartography.

Schrödinger’s Cat 

Photography has ended, but it has not died. People continue to take photographs. In 2000, eighty billion photographs were made, of which only one per cent were digital. In 2011, 380 billion were made, of which less than one per cent were analogue. The number of pictures made by humanity in two minutes equalled the total number of photographs made in the nineteenth century. 

If everyone is a photographer, then no one is a photographer any longer. In the absence of a better term for the communicative practice widespread in developed societies, photography therefore functions as a “zombie category”. At this turning point, as photography recedes into the past, signs of decadence and mannerism can be discerned. The list of activities seemingly contrary to the medium’s nature is long and telling. It begins with fascination with materiality and the growth, based on the materiality of prints, of collecting and archival ambitions as inflated as they are devoid of deeper meaning; limited print runs; and the celebration of small editions — necessarily signed — of photobooks and vintage prints, all of which translates into rising prices. This is the speciality not only of adepts of old, analogue and noble techniques known as the retro-avant-garde, but also of a sizeable group of contemporary photographers who use digital processing every day. 

Signed, numbered and framed unique vintage prints, and more often contemporary digital prints, are intended as the opposite of Kessels’s photographic rubbish heap — but are they? Is the gallery aura of the work of art not artificially fuelled? Is it merely the glow emanating from photography’s corpse? It is difficult to verify, although the hundreds of thousands and millions paid for individual photographs appear to confirm their status. Yet photography locked in museum vaults, compared with the digital life of billions of digital images, is surely dead.

I remember an absurd situation when we published a set of photographs by Thomas Struth in Obieg magazine. Besides a CD, the package from the gallery contained a letter instructing the editors how to handle the files: after copying and use by the designer, they had to be deleted immediately, while the digital carrier was to be returned to Germany. The desire to publish and circulate images now collides ever more frequently with the obstinacy of the market, institutions and some artists, who persist in seeking to limit the quantity and increase the value of photographic works of art.

Most photographers blindly follow the call of the market and fashion. Few problematise the condition of photography and, more broadly, attempt to diagnose visual culture. Besides all-too-easy gestures elevating vernacular photography, myriad selfies, and wartime and everyday atrocities to the status of art, cannibalism is equally popular: photographers devour and digest familiar conventions of representation. Exceptions proving the rule are the few artists who, like Kessels, can look penetratingly at photography’s current state. This group certainly includes artists also known in Poland, such as the duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Jon Rafman, Mishka Henner and Trevor Paglen. Their unconventional activity is evidenced by the anxiety of theorists and philosophers reciting the Kaddish for analogue photography and endlessly declining the names of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. These last great essayists of the age before photography’s digital end, together with their numerous epigones, come to artists’ aid whenever it is necessary to justify a love of materiality, ponder the problem of indexicality, discuss politics and the dangers associated with manipulating the image.

The situation of contemporary photography brings to mind Erwin Schrödinger’s experiment with a hypothetical cat that is alive and dead at the same time. We could leave the animal shut in its box undisturbed, but we might also attempt to photograph it. Made by scientists in August 2014 without opening the box and without any contact with light rays, the photograph opens a new perspective for photography too. But how are we to define the noeme of an image made at the nano level without light rays? The new era does not yet have its theory and philosophy, but it already has its daguerreotype: a photograph of the afterimage of a closed, invisible cat.

The Last Photographs from Poland

The end of photography also occurred in Poland. Unnoticed but inexorably, leading institutions closed their photography departments. These peculiar relics of modernism’s search for medium specificity did not survive reforms at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw or the Museum of Art in Łódź, where photography joined the capacious post-medium category of art-in-general. In newly established institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, no attempt was even made to open special photography departments. This institutional change stands in apparent contrast to festivals emphasising photography’s autonomy. Supported by local authorities and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the festivalisation of photography encompassed — though probably only in the short term — every larger Polish centre, reaching Kraków, Łódź, Szczecin, Wrocław, Opole, Białystok, Bielsko-Biała, Poznań and, of course, Warsaw. The festival boom coincides with the expansion of the network of schools and a rise in the number of graduates holding photography diplomas. Combined with deregulation and changes in the status of the professional photographer, this promises many of them neither distinguished artistic careers nor even starvation wages on the commercial-commission market. Participation in the developing photography market may offer some hope, although probably only for a fortunate few. The presence of photography specialists in the exclusive club of Warsaw’s best commercial galleries attests to progress in the trade in photographic art. Of the twenty entities in Warsaw Gallery Weekend (WGW), fully one third deal exclusively in photography — Lookout Gallery, Czułość Gallery, Asymetria Gallery, Pola Magnetyczne Gallery, the Archaeology of Photography Foundation and the Arton Foundation — while many galleries show it regularly, including Raster, Starter, Aleksander Bruno and Lokal_30. Interestingly, this remarkable popularity prompted a decision not to expand WGW further with additional photography organisations. Obserwacja Gallery was not admitted, while Leica Gallery, knowing the result in advance, did not even apply. Rumours are already circulating about more photographic galleries being established in Warsaw, all riding a wave of fashion, making up for years of neglect and easily drawing on collectors’ naïve faith in the auratic power and profitable accessibility of “medium art”. 

The peculiar mixture of institutional withdrawal, short-term festivalisation, market speculation and vestigial historical research is supplemented by a theory rather than philosophy of photography that gazes towards the past and dwells with particular tenderness on the traumatic history of the war and the Shoah. The speculative texts of affective historians, visual-culture scholars and archaeological archivists can be set against writings by media scholars and sociologists, equally detached from daily practice, which analyse the photo-society or become entangled in discourses of software and hardware. Some comfort is provided — surprisingly — by cultural anthropologists, although they too cannot move beyond detailed case studies. The gloomy mood affecting the local, not to say provincial photographic scene is dispersed by artists: defiant classics such as Józef Robakowski, who contests the rules of both market and art, and the recently deceased Jerzy Lewczyński. The xeroxed, damaged and de-auraed photographs and films of the generation born before the war seem revolutionary against the background of contemporary, remarkably conformist artistic and photographic production, in which almost no one questions the rules of representation, still less those of art. Yet exceptions appear here too. Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Album (2005) and especially Portraits (2005–06) are certainly emblematic of photography’s late phase. The analogue, negative-based series Black (2007), related to those thoroughly digital works, is also interesting. Devoid of photographic identity, the images play with viewers’ expectations and creatively use the potential of digital manipulation.

Karol Komorowski is a member of the youngest generation who comments interestingly on the present turning point in visual culture, photography and art through his cycle of computer-generated images (CGI). In the exhibition Virtuality Has Ceased to Exist (2014), Komorowski stepped outside the stone circle of mutual references between art and photography and confronted Walter Benjamin’s concept of mechanical reproduction. “Doubting the image is now an obsolete artistic formula,” Komorowski writes in the introduction. “We have accepted a reality ordered according to two-dimensional representations. There is no escape into this virtuality, but nor can one escape from it — we would remain in a space of pure abstraction. Even the difference among silver halides, pixels and CGI has lost its significance. Images are our Real today, and virtuality has disappeared. How, then, should we define this realism? How does our experience of reality change in a world where physical space has been annexed by computer software? How do new interfaces change our symbolic order, language and modes of looking? What possibilities does our renewed trust in images afford us?” The questions posed by the artist, born in 1993, are crucial to understanding photography after the end of photography. Interestingly, Komorowski’s weighty words are accompanied by images hung in a row in the gallery, properly framed, in an edition of 1/10 and at a collector-friendly price appropriate to the artist’s age. The mode of display in a gallery devoted to contemporary photography does not alter the fact that everything solid has imperceptibly evaporated from these computer-generated images.

*Dr Adam Mazur (born 1977), critic, art historian and American-studies scholar, graduated from the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and lectures at the University of the Arts in Poznań. From 2002 to 2013 he was a curator at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, where his exhibitions included New Documentarians, Red-Eye Effect, Schism: Polish Art of the 1990s and The Unrepresented World. He is the author of books including I Love Photography (2009), Histories of Photography in Poland, 1839–2009 (2010) and The Decisive Moment (2012). From 2004 to 2011 he was editor-in-chief of Obieg magazine. Since 2013 he has been editor-in-chief of Szum.