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4 Ten years ago What’s next? What’s In December 2001, a new photography next after I have finished museum opened its doors in Amsterdam – Foam was born. At the same time, a new what I am doing right photography magazine was launched: Foam Magazine started out as a catalogue now? What’s next for me accompanying the first exhibition, but tomorrow, at the begin- immediately became an independent platform for photography. This year marks ning of a brand new the tenth anniversary of both Foam and Foam Magazine – a memorable event that day? What’s next for you, deserves to be celebrated. However, just for us? Promises, expec- looking back and congratulating ourselves on what has been achieved over the tations, hopes and ideas past decade doesn’t fit the mindset that is characteristic of our staff. Our curiosity about what is in the about new developments is simply stronger pipeline are often very than our desire to look back. And so the What’s Next? theme arose naturally for our influential on the way we jubilee year. think, feel or behave. The fact that we found this a fitting theme to reaffirm our ten-year anniversary What’s next? It’s a simple indicates a validation of the current question that can be position of photography. In recent years, introduction the digitalization of the medium brought asked at any given about fundamental changes that have redetermined our entire visual culture, moment. A simple utterly transforming what we consider to be question, but so hard to a photo, the way a photographer organizes his or her professional practice, how photo answer. Because who editors work and how countless amateurs make, distribute and share photos. For knows what will be next? Foam, another significant issue was the Who dares to look into way a photographic institution such as ours functions: how should a photography the crystal ball and tell museum operate within a rapidly changing visual culture that has called into question us what the future might classic museum duties such as collecting, bring. It’s a difficult conserving and presenting? How does an organization remain relevant and question, but a truly significant? An investigation into the future of photography is inescapably also an fascinating one. It’s a investigation into our own future. What’s question that Foam has Next for Foam? asked for the past year Regular readers of Foam Magazine will already be acquainted with the investi in an effort to define the gation that we started at the beginning of this year in a series of special supplements. next step for photo- In these supplements, a number of experts graphy, photographers from the photographic community presented their vision concerning What’s Next?. and a photography Leading photographers, researchers and curators were given space to express their museum. It’s a question ideas on the future of photography. The asked with good reason. results were often surprising; they varied from reflective articles and provocative position statements to intriguing visual contributions. The method used to create 5 these What’s Next? supplements gave What’s Next? in Arles shape to our year of investigation. Foam This issue carries also accounts of on its own has neither the ambition nor the conversations that took place every day pretention to answer questions concerning in our What’s Next? project space in the the future of photography. To try to obtain first week of the prestigious photography answers we seek the opinions of experts festival Les Recontres d’Arles in the south from all parts of the cultural sector, offering of France. Foam created a specially them pages in the supplements, engaging designed project room which functioned them in discussions at special meetings and as an exhibition space, meeting room and inviting them to make a contribution to the discussion centre, as well as artists’ studio What’s Next? website. space. A major component of our presence in Arles was the cooperation between two Foam strives to offer something for famed art academies: the Gerrit Rietveld everyone interested in photography, from Academie in Amsterdam and the École professionals to amateurs. Conversely, we Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie are interested in everyone’s opinion on in Arles. We believe it is essential in an the question of how the medium can best investigation into the future of photography develop itself and which aspects are most to give a voice to those who will soon be a relevant. To offer our visitors and readers decisive part of that future – those currently opportunities to contribute to the discussion studying photography. Students from both we launched the project website at the academies made concerted efforts to create start of the celebration of our tenth year. work together ‘in situ’, often surrounded Anyone interested, can react to the themes by visitors, and produced a daily zine in and comment on specific questions and which they responded to both influential positions. The site has seen a lot of traffic photographic themes and the festival which since its launch. they had suddenly become part of. These students again emerge in this magazine, in For Foam the value of our tenth anniversary the section: ‘Next Generation’.

29 what's next? project is primarily the opportunity to engage in discussions with all those who It would however be inaccurate to consider can be conceived as representing the this What’s Next? issue of Foam Magazine photographic community, to raise key as a conclusion or a full account of all points and to pose critical questions. Where the activities undertaken throughout this do we stand, what developments have we anniversary year. A portion of its contents witnessed, where is it all leading? It is the can of course be traced to interviews, discussion that determines the significance discussions and conversations which took and the strength of the project, more than place in the last twelve months. But, the any answers that arise. The journey is more great majority of the content has been important than the destination. specifically created for this issue by a large array of contributors, making this issue a Expert meeting unique and independent contribution to the One important moment this year was the ongoing investigation, just as you would foam magazine # meeting of experts we organized in March in expect from our editors. The content has our museum in Amsterdam. Fifteen curators, been organised into chapters that touch photographers, researchers, trend-watchers, on themes the editors feel add up to a editors and bloggers from all over the fascinating, well-balanced magazine that is world presented their vision of the future of just what our readers look for. photography to a room full of professionals from the Dutch cultural sector. In between Curating the Future the individual presentations, the company During the process of compiling this special gathered in small groups to discuss subjects issue, the editors repeatedly realised that such as the value of copyright, authorship, filters are extremely important and are education, the future of magazines and becoming more significant all the time tablet computers, internet art, museum to distinguish value and meaning within architecture and the latest technological the profusion of information that we developments. The meeting set the tone and receive daily in a great variety of ways. direction for the discussion that has been This also explains the overall title Curating going on for a year now. Some of these the Future: each of us is called upon to discussions are covered in this What’s Next? be our own filter or curator. But because issue of Foam Magazine. artists, writers, editors and curators have 6 already established a filtering view of their latest visual technology present insights environment, they can offer us a reference into the subject matter and themes they point in our own selection processes. work with daily.

Six portfolios In the section ‘Curating the Space’ is ample This issue also showcases six different attention for an exhibition taking place portfolios with exceptional work by Lieko in our own museum in Amsterdam during Shiga, Jordan Tate, Andrew Best, Paulien the month of November. As part of the Oltheten, Hasan & Husein Essop and Cia search for our own future, Foam invited de Foto. To make our selection, we asked four guest curators to realise four radical curators and editors to propose each five exhibition proposals, each of them based emerging photographers or artists involved on a clear viewpoint that differs sharply in photography on their continent. The panel from the rest. Alison Nordström (George included: Anne Marsh who has recently Eastman House, Rochester) is responsible published her book on contemporary for a presentation which focuses on Australian photography, Eder Chiodetto, ‘photography as object’, and Jefferson based in Brazil as curator and lecturer, Hack (Dazed&Confused, London) compiled Japanese photography critic and curator a presentation based on the concept of Mariko Takeuchi, Cape Town-based journalist ‘photography as pure image’. Erik Kessels and writer Sean O’Toole and Lesley Martin, (independent collector/curator, creative publisher of Aperture Foundation’s book director of KesselsKramer, Amsterdam) programme in New York. From their lists translated his viewpoint ‘photography in we chose one representative from each abundance’ into a presentation that is both continent and selected an artist from Europe. spectacular and intriguing, and Lauren

Cornell (New Museum, New York) focused introduction Future Magazines on multi-media work and the circulation of The contribution by Fred Ritchin on the images. Foam is extremely proud that these stand-alone exhibition project What Matters four guest curators have been bold enough Now? Proposals for a New Front Page is to work with Foam on this investigation into particular relevant for us. What Matters new exhibition forms. They have been able Now? took place at the Aperture Gallery in to transform their skills and knowledge into New York in September and resulted from propositions that will undoubtedly lead to Ritchin’s close collaboration with Melissa further discussions. Harris, the Editor-in-Chief of Aperture magazine. This project and exhibition was Such an extraordinary issue could only without a doubt unique. Stemming from have been produced with the skills, talent the idea that the authority of filters that and enthusiasm of many exceptional select and interpret significant news for us authors, photographers, editors, designers, has been undermined and that collective translators, printers and sponsors. The discussions of socially conscious news exist interplay between them all and the only online, a news desk was established shared belief in creating something that in the form of a virtual cafe in the Aperture is challenging, intriguing, necessary, Gallery. Fred Ritchin’s afterthoughts on What singular, fine and unusual have made this Matters Now? conclude the special section an impressive endeavour where the entire with contributions from the editors of four creative process is as much a part of the allied and respected magazines – literally total project as the end product. It is about making each on eight pages a magazine- the process, about starting a conversation within-a-magazine. Many thanks are due to with each other and keeping the contact the editors of OUTLOOK, SeeSaw magazine, going, about information and inspiration. Waterfall magazine and Fantom for their I would therefore like to sincerely thank all enthusiasm and willingness to contribute in who have contributed to this exceptional this rather unusual way to Foam Magazine. issue. Especially our friends, colleagues, photographers and the many other valued In addition to the sections ‘Next Generation’ contacts across the world that contributed and 'Magazines', this issue also contains to making Foam the institution it is today. the chapters ‘From Here On(line)’ on Thank you all, and see you next time! • photography within an online environment, ‘Independent’ on the desire not to Marloes Krijnen conform to larger structures as artists, and Director Foam ‘Technology Matters’ in which experts in the 7 4 Curating the Future by Marloes Krijnen 10 iNdependeNt

12 27 35 Outside the Box Portfolio Audience Participation Interview with JR Lieko Shiga Via PanAm & by Stefano Stoll Kitakama The Sochi Project selected by by Max Houghton 17 Mariko Takeuchi Re-Re-Re-Mediating the Ex-Ex-Extended by Anne de Vries 40 what's next? 23 FroM Here ON(LiNe)

29 I Publish by Bruno Ceschel 42 59 Manifesto of Postinternet the exhibition Art After the Internet 72 From Here On by Marisa Olson 43 64 CurAtiNg Inside Out Towards a History, the SpAce Photography 2.0 Politics and Philosophy by Nicholas Mirzoeff of the Online Image by Laurel Ptak 75 93 47 & David Horvitz Portfolio Future Museum Visions Marcel Feil in Andy Best The Photographers’ conversation with 70 Fall Series Gallery (London) Clément Cheroux Dialogue during

foam magazine # selected by Anne Marsh by Brett Rogers Fred Ritchin What’s Next? Musée de l’Elysée Penelope Umbrico Expert Meeting 83 (Lausanne) The Wide Web of the 4 Curators 4 Visions by Sam Stourdzé 51 Photographic World 4 Presentations Three Shadows Portfolio 1 Museum (Beijing) Jordan Tate interviews with by RongRong & inri New Work Erik Kessels, Alison selected by Nordström, Jefferson 96 Lesley Martin Hack & Lauren Cornell Dialogues during by Marcel Feil & What’s Next? Kim Knoppers Expert Meeting The Ideal Institution 92 & Archiving into Foam Mug the Future by Foam Lab 8 index 171 172 218 159 163 203 209 206 selected by by selected Portfolio Colophon my Archive my by Colette Olof Colette by Manifesto on Manifesto Manifesto on on Manifesto What’s Next? What’s the exhibition the exhibition Statement on Statement & Oliver Chanarin Oliver & Girls Showroom by Charlotte Cotton Charlotte by by Adam Broomberg Broomberg Adam by Paulien Oltheten Paulien Caroline von Courtenvon Caroline Afterthoughts on Contributors List Contributors Future Education Future Future Education Future Foam Amsterdam Foam Joan Fontcuberta by Willem Popelier by N Someone’s Watching Someone’s Exhibition programme Photos from Japan and from Photos tio A

er 155 156 158 N 136 e Manifesto on Manifesto Manifesto on Manifesto by Timm Rautert by What’s Next? Next? What’s by Eder Chiodetto Eder by Photographers Expert Meeting Dialogue during Next Generation Generation Next Future Education Future Future Education Future 9 195 189 Images? ext G selected by by selected Portfolio Cia de Foto Eder Chiodetto Eder s by Lev Manovich Lev by Caixa de Sapato de Caixa N ogy ogy

l How to See 1,000,000 See to How o 131 147 138 tter 174 and Foam selected by by selected N Portfolio A Project by by Project A Six Tables Six es frontpage Halaal ArtHalaal Sean O’Toole A by Fred Ritchin Ritchin Fred by Supérieure de la Supérieure Amsterdam (NL), (NL), Amsterdam Photograhie Arles (F) Photograhie ENSP École Nationale ENSP N Proposals for a new a new for Proposals Of White Walls and Walls White Of What Matters Now? Matters What Holding Up a Mirror Holding Up M

Hasan & Husain Essop & Hasan the Gerrit Rietveld Academie RietveldAcademie the Gerrit zi ech 181 176 185 T 98 A by Arthur Ou by Total Vision Total by Jörg Colberg Jörg by g Photography Interview with Interview MIT Media Lab Media Lab MIT Michael T. Jones T. Michael A GoogledA Future of Analog Instant Analog Instant of A by The Impossible Project by Camera Culture at the at Culture Camera The Rebirth and Future and Future The Rebirth M 99 115 107 123 SeeSaw Fantom Outlook Waterfall Curated by by Curated Curated by by Curated Curated by by Curated by Curated foam magazine # 29 what's next? 10 introduction independent us to three artists who who artists to three us (printed) taken have their own into matters hands. is a con Crowdfunding has been much cept that the about over talked and has years, past two as as well been criticised exceptional prized. Two the Dutch projects by documentary photo Hornstra graphers Rob Lohuizen van and Kadir their bear witness to both the commitment to audi subject and their rely whom they ence, upon for support. 11 Bruno Ceschel introduces matter in digital times. to the love of printed to the love used practice and an ode publishing is a widely The phenomenon of self- photography itself. photography without necessarily using medium of photography medium of photography plore and investigate the plore and investigate of artists to us who ex Vries introduces a group Vries the Dutch artist Anne de the Dutch artist Upon our invitation, Upon our invitation, French artist JR. French artist JR. interview with the young with the young interview starts with an extensive starts with an extensive first chapter to, which first chapter to, we’d like to dedicate this to dedicate this like we’d age, and that is what age, calls for vision and cour calls for vision and constrained way. This constrained way. independent and un independent and entation of projects in an of projects in an entation financing and the pres financing This concerns both the This concerns tious and remarkable. remarkable. tious and is both infec their work own platforms to realise to realise platforms own artists who create their their who create artists that radiate from some from some radiate that and the engagement the engagement and The passion, the idealism idealism the passion, The JR was born in the street and raised with the need for freedom. By play. By love. JR moves about disguised. He runs over the rooftops. He jumps the turnstiles. He shakes off the police. JR is energetic. Whether in the banlieues of Paris, Jerusalem, Rio, Nairobi or New Delhi. He runs around the world, floating like a super-hero. JR is a gang. Self- taught, he surrounds himself with passion, curiosity and generosity. With his close companions, he plots his route, worldwide. Searching for the right cause. JR avoids the sun. The shadows are a resource. Light slows him down. And yet, he exposes himself to danger, to the media. In independent the street. And then in the museums. His exhibition is global. From virtual networks online to the brick walls of Shanghai, the largest gallery on earth is at his disposal. The street is his media. He knows no limits but his own. He is at once the artist, the curator, the museum, the gallery. Independence is his fuel.

↗ Portrait JR, 2008 © Christopher Shay

→ 28 Millimetres, Face 2 Face, Pasting on the Separation wall, Security Fence, Palestinian side, Bethlehem, march 2007 © JR / Agence VU 12 Outside the

Interview with

JR with JR interview

by Stefano Stoll

Box 13 In 2010 you were invited by Festival IMAGES in Vevey, ence the work for what it is. The piece has its full meaning Switzerland to present a new project entitled Un- when it’s in its location. Publishing, films, conferences framed. This was the first time that you worked and museums allow me to recreate the context in which I with a public collection of historic photographs installed my images. The museum has a neutrality which rather than with your own images. Was this your is the best environment for retranscribing my actions, for first step away from the street and towards the explaining these images and generating thoughts free of museum? any political message. The museum guarantees my legiti- The objective with Unframed wasn’t to get away from the macy as an artist. Gallery, New York New Gallery, street and go towards the museum. I had already worked with Foam photography museum in Amsterdam and the To everyone’s surprise, you signed a contract with Tate Modern in London. The real change with Unframed one of Europe’s most important contemporary art was to get away from the photo credit. I wasn’t looking to galleries (Emmanuel Perrotin/Paris) in 2011. Is this distance myself from the street, on the contrary, but to re- the end of your freedom of action? inforce the message of collage in the street. The important (Laughs). Au contraire. Financing my projects from the thing for me is not to know who took the photo but how sales of my work is the basis of my artistic freedom. I it’s been recontextualized in the public space. Unframed refuse any and all sponsoring, and this is the only way I’ve was the occasion to say that I’m not a photographer, but ever financed my projects. I never sign exclusive contracts, that I use the photo as a medium. The message, the art- I don’t get any salary from my galleries and I alone decide

work, is the collage on public walls. Arts des Festival Images, at Unframed the project of Part which works I put on the market. Perrotin arrived ten years

↖ of ©JR © Estate Devrient Sébastien 2010 © Vevey, Visuels de Helen Levitt/Courtesy Miller Laurence after I got started, when I was already working with the Lazarides gallery in London and my self-finance system was already in place. The bottom line is that being represented by a gallery frees up time for me to produce. I don’t want to spend my time selling, even though the money it generates finances my work. Also, the galleries help me get greater recognition from the art world. Because strangely enough, although what I do is widely reported in the media and familiar to a wider public, my work is still unrecog- nized in the contemporary art world.

For an artist like JR whose work is so singular and socially engaged, isn’t there a risk that institution- alizing goes along with instrumentalizing? This is a real fear for me, as it is for any artist. I have to independent look out for speculation around my works as much as I can. Of course that will get away from me one day. For the You started out in the street, because you knew how moment, even if it’s not my objective, I know that recogni- to do without a gallery or a museum. Now you’re tion from the museums legitimizes my artistic process. But showing your work in museums. Why did you change the institution also allows me to do outrageous things, like your mind? having put up the faces of the favela women on a national I haven’t changed my mind. The street will always provide monument in the centre of Rio. This installation generated me with the biggest gallery in the world. No museum can a lot of controversy, bordering on political instrumentaliza- ever compete with that kind of visibility. First, I install tion. But the commissioning museum assured neutrality, the pictures on the street, where they have maximum even though the director had to leave afterwards. impact. Then I give people the keys to contextualize them. Museum exhibitions are part of this decryption. What is your relationship to money? They’re installations accompanying the books and films If my aim was to earn a lot, I think I’ve failed completely. that I provide for free on the Internet. So the museums I’ve already refused a lot of contracts that would have are only one part of the mechanism allowing me to made me very comfortable financially. But since I started, bypass performance ‘in situ’, to provide elements for I’ve chosen to not have money be what drives my work. understanding my actions. And ultimately my choice turned out to be the right one. Our structure is adapted to our projects, and doesn’t put So you make a distinction between artistic work on any unnecessary pressure on us. Our fixed costs are low, site, in the cities where you’re pasting it up, from and never put us in danger. I’ve never lacked money, the distribution of your work through the media, because I’ve always worked within my means and not from books, films and museum exhibitions? some potential financing. I’ve never submitted portfolios Of course! Properly speaking, my artistic process is the to get government grants or prizes, and I’ve never ac- action of collage on location, whether it’s in Kibera, Rio cepted donations. In this sense, my rules are very clear: I’m or Vevey. But my actions only touch the community of radical, and I don’t make any compromises with money. people right there. They’re the only ones who truly experi- The meaning of my work is primary. 14 You started out alone in the street, with a micro- project, you went to the Middle East and you put project pasting small-scale photographs up around Israelis next to Palestinians. How do you respond Paris. Today you direct what’s almost a small to those who say you’re like Zorro, a masked man business that employs or commissions technical, intervening where there is injustice? financial and legal staff. Is JR an individual or a (Laughs). Wait: in the beginning my interventions had collective? nothing to do with the media or current events. Even in Obviously many people are involved in my projects; how- 2004, when I took the photo of Ladj holding the camera ever, they’re under my artistic direction. The most extreme like a gun, I wasn’t working in that neighbourhood because case is Inside Out, which involves the participation of thou- of the injustices. It wasn’t until a year later that my pasted sands of people all over the world. JR is like an orchestral photos found themselves turned up in the background of conductor, who is nothing without the musicians, but who items broadcast by the media during the riots of 2005. gives everyone a large margin for interpretation. A collec- This happenstance propelled me towards a confrontation tive implies an associative operation which isn’t condu- with the media and the clichés they promulgate. It’s true cive to rapid decision-making and the freedom of action that I’m concerned with the notion of injustice. I often that I need. It’s the quality of the ties between my team consider the prime injustice to be how we regard some- members that has generated our way of working; that’s one else. I think that we can change the world by the way what I protect above all. My feeling of freedom depends we show it and regard it. Too often, through the media’s on my trust in my entourage, and this trust is my source simplifications, we form an opinion of a place without ever of inspiration. having been there – the wall separating Israel and Palestine is an excellent example. I believe we can change the world With the money you received from the TED Prize by fighting clichés. ($100,000), you’ve begun a spectacular global project. For Inside Out you’re no longer the artist but rather the coordinator of an exhibition that is with JR interview infiltrating the streets of the entire world. How do you explain this sharp turn from artist to curator? After my last projects were finished, there was a point where I told myself I couldn’t go everywhere I’d been invited. I was receiving hundreds of e-mails from people asking me to intervene near their homes to change their situation. I couldn’t honour all this positive energy. So in accepting the TED Prize, I transmitted it to all the people of the world. With Inside Out, everyone can make use of this prize with their own photos, to do something that makes sense to them. To have impact on a community, on the world, I understood that I have to withdraw from the equation; I have to be the facilitator and not the author. What relationship do you have with the media? On

I’ve become a medium. But this remains an art project, not Nairobi, 2 February 2009 © JR / Agence VU ↖ the one hand you avoid them, on the other you use

a humanitarian one. Inside Out is a mirror of society. Women heroes are them. To what ends? I don’t think I use the media; I dialogue with them. Certain What does the word ‘artist’ mean to you? projects are definitely an experience of the media react- For me, an artist is someone who thinks ‘outside the box’, ing to these themes. I often refuse interviews but try to outside established boundaries, transcending any frame- direct the journalists to the people who participated in work, in all freedom. I think for myself, against the current my projects, like in the shantytowns. They allow me to or not, but not in a given direction. It’s this freedom that , Action in the Kibera slum, Kenya, explain the other side of the picture, and they’re part of people are fascinated by. With that, the artist can allow the means at my disposal for publicizing the meaning of himself to go beyond certain limits. Seriousness can rub my projects. With the Inside Out project it’s the people shoulders with mockery. The artist has the right to make on the ground who give the interviews and explain what mistakes. An enterprise gives rise to expectations. The they’re doing; I can be their publisher, but I’m not their artist owes nothing to anyone. This is why I decided to be spokesman. Generally, in the media or on the Internet I an artist. make sure that the only photos of me you can find are in a hat and sunglasses; it’s only my work that should be Today, do you consider yourself an artist, entrepre- visible and revealed. neur or activist? 100% Artist. Without hesitation. How has your anonymity served you in the past, and how does it serve you today? Ever since you started, you’ve sought interaction I’ve been anonymous since I was 13 (laughs). I’ve grown with current events. Your first project – 28mm, up in this spirit. Doing graffiti, I couldn’t reveal my name. Portraits of a Generation – took you to the heart I had to stay masked for the project Expo2Rue. Then I of the troubled Paris suburbs. For the Face2Face started to paste up portraits of people, whether people 15 close to me or strangers. Basically, these portraits have What does the notion of Do It Yourself inspire in become my graffiti. I’m like a tagger who tags with other you? people’s faces. I don’t want to add my features to the faces On the one hand, for me Do It Yourself could be a state- I paste up. I want to stay in the shadow of the anonymous ment about the self-financing of my projects, and thus to people that I put on display. Add to that the fact that my guarantee of freedom and independence. On the other most of my interventions are done without authorization. hand it evokes an aspect of the DIY tinkering that goes Anonymity protects me from trouble with the police. What along with all my installations: the glue, the paper, the I think is funny is that when I feel really anonymous is benches, the ladders, the scissors … And lastly it’s a good when I’m travelling and I show the officer my passport. motto for the mentality that animates my team: to show Paradoxically, I’m anonymous under my own name, when resourcefulness, and work with what we have and not with I’m famous in my anonymity. what we could have.

Above all, your actions ask questions. Does JR want What relationship do you have with street art? to change the world? Into what? Like graffiti, a photograph is a trace, a way of saying ‘ I It’s not the job of art to change the world. But to change was there’. That said, I’d say that most graffiti doesn’t how you regard the world is to change the world. That make sense except on the walls of the neighbourhood fascinates me, to know that mixing toner on a piece of where they are, while I have differentiated between my paper and placing a collage in a particular place can have work on-site and the works meant for the market. But of impact on our view of the world. My projects are done course, I watch out for the name ‘street art’, because it has with a few strips of paper and sometimes have a lot of become a commercial label. What’s striking to me is that impact. Two years after my intervention, the favela in Rio the explosion of street art symbolizes the reversal of the was becoming peaceful. Ink, glue and paper are certainly traditional relationships between artists and galleries. The not the usual instruments of change. power relations have changed. Street art marks the redis- covered independence of artists. The street has become Your installations are generally monumental. Is the both the gallery and the workshop. But in the future, it’s size of the images important in your process? probably the virtual world that will be the new space for The monumental size of my interventions is a common expression to replace the street. denominator among my most conspicuous interventions. But I have to be careful about this. The context is more How do you see photography evolving in the next important to me than sheer size. When I saw one of the few years? pictures I shot in the favela in Rio published in the celeb- I’ve never been a photographic purist. That’s why in the rity magazine Gala, with a vague kind of caption under it, Unframed project I was able to easily unframe and reframe I understood that this wasn’t helping the project, on the the photos that marked history, in order to recontextual- contrary it was hindering it. I have to avoid falling into the ize them. Photography is becoming hugely democratic independent trap of the image as a vector of spectacle, detached from and today everybody is a photographer. The real ques- any message and from its context. The monumental size tion for me is what we do with all these images produced of my projects helps to raise awareness and get people to every day. Photography in my eyes is above all a vector, a wonder about the subject, but if the spectacular aspect medium. It is incumbent on the artist to take it farther, dominates, one misses the point of the work. since it will always be a strong testimony with a memory function. The artist has a real responsibility to know what You devote yourself to society’s great themes, to his or her photos are becoming, where they are going and major social issues. Is your art engaged? what they illustrate. The director of the festival Les Rencontres d’Arles once said about this, and rightly, that my generation doesn’t How do you see the artist JR 30 years from now? know political engagement any more. Even the definition Oh! I can’t see it at all, not even five years from now. I may of the word political escapes us. We don’t get passionate have gone bourgeois. I may have changed my prejudices about the left-right divisions any more. In this sense, I’m about brands. Maybe I’ll have a pair of ‘Nike JRs’ on my not a militant activist. My actions have no goal or political feet. Really, I haven’t got any idea where I’ll be or what message. I don’t pass judgement on the Israeli-Palestine I’ll be like in ten years. I live from day to day. • wall or on shantytowns. I reveal things, but I’m not an activist. My objective is artistic and not political. Above all, I’m looking for a good fit between the photographs and the place; I want it to become meaningful.

Is JR worried about being ‘politically correct’? Not at all. No more 10 years ago than now. On the other hand I’ve never sought out provocation. I want to raise questions. The installation of the minaret in Vevey, for the Festival Images, is a good example. 16 curated by anne de vries

The artworks I want to present seem to share a curiosity for the enhanced, tilted and tweaked forms of media presentations, Re-Re-Re being re-inserted in specific ways into reality, using new

media technology mediating the E presented in material and sculptural ways in the actual world. Re-Re-Re mediating

the Ex-Ex-Extended x- E x-

Instead of simplifying E xtended the topics, these works seem to be precise in their stimulation of a more complex reading of the intentions and linguistics behind the information cycles as we find in the media spheres.

17 Once celebrated for its mechanical objectivity, photography has become increasingly removed from its objective origins due to technological developments. In modern professional photography, the shopped and cropped image has virtually become the standard.

Camera software such as the High Dynamic Range function in iPhones, immediately enhances images, improving snapshots directly to get more ‘realistic-looking’ photos.

Similarly, the latest, ‘Extended’ version of Photoshop, features multiple extra functions, not just to adjust the photograph, but also to add new information ‘as if’ it was part of the original image, using algorithms, content-aware filters and 3D. In this way, photography finds itself at a crucial crossroad between the actual and a manipulated reality. i ndependent

Of course, it is not only photography that gets ‘adjusted’; all media, including news reports, edit content to maximize the impact on audiences and continually keep them engaged.

In fact, the truth seems more susceptible to manipulation than ever now that we are actively occupied with its interpretation and dissemination through new and social media. Once a certain critical mass of supporters is involved, this can affect the resulting reality of the actual (offline) world. •

18 Aleksandra DomanoviĆ

→ Aleksandra Domanović was born in 1981 in Novi Sad, Slovenia. Her works explore how media technology changes and transforms itself following social changes, and vice-versa. One of Re-Re-Re her recent projects is named 13.30, referring to the time when the TV news used to be broadcast in former Yugoslavia. This is an open-end project for which Domanović took musical themes (named ‘indents’ in news lingo) from the first televised Yugoslav news broadcast in 1958 up to the present, and passed them onto techno DJs who sampled them mediating the E and turned them into tracks. It is a complex project that reflects on the developments of technology and trends but also on the events, and moreover on the way these events were presented, along the history of former Yugoslavia’s component countries. It is presented in form of parties, where the tracks are played by Domanović as a VJ, as a two-channel video installation and as a freely downloadable archive. Aleksandra Domanović lives and works in Berlin. x-

Cayetano E Ferrer x- E

← Cayetano Ferrer was born in xtended 1981, Honolulu, Hawaii. He is an artist who investigates the urban environment and our perception of it. In the series called Western Imports he covers existing objects in various environments with inkjet prints showing the background of the object itself, usually not visible behind it. Then he photographs them, obtaining unnaturally natural images that at first sight seem digitally altered. In fact they result in effective reflections on the in-visibility of the different layers of the contemporary environment and on our memory of it.

19 independent Oliver L inandoutofimages the Web context. authenticity andmultiplication of theabout notions of authorship, addresses andstimulates the debate essayvideo Versions, in which L completed by the projection of the practice. inart ideas evolution of aesthetic andfunctional making visible the spread and criteria of andposture, appearance thegrouped sculptures according to display throughout the museum. He sculptures and videos within the collection, interspersing hisown elements of the Skulpturhalle Basel L and comprehension of the originals. to gainagreater understanding ofgypsum copies classic sculptures reflects on the process of analyzing the past. culture, often juxtaposingthem with and manipulationof inour images He investigates the re-appropriation with new andfound media materials. and curator artist disciplinary working Innsbruck, Austria. Heisamulti- → l o aric reinstalled andrearranged the aric Oliver L l i aric lives and works inBerlin. v The project Kopienkritik aric was in born 1981 in er The project was aric 20 based inL based media. Samara iscurrently Golden public, andmass society spectacle conflict, juxtaposing the self to the address issuesof identity andinternal complex, maximalinstallations often with dvd's via a mixer.video the live feedsare video combined watcher to be watched. Often reverse the gaze, andobligethe use ofcameras surveillance that the viewer isinvolved through the live installationsvideo where The photographing, to create sculptures. made objects, mirrors, andre- fromimages the Internet, hand- range of including found media Michigan in 1973. She a uses wide ← G S amara Samara Golden was in born olden sculptures are incorporated into os Angeles.

hese These Simon Denny

← Simon Denny was born in 1982 in Auckland, New Zealand. He is a multi-disciplinary artist working with installation, exhibition design and sculpture. He explores the juxtaposition of reality and filtered reality by media, and how we exist in relation to this. In the installation Deep Sea Vaudeo he built a reef of screens decreasing in physical and pictorial ‘depth’, rom CRT to LCD, Re-Re-Re showing appropriated footage from an underwater ambient video. The presentation resembled sales displays which often use underwater images of marine life. The viewer was able to wonder around the faux reef, where nature and media, depiction and representation are all swirled

together, hinting at the passing of a mediating the E video format (CRT) and with it the ‘fishbowl’ screen, once a standard building block of video sculpture. Simon Denny lives and works between Auckland and Berlin.

Katja x- Novitskova E x- → katja Novitskova was born in 1984 in Tallinn, Estonia. She is an E artist, curator and media expert. Her work investigates and pushes xtended the limits of the internet and new media art, relating them to issues of identity, social reality and image ecology. The project Expo 2020 Gbadolite is a speculative research developed together with Femke Herregraven, Matthias Schreiber, Chris Lee, Henrik van Leeuwen and Mikko Oustamanolakis. Looking into the relationship between global capitalist investment strategies and contemporary power structures they created their own global event, World Expo 2020, taking place in Gbadolite, a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo. To analyse the processes behind a world expo they created collages of heavily Photoshopped found images related to Africa and new technologies and mixed them up with documentary footage. Katja Notiskova currently lives and works in Amsterdam. 21 Nicolas Ceccaldi

← nicolas Ceccaldi was born in 1983 in Montreal, Canada. The works presented here consist of custom- made prototypes of security cameras, essentially made of optical equipment and children's toys intricately melted together. These mutant devices keep a watchful eye on their environment, feeding a continuous live signal into closed-circuit video displays. Nicolas Ceccaldi lives and works in Berlin.

Timur Si-qin i ndependent → timur Si-Qin was born in 1984 in Berlin. In his work Si-Qin uses commercial imagery to explore the attractors of social and economic systems. For his contribution to Based-in-Berlin, a 1:1 scale football field LED banner system was proposed in Berlin's Monbijou Park, financed by real advertisement rented out by a London based ad-agency. The project was unfortunately shelved at the last minute due to city bureaucracy. Another project, Axe-Effect, consists of sculptures that pay a tongue-in- cheek tribute to the two primary drives of evolution: competition and sexual selection.

22 i publish -

he pub- The Twenty-Six Twenty-Six st, İ chmid has been S sh sh İ i , Stations Gasoline Twenty-Six He started collecting - photo publ l İ uscha self-published between 1963 e R h am an art an am İ c s lication lication is essentially a remake of some of the books Ed including 1972, and line. line. bookentitled a published he 2009 In Gasoline Every Stations, Building on the Sunset Thirty-Four Parking Nine Strip, Lots, Swimming Fires. Small No Trees, Palm Few A Pools, The German artist Joachim book and photography vernacular with working making for years. graphs he found in public places and, profiting from the widespread custom of sharing digital images, more recently pursued his search on- e ubl 23 runo C runo B by by

∆

İ p Jamie Hawkesworth, have published numerous others, always sticking to their original format. Murray once said his original reason for making the zines was to do something interesting in a place where there was little going on. The series of publications was conceived as pieces of a puzzle, telling everyday, mundane stories about the town they lived in and its community. Each zine was conceived as a mini-project, be it a fake fashion shoot with local teenagers, or a selection of quirky family photos found in the local charity shops. The zines were given away for free to friends and family or sold cheaply at £3. Distributing the publication in this way might be seen per se as a statement, a response to a decade in photography governed by the principle: ∆ big prints in big white walled galleries for (sup- posedly) big money. Or, if applied to books: big widely considered to be the first modern artist’s expensive books in limited editions offered for a book, an iconic precursor and major influence small elite of collectors. on contemporary artists’ book culture. Unlike Ruscha, however, Schmid did not take the pic- In 2010 PPP moved on to making photozines, tures of the places and objects listed in the title, full-bleed black-and-white photostories printed but instead used images he found online. digitally in a professional print-shop. And, more recently, a newsprint publication called Preston Schmid’s book is not merely an homage, but art Bus Station. The bus station in Preston is a beau- reflecting on itself, a significant conceptual up- tiful modernist building that seems to encapsu- date on some of the issues Ruscha raised in the late the doomed optimism of post-war England. 1960s. By using found images, Schmid questions When it was scheduled for demolition to provide the function of the art photographer in the days space for a more profitable housing development, of the digital democratization of the medium. In Murray, Parkinson and Hawkesworth decided to choosing to print the book on-demand, he works spend several weeks in the station, photograph- in another reference to Ruscha, whose books were ing its architecture as well the community that an open edition, with copies neither signed nor ≈ independent numbered and printed at various times to keep them cheap and available. Along similar lines, Schmid’s publication is theoretically an ‘infinite’ edition, available online directly from the printer, potentially forever, in a interesting conceptual rhyme to the idea of imagery found online. İ am a storyteller, İ publİsh

In June 2009 two British photographers, a young lecturer Adam Murray and one of his former students Robert Parkinson, published Preston Is My Paris, a 12-page zine of Xeroxed photographs printed at home. Preston, a poor post-industrial town in the North of England, was treated, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek gesture, as a substitute for the Paris of Atget and Boiffard.T his first publication gave both the collective and the imprint its name: PPP - Preston is my Paris Publishing. Since that first zineA dam and Robert, occasion- ally joined by another former Preston student 24 i publish

- - he The ower ower L - ef The , C’s C’s e he compul- The NY - Sta Bus Preston he campaign to to campaign The Getting To Know Know To Getting sh sh Preston Bus Station Bus Preston Getting To Know My My Know To Getting İ İ and Jong all felt the ddly, ddly, O PPP n lov merican photographer Ellen A am, İ am, he project succeeded in engag in succeeded project The chmid, chmid, S publ publ İ İ owerhouse owerhouse published a book entitled am İ am P İ The hardback cover photobook presented ide. ide. he publication, produced on a shoestring, shoestring, a on produced publication, The S t the same time, mixing portraitsfashionista e it an artistic gesture, a political act or an in- an or act political a gesture, artistic an it e B timate diary, need to leave a trace of their world. ideas, life, drive the to succumbed has artists these of Each In 2010 Jong produced another photobook, self- photobook, Jong produced another 2010 In entitled time, this published Husband’s Cock. It is a shameless - documenta tion of her cock, boyfriend’s photographed at life. intimate their of moments different graphic sexually Its un-arousing. strangely is fect content becomes a tender ode and – to a love paradigm. gaze’ ‘male the on twist what it means which Ellen documents with sion to fall in its love, burning life-consuming na its ture, irrational mechanics, is touching. gesture of turning the camera from away one’s own genitalia to those of the loved one makes incarnate we all-importantwhen that moment - gratifica and self-obsession juvenile from move look outward our necessary the share tion to to else. somebody with life My Husband’s Cock has a lot in common with family that albums: act of collecting intimate visual traces of life and one’s patiently gluing a It’s them story together we that into a story. share with our loved ones, and upon which the is constructed. our life of narrative was in fact given away for free. free. for away given fact in was succeeded. eventually building the save A photographs documentary and architecture with manner, offbeat beautifully a in tion also charmed the art crowd, photography publication. collecting the who started In 2006 Pees On Earth by Jong. peeing, while took Jong self-portraits of series a often in public spaces during the drunken and debauched nights of her youth in East became a tool in campaign the demoli- against tion. - disadvan young mostly place, the to gravitated teenagers. taged and community local the ing ◊ 25 to manifest him- or herself in something as tan- These three recent publications epitomise and gible, palpable and long-lasting as only a book update three artistic urges that have always can be. They ultimately believe photography can existed: challenging art, looking outwards at be a tool, that they can use to interact/interfere society and looking inwards at oneself. Artists with the world and possibly with themselves. making books is not by any means a novelty, rather what has changed is the context in which Schmid, PPP and Jong have decided to publish their books are published. their books themselves. They made that decision for different reasons. To openly challenge New technologies have recently furnished new the modus operandi in publishing — Schmid has tools to pursue missions of this sort. Printing- made printing on demand a central element of on-demand and digital printing improvements his own artistic practice and actively nurtured in general, the wider and cheaper availability that approach via a collective he founded, ABC of off-set printing and the amazing platform The Artists’ Books Cooperative. So they can to showcase and sell books offered by internet, interact with a social and political landscape are only some of the astonishing recent tech- cheaply and instantly. PPP has made more then nological advancements available to artists. A 20 publications so far, none of them costing more well-informed international audience interested than £10. They have created a book so intimate in books clearly exists – a further justification for that, as Ellen Jong said, she would have never felt this (r)evolution. • comfortable about having it published traditionally and seeing it appear in random bookstores around the world.

The three DIY publishers have been doing it themselves not because there is money to be made from publishing – on the contrary, most photo graphy publications are condemned to lose money – but because there is something empowering, fascinating and exciting about creating a book, especially if it is a home for your own pictures. independent

∆ Joachim Schmid, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Nine Swimming Pools, A Few Palm Trees, No Small Fires, Blurb: 2009.

≈ Preston Bus Station, Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth / Adam Murray / Robert Parkinson, Essay by Aidan Turner-Bishop, Tabloid Size Newspaper, Preston is my Paris Publishing: 2010.

◊ Ellen Jong, Getting To Know My Husband’s Cock, self published monograph with photographs and text; 150 colour pages, New York: 2010. 26

Lieko Shiga Kitakama

All images © Lieko Shiga, 2011

Photography is usually linked to death Her work is therefore neither an inter rather than life, as if Medusa’s eye pene pretation of her own world nor a docu trates a vibrant body to turn it to stone. A mentary about the real world. This seems reversal of values occurs in Lieko Shiga’s to be her vocation: to save numerous, photography. To her photography is life, anonymous lives and loves that are fated the only thing we can grasp at in despair to be forgotten and universally ignored. of being unable to evade the death that must come to us all. She made a dead Coal miners used to take canaries down plum tree bloom with paper flowers, into the mines with them. The canary is returned seawater to the sea that weighed sensitive to methane fumes and in its the same as a stranded whale and death saved the lives of many miners’ lives. collected many flowers from graves before Lieko Shiga, like a canary, dedicates her burying them in the ground. These actions continual song from the darkness in our have only one meaning: giving life to real world, to photography as life. • ity, in other words to bodies that are supposed to be dead.

selected by Mariko Takeuchi AudienceOn the concept and practice of crowdfunding: Via PanAm (Kadir van Lohuizen) and The Sochi Project (Rob Hornstra & audience participation ParticipationArnold van Bruggen)

Like the old joke about alcohol and life, it seems the in- became the buzzword. Everyone from Magnum photo ternet is both the cause of and the answer to the demise graphers to undergraduate photography students saw it of traditional media. Over the last few years, the cri- as a lifeline to making new work. Larry Towell was on the sis of print has reached its apogee. Photographers who receiving end of much opprobrium for asking his sup- made a living from photojournalism or documentary porters to fund his latest trip to Afghanistan. Although photography have had to renegotiate their industry, and his bid on one of the two most successful crowdfund- sometimes their art, in order to survive. The trickledown ing websites, Kickstarter, surpassed its goal of $12,000 effect of the nosedive in sales of most newspapers, maga- (143 backers pledged $14,007), his description of the zines and books has been that editorial budgets have project Crisis in Afghanistan was perceived as woolly and shrivelled; photographers have been asked to submit ill-conceived. Such are the risks of going public when their pictures for no fee, work without insurance, and an idea is still at the formative stage. Towell’s status as pay to publish their own books. a Magnum photographer must have played a huge part in convincing people to back him, yet it also left him As the vultures circled, chewing on the abundant flesh and others like him open to the criticism that this was of free content before spitting it out half-eaten, a new lifestyle funding – allowing the already privileged to tour business model appeared that looked like salvation. the world at someone else’s expense. A cover of the US Crowdfunding was born, a term that when I first heard satirical magazine The Onion in 2009 depicted a mourn- it, connected in my mind to the relatively recent con- ful young boy, with the strapline ‘For only $5 per month

cept of ‘flashmobs’, the sudden gathering of likeminded Houghton Max by you can help continue photographing this child.’ people to watch or take part in an activity, facilitated by electronic media. Both concepts have the idea of Because, as already suggested, crowdfunded work community at their heart, and it is on this premise that depends on the idea of ‘community’, photographers crowdfunding will thrive or falter. pursuing this route have to maintain an open and sometimes intimate dialogue with their audiences. As Crowdfunding – an ugly and somewhat inaccurate term, the work progresses, this exchange often takes the form as ‘crowd’ carries with it a connotation of anonymity – of a blog. The thoughtful blog can provide an answer 35 independent audience participation, always a favourite category of of category favourite a always participation, audience inherent and crowdfunding non-traditional with ment engage- its is Holland, in Arts the of Foundation the from as such opportunities, funding traditional more the project has been such a successful recipient of other, the website.through funded was Ironically, reason one cost total the of 10% only fact in project,yet funded successfully a of example excellent an PanAmis ,Via ventures. photographic on specifically Lohuizen’s Van focuses It board. editorial independent an via site its on funding access can projects which controls it that in Kickstarter from differs Emphas.is,which website crowdfunding dominant other the used VanLohuizen to likeit.’to learn make myself the story; I find it awkward. But I have had to instinct my not is himself. ‘It of out drawing certain a required It one. difficult a communicator constant to traveller lone from transition the found he admits theeight countries in whichhe has travelledso far. He theme, Van Lohuizen now has Facebook friends across his as migration of subject the taking America,South Currentlyhalfway through year-longa journeyacross revelation. a been has crowdfunding into foray own N agency the of co-founder Lohuizen, vanYet Kadir for remote andoutofsync. sphere, where his responses to criticism came across as in person) did not find its natural habitat in the blogo- ell’s nature private and (he eccentric very is delightful endeavour. this for site Larry crucial a offer can Tow- the people who are paying for the work, among others, has forts become paramount. The blog, read directly by photo the nature of witnessing has changed, the need for the principles.As its of one as objectivity uphold longer no can that photography of mode a in work, the in to the question postmodern of where to locate the self , the sense of community necessitated by his his by necessitated community of sense the oor, grapher to examine the validity of his or her ef- her or his of validitythe examine to grapher 36

↖ Via PanAm App for iPad were losingbigtime.’ independence, which we a be way to regain our ‘Crowdfunding could under the illusion that I could sell enough apps to do do to apps enough sell could I that illusion the under not am I income. of source new a be could app The regain our independence, which we were losing big time. longa time ago. Now crowdfunding could bea wayto projects.started approach thinking to The ways ferent changing very quickly and we had to unite, and find dif- we Noor started was that we realized the industry was I would have said you were crazy. But one of the reasons I’d be pioneering an iPad app or diving into multimedia, Says Van Lohuizen: ‘If you’d told me a few years ago that complexity hasalsobroughtitsrewards. are investing in new technology by making an app of this funders. That Van Lohuizen and his producers Paradox stories.’ my in interested are people that love I goal. only my work;it’smy to addicted am I holidays! like don’t ‘I from his work. optimism, saying he is not interested in making money incouplea ofhours. Heretains his youthful verveand and then publish to on went and common,were prodigy, he simply says he thought self-published books way. While this makes him sound like a entrepreneurial wondered if he could sell a hundred further in the same friend bartender offered to buy a copy for €30 Hornstra project, graduation Billionaires, and, perhaps most remarkably, his university as such projects, earlier Hornstra’s of success the of crowdfunding was entirely self-generated, building on ethnic, geographical and political rivalries. Their model wanted to look at real life in a region tense with religious, Hornstra visitors, to perfect appear region the making Games in 2014. As vast sums of money are pumped into the Olympic of Winter site the on focuses project year and writer filmmaker Arnold van and Bruggen his five- Rob Hornstra’s is era crowdfunding the of story success big Another profit from.’ [the this are all these templates and it can be done easily. I hope amount of money if you wanted to do it right. Now there idly. If you built a website some years ago, it cost a crazy people who have an iPad, but this is changing quite rap- enough not simply are there because funding, without app] will be something we can all all can wesomething PanAm be Via will app] Billionaires in 2008, presales of which sold out The Sochi Project. He worked closely with . After a a Communism.After and Cowgirls in 2006 2006 in Roots 101 101 Via PanAm – a 40-week journey Via PanAm engages the audience through a exploring migration in the Americas variety of platforms, using both traditional In Via PanAm, Kadir van Lohuizen and new media. While on the road, from investigates the roots of migration in the March 2011 to February 2012, Van Lohuizen Americas, a phenomenon which is as old as can be followed through weekly radio humanity but is increasingly portrayed as a reports (VPRO radio, NL), bi-weekly new threat to the Western world. Via newspaper articles (NRC Handelsblad, NL) PanAm follows Van Lohuizen’s footsteps and magazine publications (IS Magazine, from the southern tip of Chile to the Sunday Times Magazine, LIFE China, and northernmost parts of Alaska. Travelling soon National Geographic, GEO, Newsweek 28,000 km along the Pan-American and L’Espresso). Through Facebook and Highway and crossing 15 countries, Van Twitter he keeps in direct touch with his Lohuizen visualizes the stories of the audience. The Via PanAm website and iApp communities, regions and societies he provide contextual background information encounters. His photo stories reflect the and directly update readers and viewers on complexity of migration – the diverse the journey’s progress. motivations for coming and going, the Simultaneously, Paradox and Van Lohuizen struggles and successes, the economic, are working on a fourth platform: a political, social and environmental travelling exhibition capable of bringing contexts, as well as intimate moments the project back to the people and regions and personal stories. that relate to it. audience participation

↘ © Kadir van Lohuizen/ NOOR Images. In the center of Neiva is the reception center for the displaced (refugees). On average around 400 people register every month. In 2009 there were 11.000 refugees registered, in 2011 this number has gone up to 38.000.

37 independent

↗ © Rob Hornstra/INSTITUTE. The Sochi Project Project is a unique, in-depth and costly Courtesy Flatland Gallery In The Sochi Project, Rob Hornstra and project. Dutch newspapers and magazines Arnold van Bruggen have since 2009 been are unable to undertake or afford a project documenting the changes in and around on this scale. Hornstra and Van Bruggen Olympic Sochi, Russia. Over a period of five think it is important that independent, years, The Sochi Project will become an documentary journalism continues to exist, atlas of this volatile region, from the which is why they are doing it themselves, multi-billion-dollar investments in the financed by their donor system and by Olympic venues to the conflict-ridden selling special edition prints and territories of the Northern Caucasus and publications, like Empty Land, Promised Georgia. The Sochi Project is a dynamic mix Land (2010), Sanatorium (2009), the of documentary photography, film and Annual C-Print Collectors Box, posters or reportage about a world in flux; a world Christmas cards (with prices ranging from full of different realities within a small but € 6 to € 1,000). extraordinary geographic area. The Sochi 38 Hornstra, like Van Lohuizen, controls access to a cer- not a grainy, gritty, dramatic style of photography. That tain proportion of his work. Only donors can view all the page may now have morphed into a computer screen, the stories on the Sochi website. With Via PanAm, the iPad, or even a gallery wall brings considerations of its indepth reports can be viewed only by purchasers of own. Historically, in terms of photographs, the bar is the iPad app (1600 to date). This reveals the paradox set pretty high for post-Soviet aesthetics, and indeed for of the crowdfunding enterprise: the very openness of migration. Whether the Via PanAm app, with its rich the interaction is immediately undermined by its exclu- tapestry of stills, audio, video and storytelling, will have sivity. There is no tangible difference between an old- the same resonance or longevity as The Grapes of Wrath, fashioned subscription, a new-media paywall, and this or the photographs of Lewis Hine remains to be seen. kind of limited access. One of Hornstra’s books from Now we have found a way to make the work, we must the Sochi venture costs a prohibitive €99, though there keep searching for ways of making the work. are cheaper ways to get a piece of it (Christmas cards at €6, for example). While Van Lohuizen’s photographic Crowdfunding is undoubtedly a breakthrough, but subjects in Nicaragua or Honduras may not own iPads many of the criticisms – of exoticism, of grand narra- (of course some do; he does not photograph only the tives – that have attached themselves to traditionally disenfranchised), many will be able to visit the exhibition funded work of an engaged nature will stand, unless he is hosting in each of the fifteen countries, or take part photographers address these questions too. Photography in the workshops he holds locally. has never been a simple transaction. The business of looking at a photograph has always been triangulated Aesthetically, the luxury of time spent with their sub- – a three-way relation between photographer, subject audience participation ject has not, it seems, altered the photography of either and viewer. By inviting the viewer – and in theory it is artist (though Van Lohuizen is now photographing in also possible that the invitation extends to the subject colour as well as his habitual black-and-white). Though (though that would bring its own problems) – to par- Hornstra spoke of a great sense of creative freedom, and ticipate financially in the project, power relations shift. Van Lohuizen of working ‘experimentally’, their photo This generation of photographers does not want to be graphy is not in itself pushing boundaries; it is in fact seen as heroic or aloof (or at the very least, does not quite ‘traditional’. What has changed, however, is each want to admit it) and is actively pursuing a method of photographer’s relationship with words. Van Bruggen’s working that is more inclusive and less hierarchical; a writing carries the same weight as Hornstra’s pictures; Van tacit understanding that the work would not even be Lohuizen writes himself and works with a text editor, possible without the viewer. Such consideration must providing crucial context to his pictures. This deepening also be applied to the subject. In the best-case scenario, relationship with words in longer term projects is a step new funding strategies could have the added effect that in the right direction for photojournalism, which in its on webshop photographers are no longer implicated in such a nega-

www.thesochiproject.org proper definition, is simply pictures on a page with text, ← tive way in the stories they pursue. •

39 foam magazine #29 what's next?

40 In the process of making in his in-depth essay this special issue, we, the ‘Photography 2.0’. Marcel editorial team, discussed Feil (Foam Deputy Direc- things that stood out for tor, artistic affairs) invited us over the past year. Key Clément Chéroux (one moments, developments of the five curators), Fred and exhibitions that Ritchin and Penelope stimulated talks on the Umbrico (whose work state of affairs and called was seen in From Here for a critical position for On) for a conversation and within one’s own open to the public in introduction from here on(line) practice (as artist, curator, Foam's What's Next? editor, etc.). project space in Arles. Transcriptions are Point of departure for this included here. chapter is From Here On: one of the leading exhi- Laurel Ptak spoke with bitions, in the sense of artist David Horvitz on being the most discussed, the history and politics during Les Rencontres of the online image in d’Arles photography the context of his work. festival. With the exhibition's manifesto at the Inspired by the essay beginning of this chapter ‘Lost Not Found’, which it continues with different is part of one of our contributions on the use favourite publications and abuse of the online Words Without Pictures, image in an artistic the author Marisa Olson context. has now, two years later, ventured to continue Nicholas Mirzoeff con- with the theme in the trasts the engaging work essay titled Postinternet. of the artist JR with the All of which could indi- topics addressed by the cate the directions to exhibition From Here On take from here on(line).

41 The manifesto is written by the five curators of artistic director of KesselsKramer; Martin Parr the exhibition From Here On: Clément Chéroux (UK), photographer of the Magnum agency (F), curator in the Cabinet de la Photographie, and Joachim Schmid (D), artist. The exhibition Centre Pompidou; Joan Fontcuberta (ES), was part of Les Rencontres d'Arles, 4 July – 18 artist; Erik Kessels (NL), founding member and September 2011, Arles, France. Inside Out

Photography is not what it was. It is inside out. Despite the fears so widely expressed in the 1990s, photography did not die. It has interfaced with the Internet and morphed into Photography 2.0. For a decade after the 9/11 attacks, we have endured the image wars from Shock and Awe assaults on Iraq, and the scandals of Abu Ghraib and the inside out photography 2.0 Danish cartoons. With the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 coming after the dramatic transformations of the Arab Spring, it feels as if that period is now over. No photograph of bin Laden’s corpse appeared, unlike the execution of Saddam Hussein: the image has proved to be a dubious weapon. No wonder Foam is asking What’s Next? while Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2011 offered a manifesto entitled From Here On and the International Center of Photography’s Fourth Triennial in 2012 has been named simply ‘Chaos’. However, the era in which such gatekeepers determined cultural direction is over.

by Nicholas Mirzoeff Photography 2.0

43 from here on(line) humour. There wereclassic of sense punning certain a and whimsy of direction the in veer to seemed curators the by made choices the Further, practice. digital of sense common the of part are which assertions, these about remarkable particularly nothing was there time, some for culture digital with involved been have who us of those for are significant and are of part certainly what’s next. Yet of their by imagery editing and remixing. These claims the seemingly endless expanse of the as Internet source use who ‘photographers’ are all cameras.Rather use none of whom are in photographers the sense that they exhibition displayed the work of some thirty-five artists, upload.’and remix cut, and Their clip recycle, all we editors, of begins:magazines.species ‘Nowwe’reIt a various in and online posters, on reproduced and a manifesto, displayed at the entrance to the exhibition seemed a promising place to start. The curators issued Spring.the Arab to adequate be might of observations made in pursuit of a photography that These remarks are themselves a snapshot, a trajectory sonal is, onceagain, political. for and by the self as a claim to personhood. The per- the self-image, which I call ‘photografitti,’ a mark made is social the and networking social between interface visual mechanical reproduction,of (image).self the democracy a to of The means the of mocratization de- democratic,becoming is first beyondtography its graphing herself using her phone at arm’s length. Pho- photo womanyoung the is gesture signature whose body,the of extension an is It observation. mediated machine- male) (white, unmarked disembodied, a – was ever it if – now not is photography that suggests go viral.images certain then metaphor biological The Photobucket, Facebook and other social networks and Flickr, via circulated Twitpic,and posted taken, are Clay Shirky has called ‘publish then filter’. Photographs theorist Internet that era moved decisively into the has it year, each taken photographs billion 500 2.0 era. With an estimated the for app’Web ‘killer a Photography has become Magnum photos Magnum with the

to personhood. and by the self asaclaim image, which Icall and the isthe social self- networking social between From Here On Here From ‘photografitti,’ - a markmadefor 44 The interface artist asifinaHawai’ian volcano.artist ‘photo jokey produced manipulation Photoshop obvious deliberately a online,while genre cat LOL the evoke to seemed chickens of graphs graphs of monuments such as the Eiffel Tower. Photo- From Here On, in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris with of curators the of one Parr, Martin by project recent a compare further, little a comparison this Totake images. anddigital posters resulting the with want they what do and themselves role to be that of facilitator, allowing the subject to pose his access), overdisabled for much understands (so JR Here On had a literal gate visitors were required to climb forehead. her/his of Whereas centre the in mark bindi a with sitter the rendered Paris,which in pidou PomGeorges Centre at the exhibition Delhi Paris the - accompanying one as such projects, Out Inside other while all the images were archived online, together with minutes. Arles was festooned with the flyposted results, within printed and taken photograph poster-size scale his for booth photo open an had JR artist street the trast, con- allowed’signs.By not are ‘photos ignored widely with festooned and fence wire-mesh three-metre-high a by surrounded expensive,was exhibition On Here services.rity For all of the openness,rhetoric the From secu- avoid and online get Tunisiansto Egyptians and suedthe ‘lulz’[laughs], seriousturned2011,in aiding like abandoning of a project. Noticeably, web-based projects the like more felt it after Spring, Arab Tahrirthe and from photography in the name of a digitality certain but removed be must content if as was matter.It subject documentary or political of absence complete almost belated, discovery of online visual rhetoric, there was an say might one outdated, somewhat this all Amongst Inside Out project in which sitters could have a large- and LulzSec , who had previously pur - previously had Anonymous,who as f ors photo tourist of lays There were multiple over- Flag. Red the hoisting soldier Soviet the out the Reichstag were seen with- of ruins the that removed,so content key graphs’ of the of graphs’ From From - JR’s Artocraty in Tunisia, a street-art engagement that immediately followed the January 2011 revolution. With his self-proclaimed British irony, Parr photographed the subsection of the 10th arrondissement most known for its Islamic population. Perhaps his most remarked photograph depicted men praying in the street on Friday in front of a shop window labelled ‘Produits Exotiques’ [Exotic Products]. There’s a winking play with Orientalism here that uses its very awareness of the trope to replicate it beneath a protective layer of wit. Street prayer has been highly controversial in Paris with the Sarkozy administration ordering worshippers into a disused warehouse in September 2011 as part of its attempt to appropriate the racialized resentment that motivates National Front voters. Parr indulged in his own nationalism by observing in the Independent newspaper in the U.K. that French Muslims are ‘much more similar to other French people than French people are to Britons.’ As a British citizen I can assure you that the inside out photography 2.0 affect of superiority here is entirely intentional.

By contrast, JR imagined his project in Tunisia as being without conditions and open to the future. Working in conjunction with Tunisian bloggers and using all local interlocutors, the goal was to create a series of one hundred portraits of people who had participated in the revolution. The photographs were the large-scale head-and-shoulder close-ups in black-and-white that have become JR’s signature style. Printed as 90x120cm posters, they were flyposted across four cities in Tuni- sia, including startling examples in the former secret If the Internet and photography are turning inside out, police commissariat, on the façade of one of Ben Ali’s then, that involution does not solve the contradictions former houses, and in place of the former dictator’s and problematics of photography but it has extended face on posters. As the documentary posted on JR’s the photographic field and transformed the scene of own website indicates, even photography. If the archetype this open access project was of modern photography was subject to intense criticism in Today’s inside-out the unmarked (white, male) Tunisia. Why only a hundred? photographic photographer taking pictures was the common refrain. For in the street (Robert Frank) the revolution is widely held archetype is or in scenes of crisis (anyone to have been the work of the at Magnum), today’s inside- people, not a sub-set of he- the self-portrait. out photographic archetype roes. No-one wants to replace is the self-portrait. Whether autocracy with artocracy, even as a joke. In Cairo, the taken by web-cams, timers or simply by holding the contingency artist Ganzeer, who had produced a wide- camera/phone at arm’s length and checking the results ly-used pamphlet on how to conduct a protest during until a ‘good’ one is obtained, the self-portrait is the the revolution, is now attempting the marathon project counter to the ubiquitous surveillance of the age of of street portraits of all 847 people who died in the Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). It asserts a pres- revolution, the martyrs. However, the Supreme Council ence and autonomy, from which can be derived the of the Armed Forces, who are running Egypt, persist right to be seen and the right to look. The enslaved, the in painting over these memorials so Ganzeer and his racially segregated and their modern descendants, the fellow street artists like Keizer are using the Internet imprisoned, have no such right. Even after the abolition as an archive of their work (http://cairostreetart.com). of slavery in the United States in 1863, ‘reckless eye- A Google maps mash-up indicates where and when the balling,’ a simple looking at a white person, especially work was posted. Users are invited to ‘like’ the link on a white woman or person in authority, was forbidden Twitpic and Flickr but not Facebook, which is now too those classified as colored under Jim Crow. Such look- carefully under surveillance. But Ganzeer had only ing was held to be both violent and sexualized in and accomplished three of these portraits as of last summer, of itself, a further intensification of the policing of making it unlikely that his martyrology will ever be visuality. As late as 1951, a farmer named Matt Ingram accomplished. was convicted of the assault of a white woman in North 45 each individual is a person with rights. It indexes and updates the claim made by the Civil Rights movement in the U. S., namely ‘I am a man,’ into such forms as ‘We are all Khaled Said,’ the name of a Facebook page liked over 400,000 times. Above and beyond the particular instances of identification of this kind, the placing of bodies in the street as an index of the desire for change was a photography of the people. In key public spaces, such as Tahrir Square in Cairo, individuals staged themselves as the people. Their arrangements for cleaning, medical care, food and other normally private concerns rendered the public square – a key term of political discourse – into a domestic or vernacular space. The everyday of the vernacular public refuses to accept that we are in a permanent state of emergency, requiring constant CCTV Carolina because she had not liked the way he looked surveillance. In creating this domestic public, the square or at her from a distance of 65 feet. This monitoring of the other space becomes in effect a technique of projection: it look has been retained in projects the coming to- the notoriously racialized gether of individuals as US prison system, so that, If the Internet and the people into a different for example, detainees in future. This projection the Abu Ghraib phase of photography are turning takes food and environ- the war in Iraq (2003-4) mental security to be were forcefully told ‘don’t inside out, then, that equal or superior in prior- eyeball me!’ ity to security from ran- involution does not dom acts of politicized The photographic self- violence because so many image eyeballs the self solve the contradictions more people are affected and asserts its right to be and problematics of by them over the long seen and its right to look. term. Photography 2.0 I would call the genre photography but it has moves, then, from the in- ‘photograffiti.’ By this I dividual experience of the mean that unlike the ‘pho- extended the expanded present to tograph’ with its claim to project the future. Watch be a ‘pencil of nature,’ photographic this space: more follows. photograffiti is human- • made. It creates a mark field and that is not necessarily from here on(line) here from knowable to the human and machine intelligences try- transformed ing to contain the global populace. Ironically, the new the scene of mark of identification is becoming the iris, replacing the nineteenth century fingerprint and bypassing the photography. failed biometrics of the face. For face-recognition software is still poor at best, while many such photographs cannot be crawled by whatever bots Google and others might devise, because they are never posted anywhere, remaining literally in camera. This vernacular secrecy creates a certain space to be seen. Photograffiti on the individual scale exists in an expanded present, one that intrudes briefly into the past but is experienced as a continuum. Techniques such as slow-motion replay and the ability to pause and rewind live digital television broadcasts have accustomed us to this new present. The photograffiti artist knows that the first task is to refuse to ‘move on, there’s nothing to see here,’ as the police will say, but instead to claim the existence of the present as the site of the right to look.

In its collective form, this photograffiti is the demand of a people to be recognized as ‘the people’ with at- tendant sovereignty, implying at the same time that 46 i N C�NV ers Ati cel Feil... include in the exhibition. That inspiration, but not only�N in mAr is not a conventional way of terms of images. with... curating an exhibition. M.F. But of course a M.F. I see that the natural concept, or an idea, a habitat of the works is the possibility, is only really internet, though now it has valuable if it’s used in a been transformed by the five proper way to tell a story of you into an exhibition. That or a narrative, or to show is a variant presentation form: something. I felt it could have another way of presenting the been brought to another level work and a different way for by telling something about

ClémeNt the audience to look at the the possibilities the internet m A r works. Some works, I notice, offers. For me, a large part of Chéroux are now beautifully framed, as it was a display of possibilities if they are traditional artworks. digital imagery offers, but Foam What's Next? in Arles, How did you deal with the the important thing for me c el feil in onvers 5 July 2011 tension between the internet is what the artist has to say and the traditional three- with this new equipment, with M.F. Can you please dimensional exhibition space? these new tools and a new tell us something about the vocabulary. origin of the From Here On C.C. First I have to say exhibition. Why this exhibition that the fact we found it on C.C. I cannot answer that at this moment? the internet doesn’t mean the question in general terms. internet is necessarily the final Each artist has his own answer C.C. The origin of this point of an artist’s project. to your question. Each artist project was an idea of Joan Most of the artists now in the does his own work. One of Fontcuberta. He was aware exhibition hold exhibitions in them is working on the ques- that something was happen- museums and gallery spaces. tion of intimacy, another on ing, we are all aware that They commonly make prints, the position of the author, the something is happening in frames, or posters and the death of the author, so there the photographic world, but like. So the internet is not isn’t just one question or one he was interested in bringing the final destination, le point answer in the exhibition. There A together five people from d’achèvement, nor the place are different questions and tion with... different fields to try to put where the work is presented different answers. their fingers on what is hap- as an achievement. It is more <…> pening today. The people in of a way to diffuse, to dissemi- the exhibition are no longer nate the work. And the fact it’s M.F. What about the title, really photographers, they see on the internet doesn’t mean From Here On. Can you talk themselves more as artists, the best way of presenting it is a little about it? Is there a or as editors, which is a very as it’s presented on the inter- schism in history before the important word in the mani- net. This is not an exhibition exhibition and from here on? festo. Artists working with about what happens on the images today are increasingly screen. It’s an exhibition about C.C. No. Usually when you likely to be editors, making images, and the internet is pose the question in terms of choices and not always creat- just a way to disseminate the novelty you lose a lot in terms ing the images themselves, images. of complexity, so obviously which is important. Another the title turns out to be a bit point is that the project was M.F. So the internet is too easy, like an advertising an experimental curating of more or less an archive, a slogan. But it means that experimental photography; reservoir where artists find from here on some major for three or four months we imagery and select to edit or questions, like the question of sent each other links to artists’ work with it. the author, of quality and of websites, and then we met appropriation. These aren’t three times in Paris where we C.C. Yes. I would say to just peripheral questions, discussed those artists and find images, but also to find they’re much more important chose those we wanted to ideas, to find concepts. It’s an than they used to be.

47 from here on(line) conclusion? and how didyou reachthat What didyou mean by that the McDonald’s oftypology’. of theFromHereOnshow: ‘It’s very specificcharacterization credit forcomingupwitha F. M taking advantages ofimages ‘It’s asifthebourgeoisieis Someone saidtomethat festival? status atthephotography place intheworld, oronour comment onourdiminished viewer ispowerless. Isthisa The readerhasnopower, the tive intheexhibition atall. and thereisnothinginterac- collaboration withtheviewer, the digitalisinteractivity, system. A majorpromiseof so littletexture. Itisaclosed (Euclidean geometry)with those rectanglesandcircles equivalent ofslow food–all one mightcallafast-food simple algorithms,what essentially writingwithrather sun withoutany sunlight. Itis – we have, inasense, the is reallynolightinthisshow with thelight.Andtomethere writing withthelight,drawing the word photography means things goingon.Therootof F oam What'sNext? inArles, R . F. . Rit W Ihave togive you the ell, therearemany Fred 7 July2011 chiN right? about power, thanalegal more ofamoralright,talking F. M they were lookingatus? people, orquestionit?Whatif to celebratewatching other we want togo? Dowe want Is surveillance the way that want tobeseenthat way? right forthem? W walls attheexhibition. Isit prostitutes fromMadridon of privacy: you areputting such archives, thereisanissue Google StreetView, andother of thesubject?Becausein authors, butwhatoftherights talking abouttherightsof is called trash. artist, whiletheinitialimagery imagery andbecalledan can take otherpeople’s power relationship–someone trash. There’s inequalityinthis do whatever we want with and it’s reallytrash.W no vision,authorship, copyright becausethey have exhibition have nojustifiable that thephotographersin the curatorssaidyesterday power imbalances.Oneof I thinktherearevarious made by theproletarians.’ there avision? Whereshould all theseadditionalimages? Is on. Butwhatdoyou dowith build ourown websites andso distribute everywhere, we can software packages, we can history. N ow we have massive duction thanatany timein we have moretoolsofpro- would bemuchbetter. Now their work, andeverything to recognisethemandpublish waiting forsomegatekeeper publish theirwork. They were complain thatnoonewould ago photographersusedto of it.Twenty orthirtyyears but thatisonlyasmallpart the legalandfinancial R . F. . W Sothereisperhaps e tendtofocuson 48 Then we started ould you e can

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with... very few ideas since – most Afghanistan too few people of the new ideas are coming understand what the conflict from social media and the is about, why so many have cellphone culture. What are died, where it is going, or the new ideas coming from have much sense of the the photographic community? Afghan people. Why don’t we concentrate on finding them, on encouraging We are coming to a point them, instead of recycling so where the image culture much of what has been done reflects itself but increasingly before? loses the world. I sense that what we are doing, somewhat PeNel�pe

So now, if you look at the Iraq unconsciously, is building m A r war the only arresting images an image planet that we UmbricO that affect many people want to inhabit while we (although I am exaggerating are leaving the world that Foam What's Next? in Arles, somewhat) are the pictures we used to be part of. We 7 July 2011 c el feil in onvers of Abu Ghraib, which were live for images, and we are taken by soldiers, or Nina imprisoned by images – we M.F. In the From Here Berman’s pictures of seriously allow them to imprison On exhibition there’s hardly wounded soldiers who have us – rather than using the one artist presenting a single come home to the United images to free ourselves from work: series, grids… they’re States. In Afghanistan there misconceptions, to help us to all typologies, whatever the are also very few images that live. And I think that too much subject matter. You work with relate to, that help explain of what we see, in the photo typologies as well, can you the dynamics of the last industry, is symptomatic of tell us a little bit about your ten years of a devastating our imprisonment. We have fascination for selecting works conflict – although projects to escape the prison, and and putting them in some sort of typological grid, or clouds, or whatever shape you choose?

P.U. The grid for me is A really an expedient way to tion with... talk about a non-narrative, non-hierarchical arrangement of images. There are representations of some subjects that can fit quite naturally into a grid and often these are typologies. But a typology encontres d’Arles 2011 encontres d’Arles in itself, or a grid, is not my interest - my fascination is

ourès / R with the subjects I explore and the grid or the typology is just F rom H ere O n, installation shots the most expedient way to ↑ © Anne F say something with, or about, like Basetrack, and the make the images work for those subjects. work of people like Reza us. Otherwise we become, as Zalmai, Lynsey Addario, Tim image producers, both jailers M.F. How do you find, Hetherington and Simon and prisoners. select and edit the subject Norfolk, should be more matter? There are a lot of widely disseminated as a dissimilar works, but also a collection of voices amplifying common denominator in the each other rather than as images you use. fragments. Ten years after the post-9/11 invasion of P.U. Yes - there is a �N with... ersAti 49 iN C�NV common denominator con- way, like the Suns from Flickr case for example the sun is ceptually. Somebody asked project. Take the tile that the ultimate material, physical me how I choose what I use of might be very straightforward, object in our world. It’s bigger all the possible images on the down to earth, low culture, than life, it makes us happy, internet. If you take a camera but you turn it into sometimes gives us energy, it’s always outside onto the street, you very traditional aesthetics. It’s there for us. It’s an incredible are confronted with countless a conscious choice, I presume. singular physical presence, but possibilities. You could make in these more than 9 million any kind of image. If you are P.U. That’s a very good pictures it is subsumed into the a documentary photographer example, together with the electronic space of the inter- you might have a subject Mirrors (from Home Décor net, where it becomes infinitely that you are interested in, so Websites), also in the exhibi- multiple and ultimately just a that starts to help you move tion. Both are derived from code. It’s interesting to take towards a place in the physi- contexts where the original something that goes from cal world that is interesting to images propose the ultimate being a big physical presence you. And the more inside the promise of beauty, to begin to being an ephemeral, non- subject you get, the further with. The mirrors are sourced material, presence, back to you move into a context – into from commercial websites being a physical presence. the physical, material space. where they have been I do the same thing on the staged to be seductive. And M.F. How does it feel to internet. And I could say that everybody loves a sunset. It’s see your work in a very new environment. It’s something that perhaps needed to be done, something we haven’t seen before. What is your reaction to seeing your work surrounded by all those other works?

P.U. I am actually used to seeing my work in this context, but it’s only in the last couple years that I have been invited

encontres d’Arles 2011 encontres d’Arles to photo festivals. I think it’s important that the photo graphy world is embracing

ourès / R the kind of work that is in this show. I’ve begun to call myself F rom H ere O n, installation shots a photographer because an ↑ © Anne F insistence on a separation I am a documentary photo one of the most universally between photography and grapher looking for specific photographed subjects - on the kind of work I make is as types of subject matter, which Flickr there are more than 9 superficial to me as privileging has to do with dematerializa- million images tagged ‘sunset’. ‘medium’ and ‘technique’ in tion, immateriality, material, I have started to find pictures the definition of photography. technology, dysfunction within online of people taking photo- I think there’s an underlying technology, the disappear- graphs of themselves in front and important connection ance of the subject. of an installation, as though between all the work in they are in front of the sunset this show and the inherent M.F. One interesting thing themselves. conventions we associate with to me about the exhibition traditional photography. is that some of the works M.F. Why didn’t you presented there finally present that project digitally overcome the aesthetics as in the website? inherited from a painterly tradition. The way you present P.U. The materiality of it is All photos © Karin Bareman / Foam, your grids is aesthetic, in a really important to me. In this unless mentioned differently

Jordan Tate New Work

All images © Jordan Tate, 2010 – 2011

Jordan Tate’s latest work wrestles with one His images frequently focus on indicators of the key contemporary preoccupations of of an image in the making – a photograph our field: photography qua photography. of a Polaroid that could easily be an In other words: How do we see? What exposure/lighting test for a studio shoot; are suitable subjects for photography? the depiction of an iPhone screen filled And what are viable means of image- with what appears to be a colour bar; a making? web browser in the midst of download. All of these have become part of the familiar Tate’s work belongs to a growing group of lingua franca of contemporary image photographers indebted to predecessors making and image sharing, but usually Christopher Williams and James Welling. they are kept behind the scenes. Boldly, Tate But Tate pushes the conversation beyond places these elements front and centre. nostalgia and squarely into the present by indulging in screen-based images and non- In another über-contemporary nod, Tate traditional output methods like lenticular adopts a mode of working in which the screens, animated gifs, and 3-D anaglyphs. traditional idea of a coherent style or For example, the marching ants – familiar artist series is dismissed, making room to anyone with working knowledge of for seemingly disparate image-making Photoshop – become embedded in his final modes to coexist within a single body of image. These animated selection lines are work. In an appropriately deadpan manner usually a momentary visual reference or this series is entitled New Work. But it’s not the trace of an artist’s working process. that the work is interesting just because Here they are transformed into the image’s it’s new; it’s interesting because it offers a raison d’être. compelling and quirky exploration of the work involved in new photography.•

selected by Lesley A. Martin Art After The forehistory of the article you are now reading is that Foam asked me to write an update to an essay I wrote in 2008 for LACMA’s Words Without Pictures book (Aperture/Thames & Hudson); the lengthy

title of which was, ‘Lost Not Found: The POSTERINTERNET: after art the internet Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture.’ One of my aims with that piece was to bring to the attention of a wider art audience the existence of a thriving group Postinternet

by Marisa Olson

of artists whose work employed the internet self-reflexively – to both celebrate and critique the internet, primarily in their posts to a number of group ‘surf blogs,’ including Nasty Nets, the original ‘pro surfer’ blog, of which I am a co-founder, along with artists John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, and Guthrie Lonergan. Nonetheless, there were many important artists I did not have the space to highlight, and one important term I still have the yet to elucidate: Postinternet. Internet 59 In his recent essay, ‘Within Post-Internet’ (pooool. info, 2011), Louis Doulas sets the scene: ‘While Post-Internet is a term still awkwardly vague to many, it was first conceived by artist Marisa Olson, most widely encountered in a 2008 interview conducted through the website We Make Money Not Art. Her definition acknowledges that internet art can no longer be distin- guished as strictly computer/internet based, but rather, can be identified as any type of art that is in some way influenced by the internet and digital media.’

While there has now been a fair amount of writing about the term, and a fair number of artists, curators, The postinternet is a moment,and scholars have clung to it, I have yet to publish a statement of my own outlining what I meant in coining a condition, a property, andthe aterm ‘Postinternet Art,’ and how I’ve seen it develop quality that encompasses andin the five years since I did so. This will be that essay. In fact, what I want is to give you a historiography that transcends new media. is aware of the conditions of its own production, as I simultaneously present you with an image philosophy of art influenced by the internet.

My original statement to We Make Money Not Art’s Régine Debatty was that ‘I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can be done well on networks but can and should also exist offline.’ This is a point that I’d been trying to hammer-home to anyone who cared to listen for the previous 3-4 years. When appointed Editor & Curator at Rhizome, in 2005, my first agenda was to I tried, in the essay ‘Lost Not Found’, to pry existing change the organization’s mission statement to assert conversation about this work away from the oversim- its support of not only internet-based art, but all art plified, often dismissive diagnosis of pro-surfer work that engages with the internet. as a mutant digital strain of that genre silhouetted by the phrase ‘found photography,’ and hold this work up Shortly afterwards, Rhizome Executive Director from here on(line) here from against other notions about the ways in which quotidian Lauren Cornell invited me to join her on a net art content circulates within the space of flows we know as panel at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) that also in- the net. As I said there, these Pro Surfers are ‘engaged cluded artists Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, and in an enterprise distinct from the mere appropriation of Wolfgang Staehle, and curators Michael Connor and found photography. They present us with constellations Caitlin Jones as respondents. The panel was preceded of uncannily decisive moments, images made perfect by by Time Out-NY’s [2006] publication of a roundtable their imperfections, images that add up to portraits of discussion among us artists about the state of net art the web, diaristic photo essays on the part of the surfer, practice. In both the article and live discussion, I made and images that certainly add up to something greater the point that I felt what I was making was ‘art after than the sum of their parts. Taken out of circulation and the internet.’ Pressed for an explanation, at the panel, repurposed, they are ascribed with new value, like the I said that both my online and offline work was after shiny bars locked up in Fort Knox.’ the internet in the sense that ‘after’ can mean both ‘in the style of’ and ‘following.’ For illustration, I referred The theoretical ‘money shot’ of the essay resided in to the concept of postmodernity coming not at the end my statement that ‘the work of pro-surfers transcends of modernity, but after (and with a critical awareness the art of found photography insofar as the act of find- of) modernity. ing is elevated to a performance in its own right, and the ways in which the images are appropriated distin- I’m not the only person to have discussed concepts guishes this practice from one of quotation by taking similar to the postinternet. Indeed, Guthrie Lonergan them out of circulation and reinscribing them with new spoke in a 2008 Rhizome interview with curator meaning and authority.’ Nonetheless, there were many Thomas Beard of ‘internet aware art,’ which he de- important artists I did not have the space to highlight, scribed as a way ‘to take the emphasis off the inter- and one important term I still have yet to elucidate: net and technology, but keep my ideas [about them] Postinternet. intact.’ Interestingly, this compelled him to make what 60 he called ‘Objects that aren’t objects,’ i.e. a t-shirt or a book whose primary purpose is to be the vehicle of internet content. In 2009, curator Gene McHugh was awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to keep an ambitious blog (recently published in paper- back format by LINK Editions) called Post Internet, which took my term and Lonergan’s as points of departure in critiquing and historically-contextualizing contemporary work that might be considered postinternetThe. notion of the postinternet McHugh sees the postinternet situation as one in whichencapsulates and transports ‘the internet is less a novelty and more a banality,’ a presence that is now a given; a generally less phenom- enal phenomenon. network conditions and their critical POSTERINTERNET: after art the internet Meanwhile, artists like Harm van denawareness Dorpel began as transcendsuch, even the so farinternet. as to identifying themselves in their bios as postinternet artists, and others began writing about their own take on the term, as in Artie Vierkant’s ‘The Image Object Post-Internet,’ whose own salient definition of the term calls it ‘a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.’ These are all tell-tale network conditions that have both pre-internet precursors and contemporary offline manifestations; furthermore, this historically-aware, continuum-synthesizing definition of the postinternet is itself exemplary of postinternet thought, insofar as it reflects this awareness.

I lay out the history of this discussion in this way for Certainly, art history is not without its Posts. We’ve several reasons. I feel that it is important to be self- managed to solder this recursive prefix onto a number aware and transparent while one plows forward with of names for movements and practices within the field the work of articulating a set of practices and commu- at large. Whether we speak of the postmodern or the nities greater than herself. This essay is an open work postphotographic, when we pop a ‘post’ on the front and I can only aspire to be what Rancière might call end of a thing, we place a priority on priorness. But an Ignorant Historiographer. I also feel that postinternet the time-delay between the conjoined terms should be artistic practices (as opposed to everyday postinternet measured in the context of the near-future, not a vast material culture) have not only a special kind of rel- remove. Afterall, looking at a histogram of the forms evance or currency, but that they are also part and and ideas that have influenced art practice and its dis- parcel of an as-yet unspoken, totalizing, near-universal courses, postmodernity may now sit much closer to set of conditions that applies to all art as much as it im- modernity than it does to us today. Just ask Bourriaud: plicates all art in transporting the network conditions postmodernity is dead, long live altermodernity! under which we live. This is a brisk responsibility ripe with opportunity, though many artists will undoubtedly Far more interesting than the life and death of this no- fail or elect not to recognize and exercise it. menclature are the changes to which they bear witness. To call a thing a post-thing is to say that the thing is itself But the final, if not the most obvious reason to be meta- precisely because of the thing. We could quite exhaustively enunciative in sketching this historiography is that no consider the ways in which my postmodern sweatshirt is observer of a post-epoch can tell you precisely when they postmodern (beginning at the very least with the condi- arrived there, only where they arrived. No one can tell tions of its production and not ending before irony), but you what they ate for lunch on the day that ‘postinter- the ‘post-’ says it all. Because of the modern conditions netism’ struck, or what shoes they were wearing when of which my sweatshirt transports a critical awareness, the big news dropped. With the exception of 9/11, there my sweatshirt is postmodern. Propter hoc ergo post hoc. is no degree-zero for this or any other post-epoch, only a categorical here-and-now that will persist until it The notion of the postinternet encapsulates and trans- doesn’t; until it becomes stale and the air smells of an- ports network conditions and their critical awareness other mode. If it weren’t so stale to speak of paradigm as such, even so far as to transcend the internet. The change, one would here invoke Thomas Kuhn… expectation of ‘afterness’ preempts the root of the post- 61 thing, as a sort of simultaneously taxonomic/ taxider- gel and curator Hanne Mugaas, entitled ‘Art History mic lacquer is poured over ‘the modern,’ or ‘the photo,’ According to the Internet.’ The couple presented their stopping it dead in its tracks... In fact, pour some on audience with an answer to the question, What would the tracks, too, so we can also obsess about how we you know about art history if all you knew about its major arrived at this frozen position! artists was what YouTube videos came up as a result of querying their names. In this sense, they were channelling Afterall, the pervasiveness of network conditions is the concepts McHugh recalls: ‘What Seth Price called such that the postinternet (as a conceptual vehicle) “Dispersion.” What Oliver Laric called “Versions”.’ The drives and spills across planes of practice and terri- results were mostly short sound bites like Andy Warhol tories of discourse in just as rapidly seering a way as answering that, yes, he likes Jasper Johns because he Richard Dawkins meant to imply when he argued that makes good lunches. As funny as the lecture was, one the concept of evolution was such a totalizing theory very unfunny thing about it was that only one woman as to sizzle through all fields like a ‘universal acid,’ was included in their list: Tracey Emin. Her YouTube from philosophy to astronomy, from theology to zool- incarnation was a poorly-shot camcorder video of a ogy. Such is the universality of the postinternet, in this superfan waiting in line at the Tate Modern for Emin to postinternet moment. sign a copy of her newest book. When I asked Arcangel and Mugaas about the absence of women, they replied As I initially conceived it, the descriptor postinternet simply that it was not an intentional choice, but rather encapsulates an image philosophy. If we want to split that they let a widely-accepted primer determine the hairs about it, we could call it a post-ekphrastic image list of names for which they searched, and then they philosophy – one that comes after the understanding showed only those for which they found results; both that images are capable of not only illustrating and steps filtered-out women, as history is wont to do. In describing, but also theorizing themselves, even on this sense, Arcangel and Mugaas performed art history, their own terms; even as they bring themselves into par excellence, by reenacting its cycles of filtration and resolution for the first time. info-trickling. They also demonstrated the internet’s systemic tendency to model the logic of its creators, Art history is less the peculiar beast it looks like, and however hegemonic it may be. (Cf. Christiane Paul, more simply beastly. In its all-too-often restrictive, ‘The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anato- self-congratulatory, near-sighted life cycle, all a piece mies of Cultural Narratives.’) of writing in this genre must do is simply regurgitate The sense-experience of art the historiographic origin myths that preceded it, and The postinternet may be ahistorical insofar as it has no perhaps embellish itself with a new exemplary kernel degree-zero, but if it could come tothat arrive at perform we- might say is of the or two. Just as easily as it writes itself, art history so ing posthistorically – that is, to be criticallypostinternet aware of the era, is an art of often leaves out the women or ethnic minorities or less- problems historically reenacted with each new strata cool-kids that were left out in previous iterations, and of historiographic sediment, then we conspicuousmight really get consumption its readers all too often accept these new narratives as somewhere. from here on(line) here from dogma, as Alpha and Omega – outside of which there must be nothing worth noting; and they celebrate its For now, academies are slow to discover, socially- writers not as scribes delicately lifting and reproduc- contract to accept, and begin churning-out so-called ing from extant discourses, but as demigods they don’t seminal texts on by-then-dated artwork. Scholars realize are barely alit and carefully kindled by their own forbid or aggressively dissuade their pupils from writing greasy self-anointment. about hitherto unknown (i.e. pre-canonized) artists, which halts progress, stunts egos, and flagellates the In the postinternet era this phenomenon often manifests notion of original research, even as it traditionally in the difference between critics who blog and bloggers purports to call for it. The terribly good news (or who style themselves [self-appointed] critics. Despicable wonderfully awful news) is that the academy as we as the latter may be, they are also among the savviest know it is plunging into a state of unsustainability – internet users. Understanding that media, themselves not leastly because of its inability to respond to the (perhaps because they are all extensions of other media – socio-economic conditions concomitant with network and of ourselves – as McLuhan taught us) perform a sort culture. Meanwhile, as a defense mechanism to this of evolutionary ring cycle, they often flip-flop their flip- prohibition on contemporary thinking, we scurry to pant love-it/hate-it take on an artist’s work as frequently invent epistemological trajectories – drawing lines as they refresh their homepage. Yet these character flaws between charted points in a constellation and sounding- in the artworld’s online manifestations are not reasons out echoes in the space of contemporary practice. I to dismiss the internet or deny the postinternet. They are believe it is as much this defense mechanism as it is an simply online reflections of a broader culture; one that overlapping set of aesthetic concerns or formal traits just so happens to be internet-obsessed. that has landed us the photo → film → new media storyline most widely recited today. Afterall, there are Take as a more specific example the performative other realist media to which new media could easily be lecture given a few years ago by artist Cory Arcan- compared rather than contrasted. 62 But the postinternet is a moment, a condition, a property, ing the medium itself (the self-imposed burden of all and a quality that encompasses and transcends new nascent media struggling to move beyond ‘mere repre- media. Under this rubric, we should say of the inter- sentations;’ in this case, representations about working net what Allan Sekula said of photography, in Read- at a distance). We’ve entered the more mature ‘some- ing an Archive; that is, ‘We need to understand how thing more’ phase in which it may be a given that two photography works within everyday life in advanced artists are working simultaneously in different spaces; industrial societies : the problem is one of materialist we’re ready to move on and say something more with cultural history rather than art history.’ This is one place the internet, not just talk about it. in which the arc from photography to the internet holds. Artistic practice within the two media are not the only So what does postinternet art taste like, the aesthetician practices possible under these scopic regimes. While might ask? The sense-experience of art that is postinter- art is not exclusive of such things, the media ecologies net, that is made and distributed within the postinternet, under scrutiny here are also the site of a vast array of or that we might say is of the postinternet era, is an art of

commercial, political, libidinal, economic, and rhetori- conspicuous consumption (Cf. Marisa Olson, ‘Lost Not POSTERINTERNET: after art the internet cal functions. It seems almost trite to point this out, Found’). By sheer virtue of making things, the critically given that Walter Benjamin schooled us on the collapse self-aware internet user makes postinternet art. These of auratic distance, in mechanical reproduction, so long may or may not have the look and feel of Lonergan’s ago, but I’ll say that, by the same token, art made within ‘objects that aren’t objects.’ Afterall, Vierkant quite these spheres sadly continues to be dismissed as merely astutely pointed-out that ‘Post-Internet objects and vernacular, as seemingly-excess, or as weak because of images are developed with concern to their particular its (however mythical) origin in the everyday. As Boris materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of Groys laments (‘On the New,’ 2002), ‘only the extra presentation and dissemination.’ ordinary is presented to us as a possible object of our admiration;’ while I might argue that this relatability is, As so often happens in such articles, this author has in fact, a reason to celebrate such work. surpassed her wordcount just as she is prepared to serve-up examples of recent, provocative, or interest- In Louis Doulas’s aforementioned essay, ‘Within ing postinternet work. But given the ubiquitous nature Post-Internet,’ he highlights a 2011 tweet from art- of network culture and the increasing level of critical ist Harm van den Dorpel, in which the self-described internet-awareness on the part of users of all demo- The sense-experiencepostinternet of art artist asks, ‘Doesn’t the impact of the graphics, it is very tempting to wipe one’s hands of this internet on arts reach far beyond art that deals with the wordcount issue not only by calling for the conversation that we might say isinternet?’ of Indeed,the the impact of the internet reaches far to continue in other places, amongst other voices, but postinternet era, isbeyond an suchart art, andof far beyond art itself, to all of the generally to make a much larger argument. exigencies and banalities of life in network culture. conspicuous consumption We are now in a postinternet era. Everything is always- Doulas is the founder of Pool (pooool.info), ‘a platform already postinternet. Just as there was once an epoch in dedicated to expanding and improving the discourse which cultural producers and consumers were informed between online and offline realities and their cultural, that they were in the postmodern, whether or not they societal, and political impact on one another.’ It is one were hip to it, we can now say that all works are postin- of many DIY spaces cropping up, from the surf blog ternet (albeit to a lesser or greater degree of reflexivity) to the online journal to the offline reading groups now because all works produced now are produced in the devoted to looking not only at these interrelations, but postinternet era. also at the increasing fusion of these seemingly disparate realities. In a sense, this recalls Lonergan’s jest, in On that note, let the images and portfolios on the the Beard Rhizome interview, that ‘I think it’s hilarious adjacent pages, the books positioned near this volume, to hear that phrase – ‘DIY’ – all the time now, because and even the next websites you visit or billboards you it makes me think of Punk, and the web is so mild next see serve as illustrations of the universality of this and boring...’ Nonetheless, there has been a vigorous condition. If ‘Lost Not Found’ was about an artistic movement (perhaps even more so since the 2008 inter- scene, stumble with me now upon this scenario in view) to self-publish, mass-distribute, and memetical- which we are already prefigured: the postinternet. • ly-infiltrate the world at large with one’s commentary in contemporary digital visual culture. In a word, the project of these enterprises may be described as quite postinternet.

One is always prone to making such claims, but we might say that the World Wide Web is, now more than ever, mirroring globalization as reflected in the tone of online collaboration. No longer is the content of this activity strapped with the heavy burden of represent- 63 Towards a History, Politics and Philosophy of the Online from here on(line) here from Image

by Laurel Ptak & David Horvitz

6464 My work as a curator has, for many years now, critically attended to new possibilities and cultural implications of online space for art. Interestingly the project for which I am best known is not an exhibition in any traditional towards a history, and philosophy politics of the online image sense, but rather a blog. For almost five years now I have presented my view of contemporary photography inside this context, putting countless images into public circulation and sharing them with a daily community of several thousand viewers, stretching across hundreds of countries over six conti- nents, sparking a vibrant discourse about the medium of photography.

Over the span of this project it has often occurred to me that the online image in and of itself has some unique characteristics, and consequences, that have not yet been well articulated or understood. Like digital photography had earlier negotiated a new theorization of the medium, it seemed to me that the conditions of online culture would soon need to confront a new reality and ontology of the online image.

But so far I only had questions, not answers: How were artists, journalists, theorists negotiating the new meanings and implications of the photograph inside network culture? How do we make sense of the image’s new forms of hybridity, modes of authorship, economies of attention, and conditions of sociality? Beyond undoing photography’s prior relationship to the real, indexicality, or materiality does the online image define itself on new terms – through its flexibility, disregard for traditional ideas of authorship, ownership and authenticity and its privileging of pathways of circulation and distribution over the act of creation or production. Does the online image really have the potential to disturb established notions of visual culture, journalism or artistic practice in profound ways?

To attend to such questions, in December 2011, I’m launching a new research initiative that works towards articulating a yet unwritten history, politics and philosophy of the online image. Envisioned as a five-year inquiry I hope to engage many artists, theorists, historians, curators, institutions and publics along the way. For now I’ve decided to start right here in the pages of Foam. What follows is a conversation between myself and artist David Horvitz, addressing his unique artistic practice as one possible vantage point to contextualize and consider the specificity of the online image.

Laurel Ptak

Laurel Ptak: What do you think is works and movements and acceleration. of itself. For a Brief Time Only at a distinct about the online image? A The online image is always re-contextu- Location Near You is a perfect ex- lot of your work seems to approach alized. There is something about its time- ample. This project addressed con- this question. less character. That it can be constantly text and the circulation of images in flux. The question is: how do you work as reconfigured by network culture David Horvitz: The online image is with this? rather interestingly. something that can’t exist outside of its condition of circulation. Obviously, an Your projects find compelling ways I did this with Mylinh Nguyen. It was analogue photograph circulates, it had of negotiating this. I’ve often a photo project that distributed imag- to get to where it is. But the online im- thought the real medium of your es as digital files to drugstores around age is...online. It is in the middle of network might be distribution in and the world, which then materialized in 6565

Terminal Island with the Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington to the north. Adjacent to the Heim 2 3 Bridge is the Henry Ford Bridge that carries rail Discussion amongst various Wikipedia editors from Talk Pages traffic. Thread title: Something fishy on Pelican beach

Without intending to be insulting to the (cur | prev) 04:32, 16 uploader, File:26 pelican.JPG is one of a January 2011 Gavia series of not very good images of a man immer (talk | con- on a beach and I would not use it to il- tribs) (8,002 bytes) (Not really a useful lustrate any subject. The file was up- image of the article loaded to Commons today. Geographi- subject) (undo) cally unrelated IPs have been adding the

Part 1/12 image to various articles, which seems,

In popular culture well, odd. The IPs that I've noted so far In the original Gone in 60 Seconds, the police chase goes across both the Gerald Desmond are 75.212.88.129 (talk • contribs • info • Bridge and the Vincent Thomas Bridge. The remake, Gone in 60 Seconds, has the climatic WHOIS), 75.87.252.190 (talk • contribs • Eleanor jump on the Vincent Thomas Bridge. In the film Death Race, the island is the home of info • WHOIS), 80.178.14.162 (talk • con- the prison in which most of the film takes place. Author John Fante makes extensive mention of tribs • info • WHOIS) and 205.143.67.250 the island in the novels Ask the Dust and Dreams from Bunker Hill.

(talk • contribs • info • WHOIS). If anyone In the Neal Stephenson science fiction novel Snow Crash, Terminal Island is part of a "sacrifice zone", wants to do some digging, the image is also a "parcel of land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value". used on the French-, German-,immediately to the northand of El Segundo. Span- The beginning of the Blink 182 video of their song "First Date" lists El Segundo, 1974 as its location Amtrak's El Segundo Bus Stop (ESG) is located at - Although it was actually shot in Burnaby, British 3 6 3 7 ish-language Wikipedia. theDelicious Los Angeles County Metro Greencarbun- Line Douglas Columbia at Lost in the 50's Drive In. Discussion amongst various Wikipedia editors from Talk Pages Thread title: Something fishy on Pelican beach Station and is serviced by Thruway Motorcoach. El Segundo High School has been featured The stop is on Amtrak's 1c bus route that runs four in many films and television shows, including cle (talk) 01:51, 20 Januarytimes a day2011 between Amtrak's (UTC) Torrance Bus Stop Superbad, WarGames, Joe Dirt, The Fresh (Alpine Village) and the Bakersfield Amtrak Station Prince of Bel-Air, Boston Public, The Hot Chick, where passengers transfer to and from trains on Yours, Mine and Ours, Even Stevens, 24, Joan Amtrak's San Joaquin route; passengers can also of Arcadia, The O.C., Room 222, Epic Movie, Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) #Photo- connect with Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner route at the Shredderman Rules, "90210", Blackboard Van Nuys Amtrak Station. Jungle,"Medium" and many others. Some promotional T-shirts sold in El Segundo claim that graphs of places which contain a person In popular culture El Segundo High School has appeared in more El Segundo is home to the Los Angeles Lakers films and TV shows than any other high school. as a prominent subject is a related discus- and Los Angeles Kings practice facility. David Spade mentioned El Segundo on The The hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest wrote the Showbiz Show with David Spade. song "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo", which was An episode of Bones was filmed at the Hyperion sion. The uploader in that case is different, included on their 1990 album People's Instinctive sewage treatment plant, which lies on El Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. The elderly Segundo's western border. but the issue is the same: deliberately add- landlady (Irma P. Hall as Marva Munson) in The Many years ago a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Ladykillers repeatedly complained about the newspaper item suggested that El Segundo was inanity of this lyric. one of the few U.S. cities where every street had ing images posed to feature this one indi- The singer Robbie Williams sings a reference to "I a hill. However, that is only true of the western left my wallet in El Segundo" in his song Me & my residential area of the city. vidual without clearly identifying him in monkey. CSI: Miami is filmed in parts of El Segundo. The city is referenced in post-hardcore band A couple of episodes of Medium were filmed at El Glassjaw's song Everything You Ever Wanted to Segundo Middle School. many articles on California beaches. Bugs, Know About Silence from their debut album of the In the movie Crash, Ryan Phillippe plays a Los same name. Angeles police officer who lives in El Segundo. I disagree that Commons is the place to Besides mentioning Watts, Fred G. Sanford (Redd In the movie Point of No Return, Bridget Fonda's

Foxx) often referred to El Segundo on the 1970s character says the line "And I gotta go all the way Part 3/12 hit TV show Sanford and Son. In one episode, to EI Segundo" discuss this - as far as Commons would be he refers to his Ripple wine as coming from "the vineyards of El Segundo." He also references concerned, they are properly licensed im- El Segundo after he tells a soldier about remembering "crashing into the Pacific during WWII." The soldier asks, "You were shot down ages that could be useful. The issue is that by a Japanese Zero?" Fred says: "Nope, a bigot threw me off the pier in El Segundo!" In another episode - titled "The Reverend Sanford," he says they have been uploaded precisely to satu- he was "having a religious picture painted on his ceiling next week, like Michelangelo. It's going to (781.4/km²).rate The racialmany makeup of articlesthe city was here with the what is rec- be Moses partin' an oil spill in El Segundo." Finally, 4 0 4 1 73.40% White, 0.59% African American, 0.99% in another episode, when Lamont says the cologne Native ognizablyAmerican, 2.38% Asian, 0.18%the Pacific same person. — Gavia immer Discussion amongst various Wikipedia editors fromhe is Talk wearing Pages is called "Days In Paris," Fred says: Islander, 18.09% from other races, and 4.37% Thread title: Something fishy on Pelican beach "Smells more like "Nights In El Segundo." from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any The alternative ending of Austin Powers: race were(talk) 43.50% of the02:42, population. 20 January 2011 (UTC) International Man of Mystery states that subsequent to the crash-landing of Dr. Evil's Bob's There were 4,989 households out of which 33.3% Big Boy rocket, Dr. Evil found work as the night manager of a Big Boy restaurant in El Segundo, had children under the age of 18 living with them, I thought it wasthough one thedoes not nor quality ever did once exist in ofthe the photo 51.6% were married couples living together, city. 10.5% had a female householder with no husband The movie Dude, Where's My Car? was filmed present, and 33.2% were non-families. 25.5% of that was at issue,in El Segundo, inand front of the icewhich cream parlor could be dis- all households were made up of individuals and formerly known as Scoops. 10.5% had someone living alone who was 65 cussed at commons. While it's true there's a years of age or older. The average household size was 2.82 and the average family size was 3.38.

guy in the photo, I downloaded it and blew In the city the population was spread out with 25.6% under the age of 18, 9.2% from 18 to 24, it up and he's not identifiable. Baseball 30.7% from 25 to 44, 22.1% from 45 to 64, and 12.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36 years. For every 100 females Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots 02:45, 20 Jan- there were 100.8 males. For every 100 females uary 2011 (UTC) age 18 and over, there were 97.8 males. The median income for a household in the city was $47,729, and the median income for a family was

Part 4/12 $54,849. Males had a median income of $35,679 versus $30,736 for females. The per capita income for the city was $21,563. About 7.1% of families To me, the biggest issue is the saturation- and 10.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 12.5% of those under age bombing of one person's appearance in 18 and 7.7% of those age 65 or over.

Carpinteria hosts an annual Avocado Festival, a large number of articles. The middling with a history extending back to 1986. Over 80,000 persons attend the three-day festival which quality of the images is also an issue, but it takes place during the first weekend of October on Linden Avenue. The festival offers avocado is a much smaller one. I uploaded cropped products and locally made goods. Notable residents versions of the previous uploader's images, Maxwell Caulfield Kevin Costner but I'm not going to have free time to do Chris Gocong, now Cleveland Browns linebacker that for these for a while; eventually, I will end up doing that, though. — Gavia immer (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2011 (UTC) people’s specific localities. Twenty-four Your projects are often circulating enological experience of seeing). With a artists were asked to produce an image images in all kinds of ways, and fur- newspaper things were ‘updated’ daily, or file that was 4 inches by 6 inches – the ther, bringing them through contexts weekly. With the internet, it is constant. standard size of an American consumer/ that span the online and the offline. Continuous. Maybe too fast, and too amateur photograph. It was 24 because What happens to the image when it much information. I read in a book how of the number of shots on a standard roll travels between these states? humans are orientated spatially, but re- of 35mm film. The information for this cently our culture has been shifting to the ‘exhibition’ was announced online. If I’m not sure what the space between it is. temporal. But also, the brevity of mes- someone wanted to ‘view’ it they would Is it a space of the image, or is it a mental sages has a history. The telegraph... email me their address. I would then look space of the viewer? up their address in Google Maps and find Explain. the nearest drugstore to them. There are Any relationship this space might drugstores EVERYWHERE, so many have to those moments in the dark- I am curious about the moment when had ones only a few minutes from their room, waiting for the photograph photographs were able to be sent using house. The image files were uploaded to surface while sitting in the tray telegraph wires. We can trace a history to the photo developer at the drugstore of fixer? from the telegraph to the internet. We (many places now use internet uploading take a lot of things for granted today. I to send your photos to a printer) and the WOW. You just gave me a flashback. think it must have been a pretty radical prints were printed within the hour. There are these moments, maybe we can moment when you were able to see things call them poetic moments now, in ana- almost simultaneously from around the The person who sent the email could logue photography. I loved sitting in the world. When it was possible to publish then walk down the street, go in the store, dark room and watching images appear. a photo a few hours from when it was and see the exhibition. Obviously, it was And it feels that these moments of wait- taken, regardless of where it was taken. more than just seeing. It was the whole ing are lost maybe. The space of waiting When space is overcome as an obstacle. experience. It was happening in their own is replaced by the space of always being When the idea of a ‘now’ can be pub- town, whether they lived in the middle of updated, of always not being up to date. lished. It’s the same sense that a photo- New York City, or they lived in Alaska. graph is a likeness of a thing in the real This exhibition was right there. It was Yes. The online image does seem to world – that our image culture is a like- both global and local. And, in each in- have a distinct temporality, can you ness of a right now. And possibly, this is stance of its materialization, it had its say more about that? just constructed. That it is impossible to own peculiarities. Different paper...may- represent a moment. be the printer would crop something or It is speed. Instantaneity. Simultaneity edit something out...and yes, sometimes even. Even though there is always a de- I’d like to discuss your recent Public they didn’t print all the images! lay (even the delay in our own phenom- Access project. In this instance you from here on(line) here from from here on(line) here from

6868 towardstowards a history,a history, politics politics andand philosophy of of the the online online image image • to trick us, this is bad. But why is this the images Well, aren’t that bad? good, im- the like actually I concern. my that’s judged they when part, this loved I ages.’ my photos themselves! I never entered any of the conversations. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I did… Wikipedia remains invested in an aesthetic of objectivity that an encyclopedia presupposes and you images?your with that threatened thing funny One it. question them made I identifi- not was I said someone that was able because they had downloaded the that saw Photoshop, in up it blew photo, they couldn’t see my face, and thought, ‘this is OK!’ I had no idea any of these emerge. would conversations Eventually you included their debates in the book you made about what describe you Can project. this their discussion about your images like? was This is going to be done from memory, so it’s not all direct quotes – ‘It’s good to have the same person in all of these a ref- it gives a kind of standard, photos, tryingsomeone obviously There’s erence. itable by anyone’ is. is. anyone’ by itable Many of my images were taken down because editors noticed similar activity coming from the same IP address, and someone had images my all how noticed questioned one No person. same the it, in images few a after But beginning. the at it going ‘What’s like, were people up, went on? Do these images break any rules? Is there some game going on, and if there is, is that And wrong?’ so conversations to thing ethical the is what to as emerged de- were images Some Wikipedia. for do edited was I when was favorite My leted. the then and photograph, own my of out photo re-uploaded. But what rules did you possibly break? sure. was no one thing, the That’s your pictures, it’s really fascinating. fascinating. really it’s pictures, your It reveals some cracks and - contra idea utopian Wikipedia’s in dictions - ‘ed encyclopedia online an what for - 69 69 beach images. Reading through the the through Reading images. beach treat and about talk editors the way results. Or, when Wikipe- you Or, go results. on the it So there. image the see you’ll page, dia wasn’t just a ‘Wikipedia’ project, but it Wikipedia as used a place for ‘releasing’ an image into a space of circulation. But quickly Wikipedia’s editors, whose task is to monitor changes suspibecame website, the to made photographs. uploaded your of cious They noticed that the same - anony the of each in appeared figure mous lets say, Bodega Head, or Palos Verdes. lets Bodega Verdes. say, Head, or Palos There is a double play on ‘public’ here: the internet as a public space, and also, public are beaches California’s of all how propertythe military (except for bases). intend- were and online, went images The for meta-data of kind a as circulate to ed to were you say Let’s locations. actual the in an online Verde search, look up Palos this image might come up in the image You chose You a collaborative, popular, web-based encyclopedia that - any - anony also to edit to allowed is one mously circulate these This images. gesture is essential to the project. it? about more say you Can I uploaded these images of specific geo- articlesabout Wikipedia to places graphic photographs my of one So, beaches. the to illustrate an article be used would on, to drive up the entire California Coast, along the highway closest to the Pacific Mexican-Amer- the from drove I Ocean. ican border to At Oregon. each beach my with beach the of photographs made I body standing somewhere in the image: usually looking out at sea somewhere, or obscured in Mostly a I was shadow. the in large was I sometimes but hidden, photograph. I wanted to be an - anony mous person who just happened to be there. used Wikipedia as a site to circulate circulate to site a Wikipedia as used your photographs and by chance ended up testing the limits of how an image can be understood as ob- you Can online. information jective explain? Public Access was first exhibited (and commissioned) by SF Camerawork in California. my Basically, proposal was

even. a distinct a distinct The onlineThe It is speed. It is speed. image does temporality. Simultaneity Simultaneity seem to have have to seem Instantaneity. Instantaneity. expert makes it impossible to trust archive to link users’ pictures images. They can only be to corporate sponsors. Not conceived of as relating to many people realize that objects that we cannot touch when storing their holiday DiAlogue: nor feel, and can only be seen pictures on Facebook. So much via the interface of a screen. for credibility. The Wide The ease of copying plus the fact that we don’t connect When trying to answer the Web of the them to the real world makes question What’s Next?, Ritchin Photo us wary of every image that stresses that the future is now. meets the eye. Viewing an We complain about being graphic online image is significantly surrounded by technology different from holding a print and about the glut of images World in your hand, a piece of paper that come to us, but we in that gives a clear connection fact value their availability Experts: to what we consider to be and abundance. They are just Fred RitchiN & real. Ritchin compares this to one click away, cheap and CoNstANt DullAArt a footprint that you read and easy to distribute to a lot of register. Online images are people at the same time. So Moderated by more like a cloud: abstract, why feel guilty about doing J�rg Colberg elusive and disconnected from so? You can use the current the real. systems around you but be Foam Amsterdam conscious of their interests 19 March 2011 Taking this as a starting point, and refuse to rely on them it’s important to realize that completely. Call all the images what we still want from im- on Facebook meaningless and ages is that they are credible the company is left with noth- and reliable. But what makes ing. Both Ritchin and Dullaart Discussing the photographic an online image credible, claim that’s the way they deal world on the wide web with what makes it ‘real’? Before with the current systems. The Fred Ritchin and Constant the computer, the Internet and questions that arise revolve Dullaart is like a peanut but- Photoshop, we considered around this sense of a dys-

m here on(line) ter, jelly and chocolate-sprin- a photographic print to be functional future. We forget kles sandwich: unexpected, real. Nowadays an image has we are actually having fun! unusual and fascinating all lost its credibility before we We concentrate on trying to

fro in one. Both Fred Ritchin and even see it, before we even do the right thing, while there Constant Dullaart are down- experienced it. Though many is vast potential we overlook. to-earth and inspiring in many people reject such scepticism, Let’s not worry too much. This ways. A dialogue with these the question remains of how is why Ritchin would like to two men provides insight we could change it. Is there a propose a 2012 event: What’s into the many ways we deal better system for allocating Next? – The fun part. • with huge volume of pictures value to the images envelop- shown in the media, online ing us? Both Ritchin and Summary by Eva Bremer and through social media. Dullaart draw the conclusion Foam Education Department How can we judge and give that we need to find new value to these images? These systems that are on a par with questions touch the subjects modern ways of experiencing that we deal with on a daily pictures and let us confidently basis and add value to the navigate through images. The imagery that surrounds us. current systems we use are The search for possible either obsolete or created to g answers must begin with a generate income. Moderator N general notion of what we Jörg Colberg mentions expect from images. As Ritchin Facebook as an example, says, we want images to be an archive of over 16 billion reliable. Right from the start, pictures. Being a commercialMeeti living in a digitalized world company, Facebook uses its

70 expert F.R. In a funny way I do not consider a photograph on the web to be an image. It is not a photograph, for lots of reasons. We cannot consider it a footprint C.D. In practice I’m not from the digital world. It is something particularly interested in the much more ephemeral. It is not con- authenticity of the image. nected to what we can call real in terms What I find interesting is to of physical reality. When I read a book add layers of meanings to on paper, I think of trees, and we call it photographs to show the nature. When I’m in the digital world and complexity of the experience I look at something, I have no connection of the depiction. We have a to what we call the natural world. For me different approach. I have one of the arguments is that becoming the luxury of being an artist, code-based is the end of Nature with a which means I can be crude or capital N. There is a completely differ- light-hearted at the same time ent set of messages, if you consider the about heavy subjects. medium as a message. d ialogue expert

F.R. It’s also a matter of power. If you see a person suffering you want the image C.D. It is important that people know to be credible. How do you who is behind the system. We all use provide a level of credibility Google but we don’t know who initiated and authenticity such that what we see there. That would be a level people will think about what of scepticism that would satisfy me if peo- could be done, if anything. ple were aware that corporations stand People have started to see in the background. <…> On Facebook we disasters as movies or video store so many images but the company games. In the past we made can change the rules any time it wants the big mistake of assuming to. So, we have a huge archive of images that anything on a photo- m eeting in the hands of other people whose graphic print was somehow purpose is to make a profit. What does real. Now we know that’s not that mean? true. We have to be skeptical about almost anything on the internet. In both cases we are wrong. Is there a system which is useful to tell us what has a greater or lesser propor- C.D. The number of images, many of tion of reality to it? which are or could be interesting means this is something that’s happening anyway. The only question is how to find new systems to deal with it.

F.R. We are doing something now that is both F.R. But there is such an extraordinary potential, necessary and very danger- and the question is how to push it, to realize how ous. We have to work out gamazing and fun and useful it can be. Because it how to resist Google. Google N could and should be all those things. I would like to frames the world more than suggest that I could do this conference again, calling photography ever did. Google it What’s Next? – the Fun Part! is not the world, so we’re looking at a Google view on Meeti the world, and that is what we should try to resist.

71 29 what's next? 29 what's next? 29 foam magazine # foam foam magazine #

7272 phy, we spoke tovery the futureof photogra- Foam spentresearching Throughout the year that them incontext? ing changesandplace time tointerpretinterest - the day, insteadtaking along by theconcernsof ately avoid beingcarried distance anddeliber- maintain acertaincritical better foramuseumto still takingshape? Orisit that areinmany cases anticipate developments date aspossibleandto museum tobeasup-to- be. Isitthetaskofa the long-termeffectswill difficult tojudgewhat quickly thatitisinitially photography happenso Some changeswithin and rapidlychanging? a fieldthatisconstantly remain relevant within need tofunctionifitis a photography museum its own future.How does evitably beresearching of photography willin- that researches the future A photography museum 73 73 up-to-date manner, the fulfilled in a modern, function, which canbe this relatively traditional argued thatalongside There were somewho opments. to imagesanddevel - to attributesignificance poseful presentations from thechaff,usingpur- for sortingthewheat to actasamechanism ought morethanever fail tocount.Amuseum images willtoooften and significanceof danger thatthevalue importance, there’s a ability ofimagessuch the circulationandavail- internet soabstractand digital structureonthe underlying the ing, graphy issooverwhelm- the quantityofphoto effective filter. Now that increasing needforan time andagainwas the A subjectthatcameup directors andarchitects. and curatorstomuseum these issues,fromartists many peopleabout

introduction curating the space the chapter curating introduction museum should as far as possible be a reflection of its own time. There was no attempt to deny the importance of slowing down, of interpreting and referring to historical contexts, but the museum should never be afraid to respond to current events and reserve a specific place for them. Swim with the tide or against it: those were the two extremes around which the debate took place. 29 what's next? foam magazine #

Andy Best Fall Series

All images © Andy Best, 2006 courtesy Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide First page: Fall Series (Knox) VI (detail)

Andy Best’s Fall Series has captured the Best often draws on art history, video attention of the art world and secured games, film and television. Yves Klein’s his position as an exciting young artist; Leap into the Void (1960), in which the subsequently his work has been exhibited artist jumped out of a window into the internationally, and appears in collections street, comes to mind when we look at in the UK, Norway, Sweden and the US. Best’s series. Klein fell into a safety net but the photograph was altered and cropped Fall is an important series because of so the artist appeared to be in imminent the ways in which it transmits a social danger. Best plays with a similar idea and message and at the same time engages addresses the medium because for an with the medium of photography. instant we believe these people actually Although the images appear as straight, jumped or were pushed. The life/death realistic, photographs they have a surreal paradox of photography – where life is and uncanny edge as young adults appear frozen and time is stopped – also recurs. to free-fall out of buildings. As we focus Fall is a compelling and amusing series on the faces of the fallers we realise that which captures the imagination. Best they seem to be in a dream-like space, presents young people caught in deathly as if they’ve slipped from one reality into moments and we are not sure whether another, blissfully unaware of the grimy to laugh at the trick or to be troubled urban sites that they inhabit and some by the various narratives that the series viewers may wonder if drugs have induced engenders. • this trance-like state or whether we are watching a fantasy. The series opens up these narratives without closing down on a particular theme.

selected by Anne Marsh Foam invited four guest Taken together, the four curators to come up with presentations pose each a proposal as to what questions about the value a photography exhibition of photography, about the might look like in the near significance of the future. Each specific photography exhibition presentation has a fairly and about how an 4 curators, 4 visions, 4 presentations, 1 circumscribed point of institution such as Foam departure. Mounting can offer a platform for the exhibitions will remain presentation of work, for 4 Curators 4 Visions 4 Presentations 1 Museum

a core activity of a museum. study or for experiences. museum But what kind of exhibi- The following interviews tions will be possible and with the guest curators Erik desirable? The guest Kessels, Alison Nordström, curators were therefore Jefferson Hack and Lauren allowed to be quite radical Cornell and the accom- and provocative, to bring panying QR codes give an to a head the debate about insight in What’s Next? – what a photography the exhibition part. exhibition can be. 83 “Because Flickr or other similar sites are amateur forums, most institutions would be hard pressed to exhibit the work. Which is precisely why I chose it.”

Erik Kessels curating the space curating

www.foam.org/foam-amsterdam/ exhibitions/whatsnext/kessels

“I can honestly tell you that this is the first time I have flooded a room with images, literally.” 84 Why does your exhibition look the way it does? chose it. I am not showing anything you have not seen I wanted to illustrate the sheer vastness of the digital before, I am just showing how you have never seen it era we live in now. We take, collect, receive, and store before. millions of pictures every year. I wanted to show one day. One day of photos uploaded on the internet, but Do aesthetics also have a place in the exhibition instead of living on Facebook or Flickr, I wanted to you’re showing at Foam? give them a physical space as opposed to a cyber one. I find it aesthetic, but aesthetics is objective. In the I call it 24 Hrs In Photos. classic sense of photography, this is not your traditional photography exhibition. It is composed of hundreds Would you consider your exhibition a monument and thousands of anonymous photographers, cheap to digital photography on an average day in the drugstore prints and no frames. The intention is to autumn of 2011? dislocate the everyday, so that hopefully you see some- 4 curators, 4 visions, 4 presentations, 1 Yes, it physically shows how much gets added in a 24- thing new and inspiring. I also love that everyone will hour period and it’s in fact too much to deal with. see it differently. From one visitor to the next, the When you walk through the space, you could almost photographs they pick up will determine how they feel like you’re drowning in a sea of images. I think choose to navigate through the room. Aesthetics is in that’s an exciting experience. I’ve practically filled up the entirety of what you see, the experience is no longer the entire space and used it like a container. in the separate images.

Is it a statement about a development or is it a What is your role as curator? critical approach because you think there are too I choose a time span, I choose the size of the files and a many images? format. And I look through everything, but of course I That’s something I’ll leave up to the viewer to decide. can’t really see it all. That’s also the fun part, that you, It has to do with the tension between online photos as museum visitor, walk through it: you make your own and offline photos. The photos you see now have been selection. You pick up a photo and you isolate it for a printed, but in most cases the photos appearing every moment, apart from a million others, and then you day on the internet never have a physical existence. look at it for a while. After that, you pick up another They ultimately become a kind of virtual litter that you one, and so you make up your own story. That’s actu- don’t really look at. ally the same as opening a digital photo on a computer, but this experience is physical. It is also specifically There are a thousand times more photos taken now intended to separate those digital photos from their than there were in the past. However, I think in a few context. I could have hung up a monitor or 10 moni- decades there will be more to show from the 1970s and tors and shown those millions of images in a loop, but 1980s than from the current period due to the nature then you would look at them in a completely different of the digital wasteland of the internet. As far as that’s way. Of course you still wouldn’t be conscious of the concerned, photography has become an everyday part enormous number of them. Now you are made to. of life, almost like eating and drinking. Photography is no longer something precious as it once was and The main thing you see from your exhibition is because of this, images of this period will disappear. the great flood of digital images. Is a museum

Erik Kessels is founder and creative director of KesselsKramer. of director and creative is founder Kessels Erik Curator. Foam Kim Knoppers, Interview by even necessary? Especially now that there are so

Because of your exceptional way of seeing, your many successful blogs which react so quickly to museum books and exhibitions have provided a platform the latest developments. for photos which would otherwise have been Absolutely, the museum is a platform. A chance to overlooked. In those instances you’ve acted as isolate these images and take them out of their in- a filter between viewer and photo. How should I tended context. Anyone can hang beautiful pictures view this exhibition in relation to your other ex- on the wall. I want to give the viewer something to hibitions? think about. The images are the main elements that the I can honestly tell you that this is the first time I have installation pulls together for the desired effect. I hope flooded a room with images, literally. However, I feel the viewer goes back to their computer with a new or my work – be it the books I publish, the exhibitions I different impression the next time they look at a blog curate or my daily life as commercial art director – is or upload a photo to Flickr. Where is it going? • not so different. My work has many common threads and maybe the most recurring theme is the amateur. I have a great deal of respect for the professional photographer, but the amateur is not burdened by the why and how, they just do it. I am attracted to the spon- taneity, the sincerity, the stories they tell or really the stories I interpret. Because Flickr or other similar sites are amateur forums, most institutions would be hard pressed to exhibit the work. Which is precisely why I 85 “The image content is usually what we pay attention to in a photograph but photographs are objects too. It is as objects that they move through space and time.”

Alison Nordström curating the space curating

www.foam.org/foam-amsterdam/ exhibitions/whatsnext/nordstrom

The first question is of course: What will we see when we enter the first room of the exhibition The Future of The Photography Museum? What you will see is: things. Most of them will be presented conventionally, with mats and frames, the way we usually present photographs. But there will also be one large photographic collage hanging in the middle of the room and a contemporary daguerreotype in a case. You will see things that are for the most part not simply flat pieces of photographic paper. They will have been altered in some way or presented in some way that emphasizes their materiality. You are looking at things in such a way that you won’t confuse the image and the object. This is my hope for this little show. 86 Why do you think it is so important to emphasize Magnum photographer George Rodgers took remark- the objectness of the photographs? able photographs of Africa but the pictures we have I think that one of the reasons photographs are so se- sent to Amsterdam are not those. We have chosen to ductive is that the images look like truth and it is really show only the backs of the prints. It may be hitting easy to forget that they are not. What you actually see is people over the head with this idea but the important a rhythm of black and white or colored shapes and lines thing is that an image doesn’t have a front and a back; on a piece of paper – something 3D rendered into 2D. an object does. In the case of photojournalism these Of course the image content is usually what we pay at- pictures had a very specific use. Nowadays, since the tention to in a photograph but photographs are objects digital turn we send out scans, we send out pdfs or tiffs. too. It is as objects that they move through space and Before the digital turn a picture agency like Magnum time; they literally move from hand to hand. They get would send out 8x10 glossies for publication purposes used and kept in different ways and this is important in and every time they went out they would be stamped 4 curators, 4 visions, 4 presentations, 1 how they are understood. The thingness of these pho- to show where they have been. Sometimes the entire tographs is something we can all delight in, enjoy and publication history of a particular image is carried on appreciate. But there can also be a lot of information the object. in the material qualities of the photograph. One of the reasons why we have asked you as one What kind of information do you mean? of our guest curators is because you are a senior It can be almost anything. Very often the material curator of photography at George Eastman nature of the photograph will change over time as it House, the oldest museum of photography. You is used. If you know where it’s been you can often tell are very used to working with objects. Will the what it has meant to people. For example, in a flea mar- object become more important in the digital ket you will often find a photograph that on the back age? has black fuzzy circles on the corners. That tells you I hope so. George Eastman House collects, acquires that at one point it was kept in an album and we know and cares for born digital objects that have no materi- how people used albums. This informs the meaning of ality as well but the core of our collection is the pieces the photograph. A photograph that has been folded in of paper glass and metal that carried photographic half to fit into an envelope tells you that someone cared images when that was the only way photographs could about it enough to send it to someone. be. Maybe this is more important now, since now we live in a world of disembodied images. If we want to Photographs are usually made of paper and one of the understand what photographs meant in the nineteenth things we do with paper is to write on it. We simply and twentieth centuries we can’t confuse the image and cannot do that in the same way with digital images. Ob- the object. Even though we are surrounded by images viously there is the metadata, but the act of physically without materiality, the way we think about photo- connecting to a paper object by writing something on it graphs comes from the way photographs used to be. is special in its very mundanity. There are examples in the show of artists who choose to write or have others Looking at a real thing is different from looking at a write on their photographs but it is certainly something representation of that thing on a computer monitor. which is done every day in an ordinary world. You And I actually think now that we are completely sur- write: ‘Here is my baby on her second birthday’ or ‘I rounded by virtual reality it may be that contemplation

love you forever.’ of the real thing will become more special. I also think museum there is something about the physical relationship Sometimes the physical changes a photograph ac- between the object and the viewer that is a radically cumulates change meaning with time and take on a Exhibitions at of and Director Photographs of Curator Senior is Alison Nordström and Film in Rochester. Photography Museum of House International Eastman George Curator. Foam Kim Knoppers, Interview by different experience from looking at something on a curious aesthetic. The Steichen photographs that are monitor or even being bombarded by projections. in this show have instructions for the retoucher on them. These are obvious marks of their use and an Marshall McLuhan makes the observation that even interesting example of a technology we don’t use any- when technology changes something’s nature, the vo- more, but, as it happens, the marks are beautiful. The cabulary that we use to talk about it is anachronistic. marks themselves really have an aesthetic quality that For example, on our computers there is no reason to no one would have recognized when they were made talk about pages and files and folders but we do be- but that we appreciate. You would not do that with a cause this is the only intellectual construct that we have digital object; you simply make the changes and send for understanding what we do with a computer, in this the corrected file. I chose the Julia Margaret Cameron way even an image that is made digitally, consumed photograph for this exhibition because it is printed digitally and preserved digitally is affected by paper from a broken plate and of course it reminds you she photographs and so understanding these things is the was working with glass negatives. But the marks of the way we understand not just photography’s past but its broken plate, the shatter marks in the glass are evident present and the future. • in the print. And that is really beautiful. We appreciate the pleasures of ruins. 87 Jefferson Hack

curating the space curating Jefferson, please tell us something about the origin of your proposal. I am very interested in the relationship between the viewer and photography through the screen. In this new digital era screens are omnipresent and this has www.foam.org/foam-amsterdam/ changed our relationship with photography dramati- exhibitions/whatsnext/hack cally, especially compared to the times when photo graphy was primarily seen as a print-based medium. I wanted to explore this new paradigm.

In your proposal there is clear distinction between what you call the Mother Sculpture and the Rise Sculpture. Can you explain the first piece the audience encounters, the Mother Sculpture? “It’s about Yes, I wanted to do something that was respectful to some of the traditional notions of photography that the relationship was about looking at the work of established photo graphers. The idea for the Mother Sculpture was to work between the with what I like to call the Dazed & Confused family viewer and the of photographers. These photographers are all part of the current group of photographers who represent the photograph visual language of the magazine across different genres. These genres may vary from fashion, portraiture and via the screen.” reportage to art photography. 88 All those different genres will be mixed in the about a personal relationship with the image. I want presentation? people to get close and see their spit on the screen. I think we have to use the word mixed quite carefully. What I am not interested in doing with the established That requires a really focused, concentrated way photographers is remixing, reediting or even reinter- of looking. preting their work. It is about presenting it onto a Therefore the overall impression I wanted to convey screen and having the viewer presenting themselves to is a kind of minimal feeling, more meditative and per- photography that is in a digital format. So in that sense sonal. I mean, in a digital culture there is already the the main question was how am I going to do that and over-bombardment of images we are all subject to, the still be respectful to the photography. over-accessibility which results in a kind of visual junk- yard. That’s not what I wanted the audience to experi- Also because most of the images in the Mother ence. It should feel edited and curated. 4 curators, 4 visions, 4 presentations, 1 Sculpture were perhaps originally analogue and meant to be published as prints? The Rise Sculpture requires a less meditative No, I have purposely tried not to show too much archive. relationship. I have briefed all the photographers to supply images Totally. The Rise Sculpture has many more and larger that are either unpublished but have been taken recently screens and is about a different question. It is about or new work made in the last four months. So it is also using technology and about our relationship with about the current visual language of the magazine as it photography via technology. For the Rise Sculpturewe are is on the shelves now. All images are shot within our cur- using the internet, social media and other new media to rent time and therefore the photographer is influenced allow young and semi-professional photographers who by the contemporary time we are living in. They are not maybe aren’t shooting for D&C yet, but are developing photographs taken ten or twenty years ago. their own work in their own way, to submit work to the show. It is a submissions project about the future, but Obviously the audience has a comparable visual it is not real-time and it is not a free-for-all. The idea framework. They are also living in this digital, is that the photographer will send us the work and we screen-based era in which photography is choose and edit based on the Dazed & Confused spirit. presented primarily on screens. How do you see The best work will be put into the Rise Sculpture. the relationship between the viewer and the screen? One of the interesting aspects of this method was to That’s the thing I really wanted to explore. The have an exhibition that builds over time. New submis- presentation shouldn’t be a step-back experience, in sions will continually be added to the screens that will that people are looking at the entire as a single form of build from an initial 150 images to perhaps more than entertainment, as multiple screens simply bombarding 300 or 400 images towards the end of the show. It is a you with images. That is the exact opposite of what I living, growing exhibition that’s never the same thing am trying to do with the Mother Sculpture. The idea from day to day. The other thing we are looking at is for that is much more about drawing people into the to create generative groupings of images by employ- image, to establish a lean-forward experience. The ing specific software. In a way it is about looking for image that catches the eye should have a certain focal technology that allows different curatorial schemes to point, so the audience can choose their position and be employed by me on a whim, wherever I am in the

look at the picture as an image of itself in respect to world. It is much more of an experimental room. museum

everything else that is going on in the space. What & Confused. Dazed of and editor-in-chief is co-founder Hack W. Jefferson artistic affairs Deputy Director, Foam Feil, Marcel Interview by happens then is a more meditative experience. It is There is a third part as well, a room with a work not so much about the relationship with the screen. by Hellicar & Lewis. It´s about the relationship between the viewer and the This is really interesting because this is about photograph via the screen. interactive digital art. Hellicar & Lewis are long-time collaborators and friends of Dazed & Confused. They It’s quite interesting, I spoke with Ingrid Sischy about have made incredible work with different musicians this just recently and she told me a story about the and different exhibition spaces involving the public first show of William Eggleston’s colour images at the in real-time manipulations of recorded images. The MoMA. It was a sensational show for many reasons idea is that portraits of the public will be taken by but also because the images were very, very small. She video cameras and then, based on the movement of said she remembered wiping the glass of all the images the public picked up by sensors, the images will be everyday and telling the curator that the Eggleston manipulated in real time. If the first room is about the images had more spit on them than all other images. relationship of the viewer with photography via screens, She ended by saying that sometimes the small bombs the second room is of the viewer with photography via are the most powerful bombs. It made me rethink how technology, and this third room is about the relationship big I wanted the screens to be. I thought it to be really with photography via the self-portrait. It’s like a post- nice if the screens were something like 19 or 20 inches, photographic meltdown of the idea of the portrait, with comparable with an average laptop. So it would become a real sense of engagement, interaction and fun. • 89 “I wanted to consider how a culture, that has recently been broadened and diversified by the internet, was playing into the nature of photography as a discipline.”

Lauren Cornell curating the space curating

www.foam.org/foam-amsterdam/ exhibitions/whatsnext/cornell

Lauren, let’s start with beginning: the title. Your presentation is entitled Circulate. Can you explain the reasons behind it? I was invited to curate this exhibition for the 10th anniversary of Foam, an institution I admire for the way it has consistently presented photography in a contemporary and expansive way throughout its history. The specific assignment was to consider the future of photography. Because I am an art curator and non-profit director involved with technology, I thought an expected response from me might be to project into the future of photographic tools or apparatus. Instead I wanted to consider how a culture, that has recently been broadened and diversified by the internet, was playing into the nature of photography as a discipline. 90 What I decided to focus on was not tools or subject as it’s traditionally understood. The objects and figures matter, but rather the afterlife of a photograph or, as that appear in their works are recreations, virtual casts suggested by the title, its path of circulation. How is its that meld the original with its wider perceptions and meaning altered or newly understood by different con- associations into an uncanny new form. Murata’s works texts, by its continual discovery and re-discovery, by are digital still-lifes: carefully arranged collections of its technical deterioration as it changes platforms, and diverse 3D-rendered objects, such as Cyborg (2011), so forth. Furthermore, I wanted to look at this notion which presents a handful of lemons, an empty bottle of circulation as it relates to major discourses associ- and can, and a VHS cassette tape for the movie Cyborg, ated with this medium, like process-based inquiry, ap- all casually centred around a craggy conch shell placed propriation, or the realistic portrayal of objects and atop a plinth whose walls appear to be bricked. The situations. origin of these objects is intentionally unclear: some seem as if they’ve been ripped out of our world, others 4 curators, 4 visions, 4 presentations, 1 Your statement is about our visual economy in out of a video game or film; their suspension evokes which the meaning of images is not only related the ways objects are frozen and intermingled in our to their subject matter but it is also dictated by memories, both personal and collective. global circulation. How is that expressed in your chosen works? What kind of different strategies In previous works, Oliver Laric has explored the idea do the artists use? of versioning, or the breakdown between an original All of the featured works relate to this theme of circu- and its copies – a highly relevant notion for the circula- lation in a slightly different way. Hito Steyerl’s work tion of images because when images travels digitally and writings were an inspiration for the exhibition, par- they are consistently being copied. His sculptures in ticularly her essay ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’ which Circulate recall the Protestant Reformation (1517- reflects on the relative cultural value of images and 1648) in which statues and images were consistently makes a case for the radical potential of the low-res, under physical attack for being idolatrous. Laric worked degraded, sometimes stolen ‘poor image.’ In Circulate, with 3D modellers to create a silicon mould from Steyerl exhibits a short single-screen video entitled which a number of identical casts were made, a process Strike (2010) in which the artist literally strikes a video that carries the Reformation-era iconoclasm forward monitor, causing its screen to shatter, as if forcibly ex- into history, or rather compares it with the way that posing its materiality, an important aspect of digital today, in a highly visual era, objects are deprived or image circulation that is sometimes forgotten. aura and image hierarchies are flattened by constant copying and re-purposing. They seem to say that today The exhibition includes three works by Josh Tonsfeldt the original is lost, and all we are left with is modifica- in which images have been printed on the back-side of tions or new versions. photographic paper, so that the original becomes ab- stracted, streaked with marks that result from a techni- Several featured works approach the topic from a more cally incorrect process. The origin of the works was a sidelong poetic stance. Liz Deschenes, who often works mistaken Facebook friend request made by teenager with what critic Chris Wiley describes as ‘lensless pho- named Andrew to Tonsfeldt – a simple mistake that tography’ in which ‘photographic processes are pared opened up a connection between strangers that the art- down to their barest essence, in both literal and meta- ist chose to explore. Having just returned from a ‘Se- phoric terms,’ here presents a single mirrored work that Lauren Cornell is Executive Director at Rhizome and Adjunct Adjunct Rhizome and at Director Cornell is Executive Lauren York. Art in New Contemporary Museum of the New at Curator artistic affairs Deputy Director, Foam Feil, Marcel Interview by

mester at Sea,’ a study abroad program for American reflects visitors’ movements throughout the gallery. museum teenagers that involves travelling by boat to tourist des- Erika Vogt is interested in examining photography out- tinations, Andrew’s personal photographs featured im- side the frame, conjuring psychological or cultural ages of him posing – in some cases exultantly, in others memory of images in video works that have an affect casually – in front of landmarks from the Taj Mahal to of spatial or temporal dislocation. Geometric Abstraction, the Great Wall of China. To Andrew’s friends, these pic- is a series of scripted actions involving objects such as tures evince his own personality and humour; to a an arrow, chimes, and painted sticks in a work that stranger, there is a more universal dimension to them: pulls images out of legibility and abstracts them into an American abroad, the idea of being at-sea, the way a new forms and stories. The sculptures produced by teenager mugs for the camera in 2011, among them. Matt Keegan and Jim Richards, artists both deeply These low-resolution images were what Tonsfeldt blew involved with conceptualism and media appropriation, up and printed on the back of the photographic paper, are emblazoned with the phrase: Don’t Worry, What somehow memorializing what otherwise might be Happens, Happens Mostly Without You, which nods to the throwaway images, taking them out of the slipstream of movement and circulation of culture, and to the mel- Facebook, pausing and abstracting their life as images. ancholic, sometimes hopeless feeling, here imbued with levity, that there is no way to take in, apprehend and Oliver Laric and Takeshi Murata both involve 3D mod- analyze everything or all the information and possi- elling in their work to different ends. This process is bilities available. With only text engraved or spray- key because it differentiates their projects, which fea- painted onto a cylindrical form, the work distils the ture ‘found images,’ from the practice of appropriation theme down into essential human feelings. • 91 curating the space

www.foam.org/foam-amsterdam/ exhibitions/whatsnext/foamlab

Nowadays museums increasingly function as cultural entrepreneurs. The question arises: how far can you take a brand like Foam? To stretch this idea of the museum as brand, Foam Lab is launching a new product as the ultimate souvenir: ‘The Foam Mug’.

Following the lead of museums like the Rijksmuseum, Foam Lab the Guggenheim and the Louvre, Foam Lab is offering In February 2011, a group of ambitious youngsters its own, limited-edition mug, for a period of four kicked off the third edition of Foam Lab. Heading weeks. This ties in with the opening of the exhibition towards a career in the creative industry they will ‘The Future of the Photography Museum’ and is part develop different photography-based projects and of the ongoing ‘What’s Next?’ project. events for Foam.

92 architects O’Donnell & Tuomey, whose Glucksman Gallery Cork and Lyric Theatre Belfast have won many plaudits, the new building will provide the facilities and spaces to ensure we can continue to inspire our FUTURE500,000+ annual visitors to enjoy, understand and engage with photography The in ways that are both relevant and surprising to Ph�to them. This will include a At the same time, with the digital installation in the grAphers’ emergence of the internet, entrance lobby reflecting digital cameras and the our wider commitment to phenomenon of social digital programmes and future M GAllery networking over the past a dedicated education decade, photography’s floor – incorporating a ubiquitous position in what permanent camera obscura, some define as a post- study room and resource photographic age, poses space. Three new exhibition new challenges for what galleries will enable us to a ‘photographers’ gallery’ continue exhibiting work by

might now mean. In this emerging and established useu way, our new vision has photographers based in the been, and continues to be, UK and internationally. informed as much by evolving

debates around the future of While the realities of M vi s i � n M photography as the changing undertaking a Capital needs of artists, audiences Building project during a and the context of our new time of economic turmoil location in central London. inevitably focuses our minds USEU on reality over speculation, Due to reopen in early 2012, our aspiration is to ensure that the new Photographers’ the qualities and ethos which Gallery will build upon its have been so long embedded unique position as London’s in The Photographers’ Gallery The four decades since the principal organisation – its welcoming, accessible Gallery was founded in 1971 dedicated to championing and challenging character – have seen photography photography’s role at the can sit alongside a new set of evolve from the margins of heart of visual culture. principles and programmes institutional recognition to Whether on the gallery walls, which reflect the radically one of the most influential through the printed page or different way in which art forms of the 21st century. new technology,M via events, photography is understood, Alongside other institutions, workshops and educational shared and experienced by The Photographers’ Gallery projects, our programmes will most people today. has undoubtedly played strive to provide a platform a significant role in this for current debates, new ideas By Brett Rogers transformation, particularly in and creative collaborations Director of The Photographers’ the UK, by exhibiting relevant as well as excellent art. Our Gallery, London and timely work by some of building will create a vibrant the world’s most celebrated social and intellectual hub in photographers, and the heart of London’s Soho building critically-engaged for people with all levels of audiences for a wide range of specialism and engagement. photographic practices. Designed by the Irish 93visI�N We think it’s important for photographers, even in the digital age, to be in a darkroom and learn the basics of light and chemistry through a hands-on approach. We see a very urgent need for this kind of art education in China and would like to explore the possibility of expanding Three Shadows’ capacity as a learning center. We founded the Three Shadows Photography Art An important component Centre in 2007 in Caochangdi, to the process of promoting a northeastern corner of photography in China is Beijing, because we wanted continuing Three Shadows’ to give photography a space exchange with the outside where it could receive the world. We’ve had the recognition it deserves asM a pleasure of working together powerful medium of art and with some of the best expression. As China’s first organizations in photography art space solely dedicated to bringUSEU excellent exhibitions ce FUTUREto photography, Three to China, as well as help A Shadows has established the world discover talented itself as the country’s most Chinese photographers. professional platform for discovering old and new The future of photography in Three Chinese photography, as China looks very promising well as promoting cross- and we hope that Three M Shadows cultural exchange between Shadows will continue to photographic communities all play an important role in Photo over the world. expanding knowledge and t i N g h e sp graphy awareness among both artists Since 2009 we’ve received and viewers, in China and Art hundreds of submissions abroad. each year for the annual cur A Three Shadows Photography By RongRong & inri Centre Award, which culminates Founders of Three Shadows, in an exhibition for the 20 Beijing finalists reviewed by an international panel of judges. The exhibition provides unknown and emerging Chinese photographers with exposure to a large and diverse audience and grants the winner 80,000 RMB. The future of photography in China lies with these young practitioners, who are strong in number and have a thirst for new ideas and methods. What we hope Three Shadows can provide them with in the future is formal instruction on the concepts behind photography and its uses beyond the purely commercial. 94 price, and it’s in danger of becoming serves and reinforcing our collections unattainable. However, it’s essential team will be sound arguments that Musée that the collections in our institutions draw photographers, estates and continue to be enriched, ‘live’ and collectors to choose the Musée de de grow. It’s part of our mission of public l’Elysée as the place for their collec- service, our duty to conserve, study tions. l’Elysée and disseminate this larger photographic heritage. Today this gamble has paid off. In 2011 the Chaplin family gave us The Musée de l’Elysée has In this age of budget cuts, we con- its Charles Chaplin photography collected photography ever sider ourselves lucky to even have an collection, in trust, comprising some since it was founded in 1985. acquisition budget. However, given 10,000 items, among them some what it allows us to buy – or rather, masterpieces which can be seen In just a few years, we have what it no longer allows us to buy! at Paris Photo in November 2011. brought together collections – the alternatives we’re faced with Our stated ambition is to make scattered over archives, have largely reduced our sphere of our collections department a real libraries, government offices, action: we can regret the good times, benchmark of excellence. It’s the or decide to be inventive. So we’ll be choice for competence; a choice institutions or in individual inventive. For the last year, the Musée that even questions the notion of homes. In this way the Musée de l’Elysée has been reviewing its ac- ownership, in a pragmatic way. Do de l’Elysée has a collection of quisition strategies and re-evaluating we have to own a work or collection about 100,000 photographs. its priorities. for it to be in our collections, or can we be a temporary guardian? Would At the time more photographs From now on, we’ll concentrate our it be better to guarantee good came to us as donations M resources around three axes: conservation conditions, promotion future M or trusts than what we and dissemination over a negotiated purchased. And nobody 1 Purchases, taking into account the period of time, or to own it without USEU today would dare to imagine opportunities that allow us to com- being able to care for it? To what plete or reinforce certain aspects of point should we conserve something where those photographs the collection. if know we’re not in a position to would have ended up if the promote it? The jury’s still out. These museum hadn’t been there to 2 Particular interest in sometimes questions may seem trivial, but accommodate them. forgotten figures in Swiss photogra- looking at how the collections of phy, as part of our aim to fill out our numerous institutions have been mission as an institution embedded in managed in the past, their answers useu this territory. turn out to be complex and perfectly relevant. M 3 A presence in new contemporary national and international photo For example, the Musée de l’Elysée graphy, in the form of targeted would never have been able to ac- M vi s i � n support allowing us to play our role quire the Chaplin collection at its mar- of promoting young talent. ket value; we negotiated a long-term In less than thirty years, times have guardianship. The announcement of changed. The age of pioneers has On this last point, rather than spread- this exceptional collection’s arrival come and gone. Photography is now ing ourselves too thin, we’ve chosen allowed us to find the financing for trading at the whim of supply – which to concentrate on a few photo a new conservator position, as well is getting rarer all the time – and graphers and give them solid and as the means to insure its conserva- demand, which is increasing sharply. concerted support. This effort is vital tion and promotion. In creating new It has its market, gallery owners and because it allows us to identify the landmarks, the Musée de l’Elysée is collectors. Seeing how the prices have form that the museum’s contribution outlining its new acquisition policy, as skyrocketed makes you dizzy. will take, working with the artist. For well as what’s at stake strategically some, the acquisition will be accom- and what challenges will emerge, like It may be that there’s nothing to com- panied by a major exhibition and a a road map for the decades to come. plain about. In becoming a collecta- publication. For others, it will take ble object, the photograph has man- the form of assistance in production, By Sam Stourdzé aged to attain the status of an object guaranteed over several years, ena- Director of Musée de l’Elysée, of desire. Its popularity isn’t limited to bling the artist to work on his or her Lausanne the plushy auction houses. It benefits new project with some security. from museums, exhibitions, publications. But if you think about it, we do These acquisitions go along with a have something to complain about, commitment from the museum, one since we have to acknowledge that that takes into account where the our acquisition budgets have never artist is in their career and offers had the same exponential growth as the means to give it a boost. Along the price of photographs. Because of with these acquisition procedures, inflation, institutions have lost their the Musée de l’Elysée has decided to purchasing power! A few years ago, capitalise on its added value. Al- the museums were the saving grace though we may have trouble compet- of photography. By taking in dona- ing on the photography market, we tions of thousands of photographs, do know how to exploit our expertise they guaranteed the continuity of a in conservation, study, development heritage that was being neglected at and promotion with the holders of the time. Now, the individual photo the photographic heritage. We took a graph is what sells, and at a good gamble that modernising our re- �N 95visI put it. Schmid creates artworks such a possibility. Practically expertthrough collection, selection speaking, not only is it difficult and re-presentation of archi- to maintain durable digital val and found photography. files in a time of relentless From photographic accumula- technological development, tions he retrieves and reconsti- there would simply never be tutes the accidental aesthetics enough time or manpower DiAlogue: of vernacular photography. to work with everything. On His practice, along with the a deeper level, Schmid and Archiving practices of many other art- Cotton suggested that the ists, not to mention scholars, European urge to preserve into the points to the secondary func- might be distracting us from future tion of an archive, one that is the present. At once humor- perhaps even more relevant ously and in deadly earnest, than its storage function: Schmid asked, ‘How much Experts: its use. When asked for his space are we leaving open for ChArl�tte C�tt�N & thoughts about the internet the future?’ JoAchim Schmid and archives, Schmid praised Flickr for making it possible to In my view, Schmid’s analogy Moderated by ‘borrow other people’s eyes of a quarry could describe the Frits Gierstberg to look at anything you want,' essence of an archive. It is not ce but he also made clear that a place from which one can

A Foam Amsterdam he sees the internet itself not easily extract intact meanings. 19 March 2011 as an archive, but as a source Rather, it is a site in which, quarry. using the materials of the past, it is possible to discover As for the photographic and/or construct something images themselves, Cotton entirely new. Reflecting on One of photography’s many reminded us of photography’s this dialogue, it strikes me possible functions and guises fabulously confusing nature. that the productive future of is as an archival medium. It It is simultaneously vehicle archiving photography and of ti N g the sp is easy to think about both and tool, medium and subject, photographic archives is not photography and the archive information and object. Within so much a matter of hi-tech in relationship to the past, but the territory of an archive such (in the sense of bigger, better, what about the future? This ambiguities affect conserva- faster, more), but rather a

cur A was the topic of the Dialogue tion, access and interpreta- matter of creative, resourceful between curator Charlotte tion. As Cotton summed up, and critical play with the Cotton (UK) and artist Joachim ‘There is a confusion between ambiguities of both photog- Schmid (DE), moderated the physicality of the objects raphy and the archive. In this by Frits Gierstberg (Head and the meaning of the sense, curators and managers of Exhibitions, Nederlands subjects.’ It may well be that of archives may have much to Fotomuseum). Starting, at the future of archives is not learn from the practices of art- Gierstberg’s request, without a matter of resolving that ists. There is a hope that this a definition of the archive, the confusion, but of working will have exciting implications conversation ultimately gravi- with it through curatorial and for the structures, accessibility, tated towards the art world collection approaches that relevance and interactivity of and issues raised by artists take collaborative, rather than archives in the future. • working with archives and the authoritative stances towards archiving of artists’ works. the material, using practices Summary by Asmara and ideas from both artists Pelupessy It has lately become quite and the public. common for artists to be asked to work with archives, Faced with an audience to negotiate and draw member’s expressed desire for meaning from vast expanses museums to ‘keep everything, of material, which may other- because we can’, both speak- wise remain mute, as Cotton ers expressed their aversion to Ng 96 Meeti backgrounds. Charlotte appropriate curatorial work- Cotton, Creative Director of force is at any given moment. the National Media Museum, The conventional museum Bradford, describes herself curator is probably the least as a revolution-fetishist. likely to know what’s really Well versed in the world of happening in the media. ‘I contemporary art and media, wouldn’t want any curator to DiAlogue: she emphasizes the degree do a show on Flickr; I’d rather to which institutions need to ask a 14-year-old about it.’ The IdeAl stay active in programming, in questioning their motives photography: Institution and connecting with contem- a useful anachronism porary initiatives to avoid Finally, if Flickr indeed enters Experts: becoming the equivalent of the stage, this does not imply ChArl�tte C�tt�N & big ocean liners. ‘It’s not worth an exit for the photography Lisa Oppenheim my time to go to exhibitions institution. When such institu-

to see things turned into tions shift from presenting d i a l Moderated by an institutional context by classic art photography Michiel van Iersel intellectualist professionals.’ to include new media and Institutions such as Foam are contemporary reflections on Foam Amsterdam there both to look critically at a mediated society, members o gues expert 19 March 2011 the foundations of a medium of the panel felt that institu- and to question what that tions do not need to convert medium needs. Analogously, entirely into media institutions New York-based artist Lisa or museums. Photography, Oppenheim aligns the role of when used under the heading institutions with that of the of a Photography museum contemporary art photogra- or institution, is a historical Institutions are usually far pher. While critically reflecting and distinct term, similar to from ideal, according to the on the role of photography, the word ‘contemporary’ in panel members of The Ideal the institution should always the title of any Contemporary

Institution, during the What’s critically reflect on its own art museum. Although the m eeti n g Next? expert meeting in Foam. position too. Oppenheim use of the word might seem Throughout the conversation, would claim the role of the anachronistic, there is a a recurring note of critique photography institution is to certain historiography and was the apparent desire of create, and even control, a understanding attached to the various art institutions to so- meaningful context for the word ‘photography’, which we lidify the boundaries between exhibition of artifacts and can use to depart from and to artistic media. Museums act images. examine new developments as heritage keepers of specific in the world of images and media (photography, design) Appropriate curatorial image making. • in separate departments, workforce thereby needlessly sustain- For both Oppenheim and Summary by Flora Lysen ing an artificial separation Cotton, curators are crucial between entwined histories. to the ideal of the critical Similarly, art academies still institution that stays in flux. hang onto the unnecessary Cotton points to the need for division into separate depart- curators to go beyond the ments of film, photography institution’s inherent mecha- and art. nism of picking highs and lows and validating the few Avoid becoming big from amongst the mass. We ocean liners should be particularly aware The desire to dissolve of such mechanisms at a time disciplinary and institutional when the emphasis is on the boundaries is not surprising mass. Institutions have always Ngin light of the panel members’ to wonder what the most Meeti 97 29 what's next? What’s next from a magazine’s point of view? The editors of Waterfall, SeeSaw, Outlook and Fantom liter-ally made a short magazine within Foam Magazine compiling their future visions foam magazine # on eight pages each.

The special project What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page (at Aperture, New York) sheds light on how collective discussions can lead to an appropriate way of filtering and showcasing accurate news. 98 A S lice of T i me

shauba_foam_2011.indd 1 24-10-2011 10:47:40 It has been always A S lice of T i me

when we talk about it I can never say that I know what is room where photograph was taken. about photography. Th ough I could Th at particular moment was saved, recognize it as a way to help us was stuck, in this piece of work. And memorising things, to print things that is it, the magic of photography. in the times, since long time ago. When I saw the original print of the Here I present the works from two portrait of Baudelaire at fi rst sight, artists and also the interviews, both taken by Etienne Carjat, at Victor of their works are fi nding their own and Albert Museum in London. I ways to trap a particular moment was frozen by its appearance and the - or instead we can say - a specifi c long history behind it. It is a face I’ve period of time, during the stream seen thousand times somewhere else of time. Whether they’re presenting before but nothing like this time. It in the form of still image or in is true, the photograph, the writer moving image, I consider them as was there. It seems that you can a way we pass through the magic of breath the air of 19th century out photography in the new times. of it or you can feel the light in that

Shauba Chang Born in 1985 in Taipei. Graduated MFA Fine Art Media at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. Founder and Editor in Chief of Waterfall Magazine. The magazine has been participated in art/photo book fairs internationally, including Magazine Library(Tokyo 2010), Off Print (Paris, 2010) and London art book fair (London, 2011). The Magazine expands its activity to exhibitions and events such as WATERFALL # 3 POCKET LONDON LAUNCH (The Other Space, 2010, London) and Seitai Denki - an photography exhibition (URS21 Chung Shan Creative Hub / N2, 2011, Taipei).

Currently lives and works between Taipei and London.

shauba_foam_2011.indd 2 24-10-2011 10:47:42 Emma Critchley

".... a collapse of time."

- When did you start your practice as a What I find fascinating is different people’s different point of view since you've been photographer? responses to being in the water. It is a space that making the video? evokes an extreme range of emotions in people. I would say that my practice as a photographer The water can stir feelings of absolute terror or The making of my video work is quite a slow started whilst I was doing my photography degree be used in a meditative way, as a place to escape process and it often takes a number of shoots, at the University of Brighton in 2001. from the everyday. I am interested in the physical working with a few different people, to capture and mental realignment that occurs when our what I am looking for, even though the final - Whatʼs the reason you get interested in senses shift in the water and the breath becomes works are often only a minute or so long. When underwater photography? suspended. shooting, although I have the idea of what I want to shoot in my mind beforehand, it is through I actually learnt to dive before I starting taking - From printed photograph to loop video, the process of making and seeing the idea as an pictures. Because of this passion, I raised what makes you change the way youʼre image that the work really starts to develop and I money to go on a marine conservation project doing it? Whatʼs the motive for you to begin to understand it more fully. to Indonesia between my first and second year make videos? Will you consider your at university. I bought a cheap, second-hand video works as photography? If so, why? Since working with videos, I think my underwater camera to take with me and as I went photographs have become more focused on diving 3 times a day, spent hours underwater The shift to working with moving image was capturing and making permanent that which is playing with it. What fascinated me was the quite a natural one, as my work became more otherwise transitory; a fi gure suspended in space, experience of taking pictures in this space – temporal. Over the last few years I have focussed the distortion of movement, the threshold state watching the way that everything moved and on the breath and duration, looking at the when immersed underwater. behaved in a very diff erent way and particularly underwater environment as a space where the my own experience of being a part of this world. breath is denied. I’m not sure whether I see my I think I have become more aware, or perhaps video work as photography, but there is a defi nite attuned to the way in which the photograph - And instead of the view from symbiosis between the still and moving image allows you to spend time with one particular underwater, why you started to work due to the locked-off framing and single, singular moment and how through looking and photograph people(portraits) repeated action. re-visiting an image, you can encounter it in underwater? diff erent ways. Although there is an obvious connection I think this came from the initial interest of my between the two, I think that photography - What are the accounts/elements for you own experience of being in water and wanting and video still operate differently as they create to recognize it is photography? to explore this with others. I’m interested in this diff erent ways for the viewer to engage with the place, where as humans we don’t belong. work. I sometimes start work thinking about it For me, I love the stillness of photography photographically, but then end up shooting it as and the way this allows a certain engagement - Through these practices, what did you a video, as this feels more appropriate or relevant with the work. There is often a real sense of dig out from them? Why these underwater to the idea. presence, a collapse of time, which silently portraits that keeps your interests? resonates, particularly with the physicality of the - Do you take photography now from a photographic print.

Emma Critchley She has worked as an underwater image-maker for over 8 years and recently graduated from The Royal College of Art. Through her practice Emma explores the human relationship with the underwater environment. Her award winning work has been exhibited internationally, in galleries and festivals including The Australian Centre of Photography, Fotofreo; Freemantle, Le Mois de la Photo; Canada, The National Portrait Gallery and the Photographers Gallery. Over the last few years Emma has worked on projects and commissions that have been funded by organisations such as The Arts Council, The National Media Museum and The Photographers Gallery.

shauba_foam_2011.indd 3 24-10-2011 10:47:42 shauba_foam_2011.indd 4 24-10-2011 10:47:42 Single Shared Breath Emma Chritchley Loop Video 2011

shauba_foam_2011.indd 5 24-10-2011 10:47:44 Stephan Tillmans

"the key elements...are light and time."

- In the very beginning, whatʼs the initial cases it’s longer than 1/50s because of the 50Hz day. The whole process of production has been reason for you to do this project? refresh rate of the TV). So only very few of the very challenging for instance. Not only when photos are as crisp and sharp as the ones I chose taking the photos, I also really had a hard time It all started with my girlfriend’s TV, which is very for the fi nal series. So one of the main reasons I printing Luminant Point Arrays. Th e fi ne structure old. One night we turned it off as usual. Somehow am photographing this series is out of curiosity. of the motifs causes heavy moiré effects and it the breakdown of the picture seemed to be very took a lot of proofs and experiments to achieve the bright and I started switching it on and off again - What is the process? quality I am having now. But also all the reactions and again. I then had to get out my camera right I am getting online through blogs, twitter and away and tried to capture these structures of light. Since I don’t have a studio, I took all the photos facebook have been a discovery. My work has been When I realized later on that every old TV has in my apartment. In order to have complete spread all over the world within days. its own variety of this eff ect, I got really excited. darkness and to avoid refl ections I set everything So in the very beginning there was the visual up in a kind of tent. Th is is also necessary to avoid - What did you choose this form to present Idea. While collecting more and more old TVs, I dust and hair on the screen. When everything the condition of the television? started to deal with the science of the image and is clean and dark I am between the TV and the the theories of e.g. Gottfried Jäger and Lambert camera with one fi nger on the on/ off switch and I chose photography intuitionally. Later I started Wiesing. More precisely with the relationship of one finger on the release. It takes a lot of time to experiment with video also. But I never got as the abstract and concrete in photopraphy. Th at’s and patience to fi nd the right setup for sharp and clear, formal and beautiful results. what I later wrote my Bachelor thesis about. crisp results. In the beginning it took about 800 pictures to get THE picture. That’s why I am - What are the accounts/elements for you - Rather than taking photographs of working with digital cameras here. Now think I to recognize it is photography? And how other objects, why youʼre fascinated by have a pretty good setup and a good feeling to would you consider your work “Luminant these television images? What makes you fi nd the right moment to release the camera. But Point Arrays” as photography? interest in it? it still takes hours and sometimes days. Th e TVs I photograph are of diff erent models and all sizes. Not only that it technically is photography, but Since I discovered that every TV has it’s own This is how I achieve the wide range of motifs, two of the key elements of this work are light and character, and almost every time I take a photo though some televisions give better results than time. So it is photography referring to the major the result is very different, I can’t walk by any others. But not only the diff erent TVs aff ect the elements of photography. Th e question is whether old television without switching it on and off result. Also shutter speed, timing and the time the the medium itself is the only existing reference. anymore. So since I began shooting Luminant TV has been running before I take the photo have By pushing the switch of the TV, I am abstracting Point Arrays, it’s almost like being addicted. I an infl uence on the image we see later on. Th at’s the TV picture. Th e external reference vanishes as never know if the next shot is THE perfect one why you can get lots of different images out of the TV picture breaks down. So for the viewers or just another black photo. And sometimes it just one TV. the Luminant Point Arrays are not necessarily takes hundreds of attempts to get a good picture. photography until they discover what the photo That’s because the moment is pretty short and I - What are the discoveries you have shows by reading the description. I like to ask am taking the pictures by hand; one fi nger on the through out this project? people in the exhibitions what they think the release of the camera and one finger on the on/ Luminant Point Arrays are. Most people think of off switch of the TV. And I am capturing moving I don’t know where to start. I mean when doing a computer graphics. And I love the reactions when light with a pretty “long” exposure time. (In most project like this, you discover things almost every I reveal the origin of the motives.

Stephan Tillmans Born in 1982 in Westerstede

2006-2010 Communication design study at Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule (BTK-FH)

2010/2011 "gute aussichten – new german photography" award

Living and working in Berlin/Germany

shauba_foam_2011.indd 6 24-10-2011 10:47:46 Luminant Point Arrays Stephan Tillmans 100x100cm | 40x40cm lambda prints 2010

shauba_foam_2011.indd 7 24-10-2011 10:47:46 www.hiwaterfall.com

shauba_foam_2011.indd 8 24-10-2011 10:47:48

13-10-11 17:31 By Peng & Chen www.peng-chen.net Be There ��-1-aangepast.indd 1 Osama bin Laden’s hideout compound in northern Pakistan where he was killed.

未标题-1.indd 2 11-10-10 下午8:45 The New York World Trade Center site after 9/11 attacks.

-1-aangepast.indd 3 13-10-11 17:32 The Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tuscon, Ariz., called aircraft graveyard, is where more than 4000 old military planes go to die.

-1-aangepast.indd 4 13-10-11 17:32 The world’s biggest refugee camp in Dadaab, northern Kenya, home to more than 350,000.

-1-aangepast.indd 5 13-10-11 17:32 US Nevada nuclear test site used for both above and below ground nuclear explosions, home of 928 atomic detonations which made the world's biggest man-made craters.

-1-aangepast.indd 6 13-10-11 17:32 Two million people amassed on the National Mall to witness Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th U.S. president.

-1-aangepast.indd 7 13-10-11 17:32 cover: Truck crash in Bismarck, North Dakota. back cover: 400 meters long “Long live chairman Mao” ideograms on a mountain, near the city of Hami, Xinjiang, China, used as a point of reference for flights.

-1-aangepast.indd 8 13-10-11 17:33 PHOTOGRAPHIC QUARTERLY WHAT’S NEXT - FOR FOAM - AUTUMN 2011

FOAM_layoutDEF.indd 1 13/10/11 15.38 FANTOM FOR FOAM

Previous page Rafel G. Bianchi, Aureoline, 2008. Here Cobalt violet, 2009. From the series The Flag on the Top, oil on canvas, cm 117 x 82 © the artist, courtesy Nogueras Blanchard gallery, Barcelona. Opposite Shuichi Nakano, Chill at 5:25, 2008. From the series Searching for Paradise Vol.1, oil on canvas, cm 162 x 130,3 © and courtesy the artist.

FOAM_layoutDEF.indd 2 13/10/11 15.38 Photography is a virus inoculated in society, culture as well as the other representation techniques, inevi- and the arts. Since its birth it integrated the func- tably influencing the preparation of drawings, paint- tions of various pre-existing tools, such as people’s ings, installations and so on. This is a process which memory, the soldier’s telescope, the scientist’s affects not only the language of photography, but rule and the painter’s brush. It developed around also the physical device itself. Today pictures are not an endless research for its own autonomy, but its taken with a simple camera only, but also by using growing diffusion and the increasing number of its phones, computers and Playstations... Photography applications make this objective more and more attacks different instruments and sneaks inside them. unreasonable. The evolutionary model of photog- Photography will be everywhere. raphy is based on the principle of contamination, which involves both its own system, so that the The images in these pages are taken from past and future typical features of traditional genres (reportage, editions of Picture Perfect, one of Fantom’s most distinctive portrait, landscape, architecture, still-life...) are mixed sections; where we explore the interconnections between together in order to form a magmatic new vocabulary, photography and other media and artistic practices.

FOAM_layoutDEF.indd 3 13/10/11 15.38 FOAM_layoutDEF.indd 4 13/10/11 15.38 FANTOM FOR FOAM

Duncan Wylie, Cabin Fever, 2009, oil on canvas, cm 207 x 300 © the artist, courtesy Grenoble Museum of Fine Arts Collection.

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Robert Pruitt, Fantastic Garveyite, 2011, conte and charcoal on hand dyed paper, cm 127 x 96,5. Courtesy the artist and Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver City (CA)

Opposite Marina Berio top left Burn Breathe Penelope 2, 2009, cm 91 x 91. Top right Burn Breathe Penelope 3, 2009, cm 51 x 51. Courtesy Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York. Center left Burn Breathe Nan 3, 2007, cm 51 x 51. Center right Burn Breathe Marina 5, 2008, cm 51 x 51. Bottom left Burn Breathe Alisha 2, 2008, cm 51 x 51. Bottom right Burn Breathe Marco 1, 2008, cm 51 x 51. Courtesy Otto Zoo Gallery, Milan.

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Fantom - Photographic Quarterly. Editors Selva Barni and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz Associate Editor Francesco Zanot Art Director Fabrizio Radaelli Editorial Office Didier Falzone and Ross Chisholm, Lantern State, 2011, oil on canvas, cm 28 x 18. Arianne Di Nardo (assistant) Publisher Massimo Torrigiani for © the artist, courtesy of the artist and Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York Boiler Corporation Milan. www.fantomeditions.com

FOAM_layoutDEF.indd 8 13/10/11 15.38 Of What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page was an inside-out exhibition Whitethat began at New York’s Aperture Gallery with

white walls and six tables. of white The walls would gradually Walls be filled with pictures and

texts that emanated from w

discussions taking place at alls the tables over a ten-day

period in September. and six and What should be on the front page?

Do we need a new t ables front page? And most importantly for Sixmany: How can we create media that is believable? Tables by Fred Ritchin

131 At the heart of the exhibition were the conversations among a combination of invited specialists and people visiting the gallery that were led by various hosts – Wafaa Bilal, Iraqi-born digital and performance artist; Melissa Harris, long-time editor-in-chief of Aperture magazine; Stephen Mayes, head of the VII photographic agency; Deborah Willis, historian, curator, artist; and myself. Participants at each table were asked to think about what would go on the wall adjacent to them as if it were a kind of a front page.

What new strategies for telling stories should be utilized? Can we depend on the algorithms used by search engines?

A sixth table and wall were reserved for visitors both physical and virtual – many submitted work online which was then printed and hung by Aperture staff, most pos- magazines ing subjects that we should know more about.

At a time when anyone can construct their own front page using a variety of sources Why do We need one in common?

132 But there were also concerns as to how a democracy can function if citizens do not have sufficient shared knowledge of what is actually going on. How can people push for change if they do not know what is wrong? For example, as of 2009 only 400 people had the equivalent wealth of 50% of Americans – an extraordinary shift that no one seemed to know much about.

Belatedly we seem to be finding out how bad the inequality has become: ‘According to the CIA’s World Factbook, the United States now ranks 39th in the world when it comes to income inequality. What that means is that only 38 out of 136 countries have a less equitable distribution of income than the United States; the list of countries with a more equitable income distribution includes Iran, Russia, Turkmenistan and Yemen.’ Brian Montopoli reported this for CBS

News on September 7, the very day that What Mat- of white ters Now? opened to the public. w alls and six

Does the movement from a community-based front t

page (with all its many faults) to a personal front page ables filled with Google and Facebook results have anything to do with our lack of focus?

What should be Or, have the media, desperate for advertising, aban- doned their readers? Have we, in the age of ultimate the role of the connectedness, actually disconnected without even knowing it? As one participating student pointed out, media in focusing the question is not what matters now? but does our attention anything at all matter? The frequent refrain at my table was that what we are upon issues such shown about the world is so often one-sided and manipulated that it merits only a cynical response, if one as this one responds at all. as they evolve? These were some of the themes of our discussions, which ended on September 17, coincidentally the same day that the emerging nation-wide protest movement, Occupy Wall Street, began. The engaging discussions on the street, like the ones at our tables, reflect the un- certain status of both knowledge and citizenship – what do we (or do we not) know, and what (if anything) can we do about it? 133 magazines

134 Can democracy survive all of this? Has it already expired?

At Aperture we were both informed and shocked by CNN reporter Brian Palmer, conflict resolution spe- several fascinating talks given by guests – topics that cialist Marieke von Woerkom, photographer and me-

had either not appeared on our personal front pages dia innovator Jonathan Worth, recent graduates Ariel of white or had not been sufficiently documented. For exam- Ritchin and Alison Wynn, and many others – decided ple, Simon Norfolk, author most recently of Burke + that we will try to construct something useful. We are Norfolk, Photographs from the War in Afghanistan, dis- now just beginning to discuss concrete strategies for cussed the limitations of photojournalism in depicting a new front page, including reporting that provides more than simple actions. He was adamant about the more context, enables diverse points of view (including need to understand the history of Afghanistan’s long those of the subjects), and is more sensitive to differing w struggle with colonialism (including the 19th-century cultural perspectives. We also want to write new guides

massacre of thousands of withdrawing British troops), for teachers, for reporters (should the subject be asked alls and talked about specifics such as the emerging field of to comment on the photograph?) and for readers (how narcotecture – deluxe residences called ‘poppy palaces’ does one read a hypertext?), while also coming up with built with enormous amounts of drug money. Garth a transparent code of ethics. Our hope is that we can

Lenz, winner of the Social Documentary.net prize for make our findings widely available and continue to and six his work on Canada’s Tar Sands, similarly revealed in engage in discussion about the best ways to provide harrowing detail the environmental and social conse- the kinds of information that societies, and individuals, quences of this aggressive pillaging of the land for an need to move forward. energy-starved world – and the current discussions to build a pipeline to carry the corrosive crude oil across Aperture will continue its What Matters Now? pro- the United States. gram with a series of talks and discussions beginning t

in late January, themed around issues of photography, ables Some in attendance commented that it was the build- technology, and community. And for a larger sense of ing of community that was the most important out- what happened, including a more comprehensive list come of What Matters Now? Some found that of participants, see www.aperture.org/whatmattersnow what was important was that they could finally share and #whatmattersnow. Ω their own personal front pages – stories from their own countries, their own backgrounds – or their knowledge of their own specialties, whether philosophy or history or whatever else they might know of life, including what it is to be young in today’s society.

Those at Stephen Mayes’s table responded with a conclusion that, in effect, the current media environment makes explicit what was always problematic about media: ‘Our current cultural anxiety stems from the loss of these fixed reference points and we’re reaching out to replace them with new certainties, to find a new cultural consensus. But rather than looking for new conventions to replace the old, we should embrace the plurality and each take responsibility for our own management of the information that flows around us.’

Where to we go from here? Participants from my table – including photographer, filmmaker and former 135 foam magazine # 29 what's next? 136 introduction next generation exhibited in the What’s What’s the in exhibited space exhibition Next? here been have in Arles paper onto translated accompanying with an van Nickel by text artist Duijvenboden, as one of the as well three coaches in this three coaches cooperative project. one-page by Followed manifestos on Future Timm Education by Eder Chiodetto, Rautert, and Charlotte Cotton Broomberg & Adam Chanarin. Oliver in Another contribution is Colette this context on the reflections Olof’s project special exhibition Girls Showroom at Foam, Willem Popelier. by project touches Popelier’s on the topical issue of people living with young and for their public image when sharing these online. 137 statements which were statements which were selection of these visual in Southern France. A photography festival photography the international Les – Rencontres d’Arles the opening week of the opening week and a daily zine during produced work, activities produced work, questions in specially as to position their for their answers as well well as for their answers la Photographie in Arles Nationale Supérieure de Nationale Supérieure and from the École Academie in Amsterdam in Amsterdam Academie from the Gerrit Rietveld from the Gerrit Rietveld photography students photography Therefore, Foam asked asked Foam Therefore, need to be broadened. need to be broadened. get in the way and thus get in the way where traditional notions where traditional photography still fits and photography within which framework within which framework to gauge for themselves for themselves to gauge graphers. They are able graphers. They young artists and photo- artists young next generation of directly concerned:directly the from those who are who are from those Next?’ is to be expected expected is to be Next?’ the question ‘What’s ‘What’s the question answer when posing answer The most straightforward straightforward most The

Up Up Holding

a project by gerrit rietveld academie &

e.n.s.p. arles & foam text By Nickel van Mirror a duijvenboden

A cluttered room above the exhibition space in The students from the two art academies – Arles La Bourse du Travail in Arles teems with feverish and Amsterdam – first met during the What’s Next? activity. The tables – pushed together for the Expert Meeting at Foam in March 2011. Although occasion – are strewn with objects: stacked up on the surface the two schools take a very different ho slide projectors, slumbering laptops, leftovers of approach, the students went home with much the

French cheese, USB sticks, cables and baguette same feeling about the day. It was as if the experts l d

crumbs, beer cans and cameras. Here and there were overlooking something… For the students the i n

a tired photography student stares blankly into question of ‘What’s Next?’ is quite concrete. They g up space, surfeited by the day’s impressions. relate it less to photography than to themselves. They feel it is their turn, yet at the same time they

Most of them, though, are huddled together in the struggle with the question: ‘What can we still do a mirror corner, just about the most awkward place, poring with photography?’ over a computer screen on which the latest edition of What’s Next? Daily Zine is being put together A certain despair can be detected here. Nowadays – the photozine distributed every day to visitors it seems that every photography student goes to the international photography festival Les through a phase of questioning the medium to Rencontres d’Arles. It is the beginning of July, the the point of being skeptical and, at times, even opening week of the festival, and the editing of the overtly cynical. In my role as college lecturer I have Daily Zine – hundreds of sheets of which will shortly noticed that students in recent years increasingly be spewing from the photocopier – is entirely in insist that photography is merely a ‘tool’ in their the hands of the students. It is an initiative of image making practice – they are wary of the label the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the École Nationale photographer. Photography has lost its status as a Supérieure de la Photographie (e n s p ) and Foam. self-evident medium and has become subordinate to the primacy of the image. The students sense – perhaps for the first time in their budding careers – that a large group of people The question is whether this is just a phase or if is looking forward to what they are making. To get it is more deeply rooted. In the main exhibition an idea of their public they only need to look out of of Les Rencontres d’Arles, From Here On, in the window. In the square in front of the building any case this trend was carried to the extreme. Foam is celebrating its tenth anniversary with Authenticity, authorship, technical skill, social music and wine. The celebration has drawn quite awareness – everything the medium ever stood for a crowd – festival visitors, participants, museum was declared an illusion. What remained was the contacts. In some of them, the students recognize unpretentious image, anonymous, low resolution, an admired artist or a leading curator. stripped of meaning. The context was all that

The zine is ready; the first prints roll out of the machine. The sheets are hastily folded and ← Category #1: Still Life furnished with a wrapper. Then the first go down We constructed a still life in a studio according to strict instructions based to hand them out to the public. ‘Latest edition,’ on formal similarities of photographic they mumble with half-concealed pride. People are artworks that surround us. All seven surprised at the feel of the paper. It is still warm. students operated the same medium format camera, reducing the work to a 139 simple click of the button. By Gerrit Rietveld Academie students

How can one answer the question What’s Next? by only looking into the future?

Statement by Elmer Driessen Sara Glahn We, a group of seven students from the Lena Hesse Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam Ola Lanko have investigated the situation of Wolf Mulder Berend Otto contemporary photography and Kamila Stehlik located six trends, or categories, which seem characteristic and successful Students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie today. We consider them to be the new Amsterdam conventions. supervision: Nickel van duijvenboden

To discover whether there is a formula we devised a set of instructions for each category and followed them. Could this ho method lead to an authentic

result? And what happens when a l d

formula has no clearly defined i n

author? g up

Our category project a mirror is a reflection on the photographic trends that surround us. But perhaps more mattered. ‘Now we are a species of editors,’ was importantly, it is a the opening sentence of the curators’ manifesto, way of liberating written among others by Martin Parr and Joachim ourselves from Schmid. A more cynical climate in which to ask conventions once students ‘What’s Next?’ is hardly conceivable. and for all.

Foam’s exhibition space in Arles presented a cacophony of images in its very own way. In the microcosm of the petite Bourse du Travail, works of established artists entered into dialogue with the images the e n s p and Rietveld students had developed in the months leading up to the festival. Every day the students reviewed whether the setup of the previous day had been successful, and then made adjustments to the presentation. The final days of the experiment projected the strongest image: instead of confining themselves to a dark corner, the students took the liberty of disrupting the regular exhibition, and even went so far as to parasitize other artists’ work.

Take the Rietveld students’ Collage Generator: every few seconds a ready-made collage was ← Category #2: Portraits projected on the wall, randomly compiled from Each of us found her or his own model over a hundred visual elements and generated and adopted the same set of conven- live as the viewer watched. There was no author tions of a blank expression and subdued colors and adhered to uniform technical 141 specifications. By Gerrit Rietveld Academie students

← Category #4: Collage ↖ Category #6: Text Each collage was randomly generated On photography? corresponds with On photography by a computer at the moment of display by Susan Sontag, a book of great importance to many (originally presented as a projection). We photographers. We are reacting at a theoretical level set the parameters by choosing a large in photography that has become more familiar today. number of found images to draw from. We replaced all the fullstops in that book with question What remains is a machine of suggested marks as a commentary on that tendency, to investigate meaning, questioning the position of the how that would influence our perception and to author. challenge us to doubt more. By Gerrit Rietveld Academie students By Gerrit Rietveld Academie students ↗ F9 The Chat Booth Installation by Adrien Pezennec and Benjamin Mouly questions the consumption of self-representation when confronted by others. Chatroulette.com is a social website that defines itself as a way of meeting new people that involves your image and draws a line between real and virtual → Source persona. We made an installation that Five self-portraits and five markers. allows the spectator to stand back from The public is asked to vote for a face and the role he plays while interacting in envi- to sign the print. Arbitrary and without ronments such as Chatroulette. Without stake, each vote is a symbolic act. The being too didactic, we incite the viewer to visitors seize the image and become the question the way his image and persona author. Turning the portraits into unique are shown, shared and perceived through pieces, the visitors are about to delete this kind of social network. them. By École Nationale Supérieure de la Photo By École Nationale Supérieure de la Photo graphie students graphie students

involved. The collage was brazenly projected between a group of works by Anne de Vries, who carefully composes his collages. On another wall a series of self-portraits Source by e n s p students lured a response from the viewer. Visitors were invited to write their signature on the glossy prints – a ‘desecration’ that countered our tendency to Today you can’t think about Image view art at a respectful distance, while at the without considering its circulation same time calling into question the position of the and uses on the Internet. That’s why we author. After a few days the portraits were covered have chosen that medium as material for in scribbles and effectively rendered invisible. our research. Given the constant flow of images present on the web, we decided Both groups of students were clearly preoccupied to question the images’ purposes. with the positioning of their work. The students of the e n s p concentrated on the influence of the internet – themes such as voyeurism and the ‘make-ability’ of history in our mediatized society. The Rietveld students had opted for a collective study of mannerism in contemporary Who makes the image? For whom? fine art photography. They copied trends they What does an image show? had identified (‘categories’), working as a single author as opposed to seven individuals. The transmission of From this chaotic and experimental image one images implies a constant thing clearly emerges: the youngest generation renewal that generates of photographers experiences at first-hand how accumulation. The image the authorship of the individual, autonomous looses its value till it becomes

on photographer increasingly yields to the importance just another image. It is going t i of context and positioning. But through their to be found, taken, sometimes collaboration their initially despairing response to archived or collected but the question ‘What’s Next?’ evolved into something always consumed. In this far more hopeful. That hope lay in the students’ perspective, every image is ge n era capacity to see the irony of their situation. They removed from its original seemed to want to bring about a change: instead context to be transposed of allowing the positioning of their work to be n ex t dictated by their environment, they looked for into another that can be a way of taking control. The process was like an completely different, making abjuration: by using their work to hold up a mirror it increasingly difficult to to the present status quo in photography, they read an image. Public and shed their dead weight and were able to say: well, private spaces collide and we have done this, time now to re-invent ourselves. sometimes reach obscurity Next.•to become the source of the photographic works made for this occasion.

Statement by Anne-Camille Allueva Lise Dua Benjamin Mouly Adrien Pezennec Olivier Sarrazin

Students from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles Supervision: Florence Maille

146

Hasan & Husain Essop Halaal Art

All images © Goodman Gallery and the artists, 2009

In his final year of art school, Hasan template for their subsequent practice. Essop, a printmaking major, started The Essop brothers’ ongoing photographic working with collage. His strategy was project of self-representation refuses a simple: juxtapose magazine pictures of lot of things: the monochrome sobriety of superstars in off-key landscapes. ‘I found it documentary; a stable view on the working so difficult,’ he later told me, which is why class lives of many South African Muslims; Hasan asked a university friend to make sombreness. some staged portraits of himself that he could use in his collages. Watching from a Respectful rather than critical of Islamic near distance, Husain, the younger of the theology, you could argue that their work is twin Essop brothers, was impressed. Photo marked by a subtle activist agenda. Let me graphically trained, he suggested that clarify. When last I met the brothers for a Hasan would move out of the studio and chat, they told me about visiting Hamburg, pose himself in the everyday world of Cape the city where Mohamed Atta and other Town – Husain wanted his brother’s collages key protagonists in the 9/11 attacks lived to appear more real, as he would later put for a while. ‘Germans had this impression it to me. Exhibited at the Michaelis School that Islam was strictly a terrorist religion,’ of Fine Art, Husain’s crude photographic offered Husain. ‘Everybody we confronted collages prompted Goodman Gallery cura only knew Osama bin Laden – they didn’t tor Storm Janse van Rensburg to call. He know the prophet Mohamed.’ Following an was interested. Husain floated a thought: exhibition in the German port city, viewers ‘We told him about our idea to collaborate.’ asked lots of questions. ‘We spent more Go for it, came the response. time speaking about our religion than art, because they didn’t know anything The brothers worked on five photographs, about the beauty of Islam, that there is each brimful with collaged portraits of another side,’ offered Husain. The Essop the twins doing various Muslim and non- brothers’ photographic work, which has Muslim things – washing, praying, matured, losing the jerky cut ‘n paste feel attending a dogfight. Shot in a variety of and overfull compositional frame of their non-descript locations in their native Cape early work, offers a sincere and engaged Town, these early photos established the response to this damaging image. •

selected by Sean O’Toole What’s next? I sometimes ask the fictional character of myself that and come to very the medium. It will become different conclusions: increasingly more difficult to The urban parents will preserve such terms as part of continue to eat their the� ‘photographic’. wholemeal bread and butter,t will prepare plates ofs raw With the decline of analogue vegetables and drink white photography, the traditional wine. In times of the global content of the teaching at art financialf crisis,e the few mega- academies is dwindling. It irich will buy a Picasso or a cannot, however, be irrelevant Richter for the umpteenth whether I am speaking about time, young photography will algorithmically generated AN have no market value and pictures or analogue contemporary art is out for photographs. Education must those that can afford it. take a completely different MAN i f e s t M approach here, in artistic, �Nphilosophical and technical terms. A different name must be found for this technically new aspect, instead of photography. In my opinion digital photography is an

anachronism that does not do � n f uture educ A justice to the new image.

The next generation of artists could show new potential directions, or even themselves express these new required teaching contents. For example: Adrian Sauer (1976, Berlin, Germany), with his work Bilder aus Berechnung , 2011 © Adrian Sauer Adrian © 2011 , (Colours) Farben 16.777.216 C-Print digital cm, 125 x cm 476 original: (Calculated Images), Björn A few clever people who Siebert (1978, Hamburg, have more affinity to good Germany), with his Remakes, artistic work than a plate or Viktoria Binschtok (1972, MANifesto of raw vegetables will turn Moscow, Russia) with World of

their attention to work by Details. Here we can observe tio N �N future young artists such as Tobias claims being made of the new educAtioN Zielony (1973, Wuppertal, medium that could form a Germany), Sven Johne (1976, new school of thought. Bergen/Rügen, Germany), Aymeric Fouquez (1974, by Chateau-Thierry, France), TIMm Ricarda Roggan (1972, Dresden, Germany). They RAUTERT give something back to photography that is very personal and unique, something that reflects documentary terminology and is also a reference to UTURE F EDUCATION155 by malaise, Oliver Chanarin Let’s forget about photo said that, strangely enough, graphy. Photography is not a the student photographer means to an end, he reasons. expects to earn a living from Photography isn’t about the taking pictures. and Laurel world, it is positioned within Ptak gets emails every day the world. The promise that from students and teachers photography can be fully from all over the world telling learnt, that it is a discipline her how her blog influences which can be mastered is a experttheir practices. fiction.O r, in Chanarin’s words: ‘Education doesn’t stop’. The overall experience of recent decades has been that ‘Within photography we the teaching of photography are confronted with many has become more abstract. practices and methods,’ says DiAlogue: Teachers now mainly teach a member of the audience. their students how to filter ‘The discipline of photography Next information, do research and doesn’t exist anymore, if tell a story. For an increasing it ever did.’ Still, one is left GenerAtioN number of photographers the wondering, how to initiate Photo darkroom has become obso- the student, who nonetheless lete, as witnessed at the edu- has to position himself, into grAphers cational level by the gradual this heterogeneous universe. disappearance of the German You have to dig your way out Experts: Fachhochschule, where the to where you want to go to, OLIVER CHANARIN, ‘kraft’ was taught. Within this Ruff advises. But adds that thomAs ruff & general change in educational compared with how teaching LAurel PTAK approach national experienc- was 30 years ago, the art es differ. At the Gerrit Rietveld world has professionalized. Moderated by Academie in Amsterdam the The contemporary art industry Anne-Celine Jaeger teaching is highly individual. rewards discipline, according In Switzerland, photography to Chanarin. Galleries and Foam Amsterdam is taught through theory. Ptak musea give bad signals he 19 March 2011 wonders what kind of work insists, in the face of protest results from such a decidedly from the students present. next generation theoretical method. And while the images, that question their Commercialization and pro- own existence, status and fessionalization do not mean meaning, or lack thereof, that one has to create a brand to the Swiss students produce be successful, as Ptak’s highly confirm photography’s personal blog testifies. ‘We abstraction or its conceptual teach students to say ‘no’ say Jaeger opened the afternoon ground, the question of how speakers from the audience, dialogue entitled Next its very intangibility can be an opinion fervently backed Generation Photographers taught remains unsatisfacto- by Ptak, who fears institution- with the provocative question rily solved for many members alization. ‘I need a school to ‘Do we still need to teach of the discussion group. discuss and develop my work, photography?’ alluding to the Meetia safe place to make mistakes enormous number of photo- An audience member suggests and a teacher to kick my ass,’ graphs and their drastically that dialogue is important. says a student. The only way changed character. Members ‘Students have to verbalize to find your own voice in this of the panel shared their what they are doing’, Ruff complex contemporary state experiences of photography agrees, as articulation cre- of photographic affairs, con- education with the audience, ates consciousness. But the cludes Jaeger, quoting Alec N which led to an animated student’s awareness should Soth, is to just do the work. • discussion. Thomas Ruff quit concern the world rather than g teaching when he was struck photography, adds Chanarin: Summary by Ilse van Rijn

156 L.P. I don’t teach that much at the moment, but one interesting thing I find about the blog is that I get so many emails, often from teachers, T.R. The big problem from faraway places, telling has to do with the words me how much it influences their ‘photography’ and practice and in general how ‘photographer’. There is such they see photography. I like a wide range of practices in the idea of creating a platform photography, such diversity where knowledge can be among professionals, that shared on a global level. things were probably much clearer thirty years ago. It’s difficult for young people to filter, to decide which way to go. And they have that big d ialogue expert word ‘photography’ in front of v�ice from the them. They have no idea. All they have in mind is: ‘I want AudieNce to become a photographer, I Five years ago it was all about the search want to study photography.’ for information. How can I find the They need advice, and I information I need to be a good student cannot advise them because I or to develop my own language? And don’t know what they want. now there is so much information that it becomes more about filtering. Research is becoming more and more important. m eeting O.C. Even if we try to give students a much broader framework than just photography, people tend to narrow down their interests very quickly, because the art world rewards that. Maybe this sounds pessimistic but artists are gradually pushed towards developing themselves as a brand. It’s something that is picked up in the education system. It’s so conservative! And reflected by the art world. Are they good signals? Are they healthy? Are they productive? I’m sceptical. Being an artist has become so Meeti professionalized… it’s shameful. O.C. I’m probably the T.R. Students have to talk, worst kind of teacher. We try their ideas have to come to their to be encouraging, to give lips. But not all students can talk, some insight and stimulating some are very intuitive, others appropriate research. But N are insecure. Fresh strategies its hard not to interfere… to have to come up. impose ones own ideas. It took g me a long time to realize that.

157 M ANi The most importantf issuese generated by the techno s logical revolution of the recent t decades, is the fact that it � makes us all equal when it comes to imaging. Technology has democratized production.

The formation of a future MANifesto professional photographer, �Nin this context, which aims �N future to produce in documental, educAtioN experimental or artistic area, should be focused on under standing man, study of human by sciences and in the use of photography. As a Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio tio N Eder Branco would say, to learn about photography you have Chi�dett� to forget photography.

Technology makes us N e x t g er A all UTUREequal. F The difference is the man. EDUCATIONVasconcellos © Cássio

158 How differently young girls nowadays experiment with images of themselves compared to my generation: they no longer react defensively to images but they act to produce images to brand themselves. It even seems like some of them solely live with and for their public image, branding someone’s watching themselves daily on their Facebook / Twitter pages. Someone’s Watching Afterthoughts on the exhibition Showroom Girls by Willem Popelier in Foam 3h

by Colette Olof Foam Curator

159 next generation But do they understand what this could mean in the in mean could this what understand they do But one to look at. Free of charge. Without interpretations. sent out all over the digital horizon, available for - every distinction between private and public, their images are Twitter pages. Dismissing a democratic and traditional Facebook/ their image,on themselvesdaily branding public their for liveand solely with them of some like seems even themselves.It brand to images produce to act they but images to defensively react longer no images of themselves compared to my generation: they How differently younggirls nowadays experiment with lookingforanattitude. insecurelittlegirl I seea very pictures, these at back Looking Christmas. party,or like my other annual get-togethers birthday or during not?) or up Make braces? my hide to How wear? to trait made by (Horror! the school photographer What a representationofmyself wasthe annualpor- during When I was a thirteen-year- old, my only relation with

160 of them, they had only deleted some and kept others.kept and some deleted only them,of had they together in front of the webcam. Instead of deleting all fun having girls, young two of photos 100 almost of series a found Popelier then But universe. digital the of these orphan are portraits living anonymous lives in computers and often forget to take them off. public these on portraits their take people many that out found showrooms.He in webcams on visitors by doing research into the phenomenon of pictures taken publication, I was immediately intrigued. Popelier was public through self-image a constructing of context with his idea of investigating the value of images in the me approached Popelierphotographer Willem When of one daybythisexposure? the dangers confronted be they will or spheres private and public image betweenthe next step in dissolving the borders public their towards ethic innocent their Is run? long Thousands Thousands This fact intrigued Popelier and when he discovered that one of the girls was wearing a necklace with her name, he googled her name together with an image and before he knew it he had found a great many details of her life.

We had several long discussions to investigate the possibilities of showing the work in the context of a museum. Popelier was clear about the fact that he wanted to show the work without telling the girls beforehand that they were protagonists in a form of modern storytelling. We decided to concentrate the exhibition on the images and the Tweets of one of the girls. She is not aware of anything, which in a way is the point. She is sharing her private world in and through the public domain without realising this. She is just one example of many. It is not about her specifically, and at the same time it is about nothing but her. someone’s watching

Popelier explained to me all the different aspects he had discussed with a lawyer on the rights of the girls. Since this is such a new topic for lawyers, the rights on the internet, not many things about it have been clari- fied yet. Not many laws are yet written on it, no legal precedents have been set. We could show the work, as a museum, without being afraid of too many difficult aspects. But then I started discussing this exhibition proposal with other people. With staff members of Foam, with friends, colleagues. The reactions were, to put it mildly, intense.

We, the adults, had to protect the teenagers. They don’t know what they are doing, how these images can follow them for the rest of their lives. What could be the consequences for the girl if she and her surroundings found out? The general feeling was that it was an important topic to discuss, but without using one underage girl 161 as a showcase. It wasn’t about her as a person, but it It is interesting to see that the museum can still host was all about the stories and interpretations surround- a topical discussion that continues on several levels: it ing it. The exhibition showed all images the girls took, started naively online, was translated into print for the including the deleted ones. The girls’ identities were exhibition and continues to live on in newspapers and covered by playful pink dots which became a visual digitally outside the walls of the museum. • play in itself. In the middle of the room a printer connected directly to the Twitterfeed of one of the girls was spitting out every tweet she was sending, but also with pink lines through her messages so only the date and hour of the tweet would be visible.

When the show was installed, it generated a lot of discussion about the ethics. No single conclusion can be drawn. When journalist Rosan Hollack from the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad retraced one of the two girls by Twitter she invited the girls for a discussion in the museum. The girls were surprised, a bit over- whelmed, but amused as well. It didn’t scare them off, but they did realise a bit more what their behaviour could actually mean. In return for the images used by Popelier, they asked for a lunch in Foam café. next generation next

Credits of photographs in order of appearance:

Article published in NRC Handelsblad, 15 July 2011, page 30-31

162162

The loosely held pages tremble and move up and down. Through the motion of the subway but also through the natural trembling of the man’s hand and arm.

Show the resemblance between pages and thoughts: fi rst fi lm the loose pages and then move the camera up to his head. Then keep the camera still and focus on his forehead. sketchbook 1, page 63 Reading people, each in their own world. A reading woman suddenly looks up, right into the camera. She keeps on looking that way for a long time. Then she goes on reading. sketchbook 6, page 132 Curled up like a thought Curling thought Uncurling thought Curl thought Thought curl

Curled up tightly Curled up loosely

Nice to show on the outside what’s going on inside the head. Make portraits on the street of employees during their lunchtime. See if the expressions on the faces resemble the pattern of the strings around their neck.

sketchbook 6, page 73 Kites with paper-thin transparent strings move slowly up and down. People follow the movements of the kites, which makes their heads move up and down in an even slower tempo (nice dynamics). sketchbook 6, page 74 He was resting with his head against the wooden post, deep in thought. I wanted to photograph him quickly and rummaged in my bag. The noise startled the man. Too late! I tried to get him in the same position. It worked, but unfortunately his thoughts were gone. Paulien Oltheten Photos from Japan and my Archive

When we look at Paulien Oltheten’s work how we read in public, followed by the capturing and examining the gestures of minor detail of strings around the neck people in the street, we’re prompted to of business man during their lunchtime keep an eye on our own behaviour. Her or the moving heads of men looking at storytelling departs from the photographic their kites up in the air – every single registrations of small observations which observation is autonomous, without capture her and which she captures on disturbing the overall picture. Paulien film while wandering through the streets Oltheten builds on a continually growing of a city (e.g. in Japan). She extends her archive, mapping and wondering about snapshots of city life with commenting human life. Neither her work nor her way sketches or words, restages certain patters of presenting it seems to know any limits of behaviour herself or asks passers-by without ever falling into repetition. to do so. In the final stage, if there is ever one, these different layers arrange Stimulating our reflections on the status themselves at random, thus preventing quo of the photographical universe in which the observer from taking a quick-and- we live is one of the aims of photography easy conclusion. as an art form. Its objective is to break through the multiplicity of images and, if The minor motions and behavioural pat possible, generate new visual information. terns that Paulien Oltheten distinguishes, We are provoked to stop taking for granted each act as a part for the whole to represent the photographic omnipresence. Paulien one and the same image, a Gesamtbild of Oltheten makes us more aware of the way humanity/humaneness. Her ‘theory of the we relate to the material world and to street’, as her first publication also was each other on a daily basis, of our patterns called, transforms itself into an all-round of perception, experience and behaviour – metaphor for human existence. Her visual and to call it all into question. Sometimes theory doesn’t seem to require a particular recognizable, sometimes surprising, but argumentative arrangement to be valid; it never condemning. • is revealing anyway. The automatism of

selected by Caroline von Courten Across the world in the past training to be a ceramicist five years, photographic in the early 20th century higher education has might have been! I am only been shaped by the tough half joking� here – and the decisions that photographic serioust side of my fantasy educators have made scenario is questioning what about abandoning schools’s photographic education increasingly empty and could be if you centred on ignored wet dark rooms for photography as a subject the air-conditionedfe banks and a discipline rather than of calibrated computer a rarefied area within the screens and the large, colour- increasing, ever-changing saturated-pigment printers. expanse of creative In retrospect, given what technologies to which photographic education faces photographic education in the next five years, college does not necessarily or MAN i fe s t and universities have only just even meaningfully have a reached the starting blocks on relationship. a course of unexpected round- MANabouti turns. At the same time, I write as a curator who has Of course we didn't just spent most of her working MANifesto suddenly arrive at this life in cultural institutions

moment of change. Gradually founded by those ambitious, � n future educ A �N future over the past fifteen years, intellectually greedy, socially the notion of photography enterprising Victorians who educAtioN as contemporary art and mapped creativity and what it therefore means societal improvement�N onto to be a photographer has the fluid expanse of scientific by cast its seductive web over and artistic innovation. I’m photographic education. At excited for the coexistence ChArl�tte the same time, the increasing rather than the differentiation polarisation of both the of categories of creativity C�tt�N techniques and ambitions and what photographic of artist-photographers education can be if we think on one side and all of us of it as combined with that quotidian image-makers of, for example, curating, and image-users on the design, and computer science other, effects the definition within higher education.

of photography education. Photography will remain as t i o N Equally, every region has an accelerated and relevant its own 30-year history of human creative endeavour if photographic practice and it stays as a relevant way of education, mitigated by its seeing and communicating. • markets, politics, press and educational philosophies. No country’s cultural history or its particular battle to legitimise photographic practice as art FUTUREseems now to guarantee a more or less resonant position in these global industries of art and image-making.

One option for photography education is to become an even more rarefied and specific form of education – rather like what I imagine ION EDUCAT171 MANifesto �N future � educAtiofeN st by MANAdaim Broomberg & OLIVER �N CHANARIN

FUTUREi o N N e x t ge erat ION EDUCAT 172

29 what's next? 29 what's next? 29 foam magazine # foam foam magazine #

174174 visualization methods. methods. visualization to Lev Manovich’s central also is online circulate that images of evergrowing archive and enormous the How with tonext. deal expected be can steps what world shares and the representing literally Google of implications the interview his in Advocate,ogy examines Google’s Technol- Chief T. Jones, Michael section. this in addressed innovations are these behind visionary the and us for store in vations inno- technical the of Some aesthetic. image newin a result that offs spin- of series entire an motion into set well as as images, creating ways other of duce intro- New technologies photography. of practice have artistic the on byand can extension they have had impact the we realise tions, innova- technological follows periodthat the In 175 175 (photographic) practice. (photographic) to our to applied be framework visionary apossible as seen be could Next? What’s to reply in statement personal Fontcuberta’s Joan epilogue, As life. creative anew photo-graphy analogue given instant has which Project, sible Impos- The behind vision the with contrasts This work with. we currently cameras the of ahead light-years already is technology camera that shows corners, around photograph can that inventor acamera of co- and Storytelling Future for Center the of director the also is Raskar,Ramesh who by led Lab, Media the of activities search re- the on article An

introduction technology matters chapter technology introduction at theCamera MIT Media Culture Lab

Total

by Arthur Ou technology matters technology Vision

The compulsion to replicate our of the camera obscura gave hints front of their prototypical cameras perceptual experiences is likely of the many possibilities of photo were going to look like. Prior to their much older than the first prehistoric graphic seeing, finally leading to breakthroughs, the transformed cave paintings – these first pictures the first arrested photographic universe in the photographic realm gave the viewer an alternate version images. For those earliest of photo could only have existed in their of the experience of seeing animals graphs, the photographers – or more imaginations. They had a great that were not actually there, and accurately, inventors, scientists, impulse to transform vision into a they also became a means to share and physicists – such as Henry Fox permanent record. And what was the experience of seeing with others. Talbot and Nicéphore Niépce had revealed through their experiments That was some 30,000 years ago. no way of knowing on certain baffled and astonished them, and From then on, after many millennia, terms what the subjects and the of course to the countless number the proto-photographic discoveries selections of the world placed in of photographers thereafter.

176 total vision

› line line haps haps denced by pulsion – to – pulsion nologies, nologies, cameras graphic graphic seeing in the 177 graphic graphic compulsion still sible in all of the nuanced the of all in sible perbly rendering our perceptual perceptual our rendering perbly graphic image and the camera, from from image camera, graphic and the territories territories of photo history. its past of entirety Institute Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, has been instrumental in advancing these paradigm shifts, charting unprecedented human sight. Photography, as human sight. it Photography, is being considered and explored by Raskar, the Ramesh Camera by lead group research Culture Massachusetts the at professor associate an fullest extent pos extent fullest facets, and exceeding the limitations of gets gets closer to the original com replicate our perceptual experience in the mobile phones, mobile to the phones, geographic tracking a photograph ascribed image files, data to is no longer a mere transcription of the light registered or recorded, but per the the pervasive networked archive of on on cameras built-in by made many images, direct direct optical as recordings, evi the rapidly expanding definition of the photo life. Yet, our photo Yet, life. burns desiring incessantly, to go beyond In the present realm, with the advances of digital imaging tech su of capable contemporary in commonplace now are reality Interview with Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar by Arthur Ou

Arthur Ou: Could you please talk about the now. It’s very similar to the beginning of television, philosophy of your research group, Camera when the first televised broadcasts were replays of Culture? I know that one of the main goals of theatre shows, allowing the viewer to experience the your research is to reinvent the camera. For shows whenever and wherever he or she wanted. But almost the entirety of its history photography clearly the medium of TV has evolved into a completely has taken the human eye as a model, but you and different storytelling medium. your research team are trying to break from those conventions to find new ways of seeing and I think that limited use of the possibilities is the same rendering the world. with digital photography – it is still doing what film photography was capable of doing, except for the fact Ramesh Raskar: From the beginning, the motivation that it’s much faster and cheaper. But beyond that they has been to make cameras that can see as well as the are not fundamentally different. The art of photography human eye can see. But in reality photography is very has not changed at all with digital photography. It’s much about finding ways to see differently, to go beyond just become easier and more efficient. So far, the way the human eye. Photographers always choose amazing we have solved the problem of capturing and sharing zooms, or very wide perspectives, or extreme angles, visual information is to make the photograph compat-

technology matters technology for example. The most striking photographs show what ible with what the human eye sees. We try to mimic a the human eye does not see. I think photographers are lens that behaves like the cornea, and then we have a always trying to surpass their own experiences, making detector that mimics the retina – and that’s the end of the scene hyper-realistic, emphasizing things, etc. It has the story, that’s our image. We have solved this problem always been about creating a meaningful abstraction of by reproducing what the eye sees. This is great for a the world, as the photographer wants to tell, or convey direct view. But if we want to manipulate that, and if to the viewer. we want to understand the world and do something additional with the photos, this model simply doesn’t Once camera makers can realize the users’ ambitions, work. We need to go beyond just mimicking what the they will start providing completely new functionalities human eye can see. We’re going to see if we can push to their cameras. Right now they are just stuck on the the envelope of what we can dream. idea that a camera should have something similar to the human eye – that they should have a lens, film or Can you talk about the ways that the Camera a sensor, aperture, exposure time, etc. This has been Culture group has tried to break from these exist- photography as we have known it for the most part. ing conventions of photography? The very first digital camera, the DCS-100 developed in 1991/92, which was a joint venture by Kodak and In the future of photography and digital imaging I Nikon, was basically a 35mm film camera outfitted think that there are three distinct stages: epsilon photo with a digital sensor and a processing unit – it even graphy, coded photography and essence photography. had the film cartridge compartment if you open it up. Camera Culture is working within these three realms. I think that we are still locked into a world of film-like How simply do you want to photographically capture photography, even though cameras are mostly digital the essence of an experience? When cameras were in-

178 vented, they immediately made photorealistic painting synthesize a new picture based on the ten minutes I obsolete. Because there was no longer a need to draw spent with you rather than the singular moment from or paint something that can be photographed. I think a conventional photograph. The question becomes: can that very soon we are going to reach a saturation point we create cameras and software so that, instead of a in terms of photography that will lead to the inven- photo, we get an emotive artistic rendering? tion of a new form of visual art that will make today’s cameras obsolete. One of the many research projects in the Camera Culture group is developing technologies to Because the only things that cameras capture is pho- ‘see around corners,’ can you talk about that tons, they don’t really capture the essence of the scene. project? Even with our eyes, we don’t really see with our eyes – we sense with our eyes but we see with our brains. We have been taught a photo is taken within the line Right now the camera seems to be doing both: it’s re- of sight; but it seems we’re able to see beyond line of cording and seeing at the same time. I think that this sight, based on echo. The way my voice echoes in this becomes one of our main challenges. For example if I room is different with the door open than if it’s closed. want to record experience of having an amazing meal By doing an analysis of that echo, we can tell what’s or being at the beach or taking a rollercoaster ride, just around the door. there is simply no camera that can record that. So our aim is to create completely new forms of devices, We have developed femto photography, where we are software, and techniques that respond to this array of using lasers that have a duration of a few femtoseconds experiences. – that’s 10-15 seconds (nano, pico, femto). If there is an extremely accurate synchronization between the Let’s say I create a picture of you with a regular camera flash and a very fast sensor, which is also working in and also a thermo-light camera. With the thermal the picoseconds range, we can analyze and compute total vision camera I can see the blood veins, and how much blood what’s around the corner. We have done some initial there is in different parts of your face. With that data experiments, and it’s very promising. When we can see I can then figure out whether you are smiling or smirk- beyond the line of sight, we are not breaking any laws ing. The camera would record all information and of physics – so far. ›

179 The photograph of tomorrow will not just be recorded, it will be computed.

Lastly, what do you envision the camera of the future to be like?

Maybe all a consumer wants is a big black box with a big button, with no lenses, no sensors, and no flashes. If I am in Times Square or at the Eiffel Tower, it’s really debatable whether I should take that picture, because lots of people before me have taken that picture. So all I want is when I release the shutter, I go online and trawl Flickr and retrieve an image taken in the right direction at about the right time of day and season. I can guarantee, with a few minutes of operation, it is going to be much better than any image I can take. There are so many good pictures out there of so many great places, a person has to make the decision whether it’s worth investing money and time to take that photo, because it’s never going to look like that photo on Flickr.

We might be approaching the time when we have

technology matters technology completely saturated the space of all the photos we can take. The only important data is the people we care about – how they look that day, and so on. If I’m standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and I take a picture, I don’t really care about how the Eiffel Tower looks. I don’t need a camera that captures the tower well. All I really care about is if my kid or my wife looks right in that picture. So all I want is the data that ignores most of the pixels and only focuses on pixels I care about. Even then, I probably have a much better picture of my daughter and my wife somewhere in my photo collection. So they don’t have to be dressed the best and be in the best mood, and my daughter doesn’t have to smile at the right moment. All that information is already available.

We don’t know how many of these wishes will come true. Lots of smart people around the world are thinking about it. We’ll see many of these technologies in the next five to ten years; but we can be sure computational photography will be there. The photograph of tomorrow will not just be recorded, it will be computed. •

180 The bold visions of Edwin H. Land, the inventor and founder of Polaroid, took the photographic world by storm from the first public The presentation of analogue instant photography in Rebirth 1947. Sixty-one years after his first public presentation and the ideas and visions of Future of this mastermind were still Analogue Instant Photography “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.” — Edwin H. Land strong enough to inspire the founders of The Impossible Project.

Despite the fateful decision of the huge Polaroid corporation Land founded to discontinue production of its analogue instant film materials in 2008, despite the unavailability 181 of many components of the original Polaroid film formula and despite many people shaking their head in bewilderment when learning about The Impossible Project’s ambition to make new instant materials, tireless work started in October 2008. The concrete aim was to save analogue instant photography from extinction, to keep one of the most legendary photographic inventions alive by re- inventing instant film and propelling it into the 21st century. technology matters Dr. Florian Kaps, the founder of Impossible, refused to accept that analogue instant photography had become obsolete: too complicated, too expensive, too messy, too cumbersome compared to digital photography. But these maverick characteristics are precisely the unique 182 features that make ana- components that were logue instant photography mostly no longer available irreplaceable. Despite or whose sale had been the digital revolution, banned. Impossible had or indeed because of it, to bake a cake without there will always be space flour and eggs. Various and future of analogue instant photography the rebirth for analogue instant chemicals in the film paste photography. The one had to be substituted, new makes you mourn the manufacturers for the absence of the other, so the negative and positive of the basis for inspirational co- film had to be contacted existence is guaranteed. and commissioned Bursting with enthusiasm (Impossible found and with a huge wealth of excellent partners in Ilford Photo and InovisCoat), a new battery to power each film cassette had to be developed and manufactured (the first few thousand Impossible films were powered by original Polaroid batteries; Impossible film cartridges now contain an improved knowhow, a select team of and highly sophisticated former Polaroid employees battery developed and started to develop an produced by HCB instant film formula for the SuperPower, which can be 21st century. The 29-year- returned to Impossible and old Polaroid recipe required will be re-used). Finally, 183 All images are part of the project & exhibition create images on PX 680 Color Shade FF film Long, Chloe Aftel, Dustin Yager, John Reuter, Outside the Lines (on show at Impossible expressing their personal interpretation of Leah Reich, Max Wanger, Parker Fitzgerald, Project Space NYC, 29 September 2011 - 31 the phrase 'Outside The Lines'. The Ritchard Ton, Rommel Pecson, Sol Allen, Sol January 2012). The Impossible Project photographers involved are Adam Goldberg, Exposure, Toby Hancock. challenged 14 outstanding photographers to Andrea Jenkins, Benjamin Shuster, Brandon

century. ∞ century. st the smelly and quirky tools tools quirky and smelly the and touch to us allow that ac- world, the comprehend than ever. value more quire an instant the artIn world, an image represents work, irreplaceable of piece its unique glory, radiant in appreciated by artists and photographersworldwide. International artists Araki, including Nobuyoshi MaryStefanie Schneider, EJ Camp, Ellen Mark, Ryan David Levinthal and already McGinley have the new Impossible used Shade and Color Silver Shade film materials, to contributingthe results exhibitions global several Tokyo, York, in New Berlin and Manchester, them, with Together Arles. the Impossible changes and of photography world tangibility as variety, keeps creativity as analogue well the 21 in alive 184

unique and irreplaceable, unique and irreplaceable, . The tangible, tangible, The . value special unreal, real things regain a real unreal, more and more virtualmore and more and which things are becoming which In a digitalized world, in In a digitalizedworld, and unprecedented results. possibilities, fresh features possibilities, a new, broad range of a new, Impossible films offer traditional Polaroid film, film, traditional Polaroid the highly standardized the highly standardized traditional limits. Unlike traditional limits. photography beyond all photography beyond pushing analogue instant pushing analogue seen characteristics, seen characteristics, and never-before- of outstanding, unique of outstanding, films produce originals These Impossible instant These Impossible cameras in early 2010. cameras films for vintage Polaroid vintage films for production of new instant of new instant production components, and started components, problematic or unavailable unavailable or problematic for replacing and upgrading for replacing came up with new solutions solutions new with up came this small team of experts team small this technology matters technology a Goo g

Interview with a googled Michael led Google’s Chief Technology Advocate future T. Jones by Jörg Colberg future 185 technology matters come to embrace photography to communicate to photography embrace to come images to Street View photography. In these ways we’ve Street the View. matching by orientation We their find inside museums. The pictures at Panoramio are also in use for movingfrom evenand cars, carts push bicycles Google Street View, which are images taken robotically on a place, you see the pictures taken there. We started tures in Google Maps and Earth. Now, when you click a website of geo-located pictures. We’ve placed those pic- that picture is in Paris on a map. We bought Panoramio – takes a picture of the Eiffel Tower, theright place to find into Google Maps. We soon realized that when a person images lateral street-level and oblique,vertical, duced imagery.satellite and airplane of mosaic Weintro- also from the because start it is a photograph of the Earth, a images about been has Earth days.Google early from and our customers. We have had Google Image Google Search for focus natural a and information world’s the of part powerfulpowerful. a are are Images They intodeep this? What was the reason for that? ing matching existing images. How did you get so various ways you can search for images, includ- actually it is. There is Google Earth and there are photography,in involvedbut heavily company a as Google of think don’t probably People working with images and having images relate to all these different ideas thatGoogle had to make somethingreally,is really hard. I’m intriguedby now, and finding images and matching them to webthe on photographsof literallybillions are there and because interesting very them images mapping these taking of idea the find I places with confidencebefore they travel. loci, thesense of place, so thateveryone can know new Google andimages/photography? Google of future the as see you do what but disclose can you much howknowdon’t I going? this is other images and to our locations useful. Where

genus 186 our planetouryouhave encoded, likelymorenextthethe tions, and so on. That’s interesting because the more of photographer must have been, lens focal length, distor- the where compute the can of weTrevi Fountain,and TreviFountainmatched becanit in withpicturesour the has that picture new any that is means that What the Trevi Fountain is very accurately, within millimeters. where know weStreet vehicle.So the View of pictures different several from this know vehicle.we View And the orientation of it compared to the path of the Street Fountainimage weknow becausewhereis it weknow pictures are geo-located very carefully. If we see a Trevi Street Google View example Forlocated. already are The other development is that many online photographs Pictures aregoing to beinherentlygeo-coded. to get pictures that are already at places. That’s a trend. lotof work toput pictures at places, but we’restarting place.’a atof‘picture in.thinkNowwe We’vea done Probably it wasn’t important to him what valley he was latitude. and longitude down write didn’t He picture. go back and find where Ansel Adams took a particular becoming common. That’s really different than to trying do that, but the ability to do so automatically is quickly andcan tag theimage withalocation. Not all mobiles in your mobile phone, the phone knows where you are camera the with image an take you If aware. location becoming are images people’s of sources the First, and take a picture, could they find it again? it few find Those they picture,could a take and do on a vacation, where they walk down a Venetian alley If you think of the kind of photography someone might the world ofimages. find the location as, let’s say, 123 Main Street just from It could take a picture, send it to Google, and we would were if you were lost and you didn’t have a GPS device. location device. Thus, a camera could tell you where you like that, it also means that the camera can be used as a things or it, for search you map, have a on it show we picture somebody takes can be matched. So not only can their judgment when add they to images. our The curator is The the artist

Every pixel in every image people share adds permanently to human knowledge in a way that will span generations.

flowers in a courtyard in a shadowy alley... But we’re What this means is that we’re living in an in- getting close to the point where we have enough pictures creasingly recorded world. But there are growing that we can instantly geo-locate that picture and say ‘You concerns about privacy and about the amount were exactly at this location, looking that way.’ of recording we’re doing or that is being done. a googled Maybe we don’t even really know that our phone We have an image-understanding product called has a GPS device and that we record where we Google Goggles. It runs on mobile phones. It lets you are. Maybe we don’t want that information to take a picture, and then it tries to recognize what’s be distributed. I’m sure Google is thinking about going on in the picture. If you take a picture of words it privacy issues, too. What’s your take on this? runs optical character recognition to understand those words and then it can offer to translate; if it is a Sudoku Privacy is important. Historically, it’s an issue tied to puzzle, it can solve it for you. As a traveler who doesn’t photography. Think about taking a picture of people kiss- speak every language, that is really helpful. ing. It’s a private moment but your photograph makes future it a permanent public moment. As a photographer, a Geo-coded pictures make Google Goggles smarter. You street photographer or a photojournalist, there’s a lot take a picture and we can tell you where it is: that’s this of psychological drama around things like that. It is an particular church, and we know from, say, looking up old issue changed by the internet, where things make it in Wikipedia when it was built, or we know when it was online easily but cannot easily be forgotten. This issue damaged, how it was rebuilt, the names of the different is bigger than Google and bigger than photography. If people involved. You can search the world by taking a you post something as an eight-year-old or a twelve- picture of it. That is important. year-old on Facebook and then later on, you want to be Chancellor of Germany or a US Supreme Court Another possibility will be to reconstruct in the compu- judge it might happen that you said something when you ter the physical 3D geometry of the world. There may were eight that you’ll regret when you’re fifty-eight. Our be millions of photographs of the Eiffel Tower. Photo- embarrassing childhoods have been forgotten. But for graphs of every part – if not by tourists in front then by children of today, when they’re our age, their mistakes a maintenance worker inside or from a news helicopter will still be on YouTube and Facebook. up above. From those pictures it is possible to infer the exact shape of the Eiffel Tower. The result is an accu- This is like living somewhere small. There are a few hun- rate computer model of Earth where everything is built dred people and everybody knows everybody’s business. by the activity of people going about their business and You can’t escape it. Everybody knows everybody. It’s not taking pictures. People on vacation, taking a picture, that they’re spying on you, its just that everything you do might not know they’re completing the Eiffel Tower or in a small town is remembered. That little-village feeling guess that every pixel in every image they share adds is coming to the whole world because our lives are being permanently to human knowledge in a way that will recorded, remembered, and indexed. I like to think of span generations. Of course, the building changes with privacy this way: What kind of society does the world want? time so that tells us when the picture was taken. If the What rules or behaviors create and protect that society picture matches 1934 Warsaw, Poland, then it was a or defend transgressions against it? Certainly, Google pre-war photograph. You know this just because of the and presumably every other company will obey whatever picture, not from any other information. This is hap- those rules are, but now there are few rules and societies pening more and more. Soon it will be ordinary. have yet to really know what they aspire to. › 187 technology matters real question. we’velost?’privacy already the recreate to the is That more about ‘Are there any areas of life where we need it’s think I privacy?’ about ‘What of question thetical hypo the it’snot that way a such in emerging cally issues are already These happening privacy or techni - the people. all track basically,could youSo cars. the all by time all the recorded gets also street in the everybody then in case of an accident. Once you’re doing that for cars that all cars will have high-speed recording of all events do to little costs it as lives.soon their As record will people will share with the police or Google, but people that saying not keyed.I’m biologically or protected super-password be will they lives.Maybe our record and camera video a wear to norm the become will It in stores with security cameras or with CCTV cameras. that; it’s not even a question to me. It already happens see what that was. I am certain that most people will do thing interesting ever happens you can scroll back and that takes pictures all the time all around you. If some- camera in your glasses or in your hat or somewhere else instead.cameras video but You’llmore video a have and natural step is that people won’t cameras anycarry obvious growing,another cameras little of quality the and again, isolated be to refusing and online coming of internet, the adopting people of pace rapid Speed relates to the privacy issue. If you think about the if youif were lost and youand didn’t have could tell you a G where you were A camera A camera P S device. people - 188 New York was: Is it art? Which is more a philosophi- a New more is art? YorkWhich it Is was: we talked about at the New School of Photography in we expected, we know we have succeeded. A question them. Whenever we see our projects used beyond what from benefit and enjoy people will that hope the with our work. We technologies pursue and buildproducts It’s a pleasure. It’s wonderful when people respond to kind of art? What are your – or Google’s – thoughts about this of those even got a World Press Photography nod. One art.of Street bodies createViewtoGoogle View a little bit. I’m sure you’ve seen artists Street Google to back go to wantunrelated.I completelythat’s question a you ask me Let your house. outside none – privacy of level different a with one might make for a better society, but it wherever go.they and good be might reason The very graphed constantly by the police or by security cameras photo being are people of Millions change. a That’s police. I didn’t mind that exactly, but I know that’s true. London by time whole the photographed was I there I just arrived from London, and I know that while I was memorable. and evocative,emotional, inspiring, is that result a produce and images our to judgment their add they when curated.artist are the they is when curator The capture moments fantastic in human lives become art camera taking pictures isn’t art. Those few images that cal question than a practical one. But to me, a robotic

certainly creates certainly using using • How can we efficiently explore massive digital image collections like the 167,000 images on Flickr’s Art Now group to ask interesting questions?

How to See how to see 1,000,000 images? 1,000,000 Images?

The basic method used by media researchers when the amounts of media being relatively small – see all images or video, notice patterns, and interpret them – no longer works.

by Lev Manovich

189 technology matters technology

190 How to Work with Massive Image access single media items at a time at a limited range of Collections? speeds. This went hand in hand with the organization Early 21st century humanities scholars, critics and of media distribution: record and video stores, libraries, curators have access to unprecedented amounts of television and radio broadcasters all only make avail- visual media – more than they can possibly study, able a few items at a time. At the same time, hierarchi- let alone simply watch, or even search. A number of cal classification systems used in library catalogues and interconnected developments which took place be- rooms encouraged the users to access a collection in tween 1990 and 2010 – digitization of many analogue ways defined by classification schemes, as opposed to media collections, the rise of user-generated content browsing at random. When you looked through a card and social media, the adoption of the web as media dis- catalogue, or physically walked from shelf to shelf, you tribution platform, and globalization which increased were following a classification based on subjects, with the number of agents and institutions producing media books organized by author names inside each subject around the world – led to an exponential increase in the category. Thus, although a single book itself supported quantity of media while simultaneously making it much random access, the larger structures in which books easier to find, share, teach with, and research. Millions and other media objects were organized did not. of hours of television programs already digitized by various national libraries and media museums, four Together, these distribution and classification systems million pages of digitized U.S. newspaper pages from encouraged 20th century media researchers to decide

1836 to 1922 (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov), 150 billion beforehand what media items to study. A researcher how to see 1,000,000 images? snapshots of web pages captured from 1996 (www. usually started with a particular person (a filmmaker, archive.org), and trillions of videos on YouTube and a photographer, etc.) or a particular subject category photographs on Facebook and numerous other media (for example, ‘1960s experimental American films’.) In sources are waiting to be ‘digged’ into. doing that, a researcher could be said to move down the hierarchy of information in a catalogue and then How can we efficiently explore massive digital select a particular level as the subject of her project: image collections to ask interesting questions? The cinema > American cinema > American experimen- examples of such collections are 167,000 images on tal film > American experimental film of the 1960s. Art Now Flickr gallery, or 176,000 Farm Security The more adventurous would add new branches to the Administration/Office of War Information photographs categorical tree; most were satisfied with contributing taken between 1935 and 1944 and digitized by Library individual leaves (articles and books). of Congress. How can we work with such image sets? The basic method used by media researchers Unfortunately, the current standard in media access – when the amounts of media being relatively small – computer search – does not take us out of this paradigm. see all images or video, notice patterns, and interpret Search interface is an empty box waiting for you to type them – no longer works. something. Before you click on the search button you have to decide what keywords and phrases to search Given the size of typical contemporary digital media for. So while the search brings a dramatic increase in collections, simply seeing what’s inside them is speed of access, its deep assumption (which we may be impossible even before we begin formulating questions able to trace back to its origins in 1950s ‘information and hypotheses and selecting samples for closer analysis. retrieval’) is that you know beforehand something about Although it may appear that the reasons for this are the the collection worth exploring further. limitations of human vision and human information processing, I think that it is actually the fault of current To put this another way: search assumes that you want interface designs. Popular interfaces for accessing to find a needle in a haystack of information. It does not digital media collections such as list, image gallery, allow you to see the shape of the haystack. If you could, and image strip do not allow us to see the contents of a it would give your ideas of what else there is worth seek- whole collection. These interfaces usually only display ing, beside the needle you originally had in mind. Search a few items at a time, regardless of whether you are in also does not reveal where all different needles in the a browsing mode, or in a search mode. Because we are which sessions, gameplay the sequence of Hearts II everyvideogame Kingdom 6 seconds from Japanese the from taken Frames haystack are situated, i.e. it does not show how particu- not able to see a collection as a whole, we can’t compare ↗ frames). (22,4999 gameplay of hours 62.5 visualization represents This end. to beginning the game from of traversal a full constitute Manovich) (with Lev William Huber visualization: and Game recording lar data objects or subsets are related to the complete sets of images or videos to each other, notice patterns of data. Using search is like looking at a pointillist painting change over time, or understand parts of the collection at a close range and only seeing colour dots, without in relation to the whole. being able to zoom out to see the shapes.

Against Search: How to Look without The hypertext paradigm which defines the World Wide Knowing What You Want to Find? Web is also limited: it allows navigation around the web The popular media access technologies of the 19th and of pages according to the links defined by others, as 20th century – slide lanterns, film projectors, Moviola opposed to moving in any direction. This is consistent and Steenbeck, record players, audio and video tape with the original vision of hypertext as articulated by recorders, VCR, DVD players, etc. – were designed to Vannevar Bush in 1945: a way for a researcher to create 191 Using the usual search tool is like looking at a pointillist painting at a close range, without being able to zoom out to see the shapes.

‘trails through massive scientific information and for Media Visualization others be able to follow his traces later.’ The limitations of the typical interfaces for online media collections also hold for interfaces for desktop and Based on my informal review of some of the largest mobile applications for media viewing, cataloguing, and online institutional media collections available today editing, and media hosting sites. Like dedicated online such as europeana.org, archive.org, U.S. Library of collection sites, media managers and hosting sites allow Congress digital collections, and artstor.org, a typical users to browse and search images and video, display- interface offered to the users allows browsing through ing the results in various formats. Their usefulness as a collection linearly or by hierarchical categories and research tools, however, is quite limited. Desktop ap- subject tags, and searching using metadata recorded plications such as iPhoto, Picasa, and Adobe Bridge, for media objects. In all cases, the categories, tags, and and image sharing sites such as Flickr and Photobucket metadata were input by the archivists (none of the sites can only show images in a few fixed formats – typically I reviewed offered user-generated tags.) As a result, a two-dimensional grid, a linear strip, a slide show, when a user accesses institutional media collections via and, in some cases, a map view (photos superimposed their websites, she can only move along a fixed number on the world map). Images are usually sorted by up- of trajectories defined by the taxonomy of the collection load dates; to display photos in a new order, a user and types of metadata used in describing the data. has to invest time in adding new metadata to all of them. She can’t automatically organize images by their In contrast, when you observe a physical scene directly visual properties or by semantic relationships, compare with your eyes, you can look anywhere in any order. This collections which may have hundreds of thousands of allows you to quickly notice a variety of patterns, struc- images to each other, or use information visualization tures and relations. Imagine, for example, turning the techniques to explore patterns across image sets. corner on a city street and taking in the view of the open technology matters technology square, with passersby, cafes, cars, trees, advertising, Graphing and visualization tools that are available in store displays, and all other elements. You can quickly Google Docs, Excel, Tableau, Many Eyes and other detect and follow a multitude of dynamically chang- graphing and spreadsheet software do offer a range of ing patterns based on visual and semantic information: visualization techniques designed to reveal patterns in cars moving in parallel lines, house painted in similar data. But these tools too have their own limitations. A colours, people who move along their own trajectories key principle, which underlies the creation of graphs and people talking to each other, unusual faces, shop and information visualizations, is the representation windows which stand out from the rest, etc. of data using points, bars, lines, and similar graphi- cal primitives. This principle has remained unchanged We need similar techniques which would allow us to from the earliest statistical graphics of the early 19th Media visualization of 1,074,790 manga pages © Lev Manovich and Jeremy Jeremy and Manovich manga pages © Lev 1,074,790 visualization of Media observe vast ‘media universes’ and quickly detect all century to contemporary interactive visualization soft- ↘ on iMac Rendered 44,000 pixels. x 44,000 visualization size: Original 2010. Douglass, Initiative. Studies Software softwareby developed using ImagePlot interesting patterns. These techniques have to operate ware which can work with large data sets. Although with speeds many times faster than the normal play- such representations make clear the relationships in back speed (in the case of time-based media.) Or, to a data set, they also hide the objects behind the data use an example of still images, I should be able to see from the user. While this is perfectly acceptable for important information in one million photographs in many types of data, in the case of images and video it the same time it takes me to see a single image. These becomes a serious problem. For instance, a 2D scatter techniques have to compress massive media universes plot which shows a distribution of grades in a class into smaller observable media ‘landscapes’ compatible with each student represented as a point serves its with the human information processing capacity, while purpose, but the same type of plot representing the at the same time keeping enough of the details from the stylistic patterns over the course of an artist’s career original images, video, audio or interactive experiences via points has more limited use if we can’t see the im- to enable the study of the subtle patterns in the data. ages of the artworks. 192 how to see 1,000,000 images?

193 Since 2008, my Software Studies Initiative has been de- the highest contrast are on the right, while pages with veloping visual techniques that combine the strengths the least contrast are on the left. In between these four of media viewing applications, graphing and visualiza- extremes, we find every possible stylistic variation. tion applications. Like the latter, they create graphs to show relationships and patterns in a data set. However, Media visualization can be formally defined as creating while plot making software can only display data as new visual representations from the visual objects in a points, lines or other graphic primitives, our software collection. In the case of a collection containing single can show all the images in a collection superimposed images (for instance, the 1930s WPA photographs col- on a graph. We call this method media visualization. lection from Library of Congress), media visualization Typical information visualization involves first trans- involves displaying all images, or their parts, organized lating the world into numbers and then visualizing in a variety of configurations according to their meta- relations between these numbers. In contrast, media data (dates, places, authors), content properties (for visualization translates a set of images into a new visual example, presence of faces), and/or visual properties. representation which can reveal patterns in the images. In short, pictures are translated into pictures. Our media visualization techniques can be used independently, or in combination with digital image Two visualizations of the same data set presented on this processing. Digital image processing is conceptually and the previous page illustrate the differences between similar to automatic analysis of texts already widely infovis (information visualization) and mediavis (media used in digital humanities. Text analysis involves visualization). Both visualizations use familiar scatter automatic extracting various statistics about the plot technique; however the first visualizaion (p.193) content of each text in a collection such as word usage adds images on top of the points. The below visualiza- frequencies, their lengths, and their positions, sentence tion shows the distribution of the data; the other allows lengths, noun and verb usage frequencies, etc. These us to understand what is behind the points. statistics (referred in computer science as ‘features’) are then used to study the patterns in a single text, The data for these visualizations are 1,074,790 manga relationships between texts, literary genres, etc. (Japanese comics) pages. The visualization below represents each page as a point. The visualizations Similarly, we can use digital image processing to on the previous page (p. 193) use the scaled copies calculate statistics of various visual properties of of the pages instead of the points. To produce these images: average brightness and saturation, the number

visualizations, we have measured a number of visual Each pages. comic) (Japanese manga 1,074,790 of visualization Information and the properties of shapes, the number of edges

characteristics of each page: contrast, number of ↖ = entropy. Y-axis deviation. = standard X-axis as a point. page is represented and their orientations, key colours, and so on. These lines, texture properties, etc. We then use one of the features can be then used for similar investigations – measurements to position the data on X-axis, while for example, the analysis of visual differences between another measurement is used to position data on Y-axis. news photographs in different magazines or between This method allows us to organize images according news photographs in different countries, the changes to their visual characteristics along two dimensions. In in visual style over the career of a photographer, or the technology matters technology this visualization, the pages in the bottom part of the evolution of news photography in general over the 20th visualization are the most graphic and have the least century. We can also use them in a more basic way – for amount of detail and texture. The pages in the upper the initial exploration of any large image collection. • right have lots of detail and texture. The pages with

194

Cia de Foto Caixa de Sapato

The appearance of Cia de Foto in Brazilian In the series Caixa de Sapato (Shoe Box) photography in the last decade brought the collective transits from the family with it discussions that helped us to reflect private world to the public sphere with upon taboos so far considered untouchable. sensibility. Photographing without dogma The three photographers of the collective and censorship, the body of work laid a created proper ethics and aesthetics, vigorous poetic on the familiar routine causing endless polemics and then, a great and results in a universal code. In Caixa number of followers in Brazil and abroad. de Sapato, in which video format reaches its best narrative, the cycles of life and Some of the group beliefs are not to sign the effective liaisons that grow among their works individually and aggregate people who live or visit the authors’ houses references of publicity and movies to the blossom into a vital force of unique beauty. photodocumentaryism, breaking the Caixa de Sapato enables us to realize that compromise to realism and expanding the the most compulsive beauty is enclosed in reportage beyond the limits of fiction. Even what we insist in daily ignoring. Hopefully keeping the field of reportage, the themes photography in the future may teach us, should have priority over the author. Cia de surrounded by technological evolution, to Foto incorporate the idea that subjectivity look more humanistically and intensely at and the perception of who relates the fact our surroundings. • has forcefully to transpire on the surface of the image. This way they created an aesthetic that dialogues with many authors of photography history as well as with painting tradition in a profound and delicate study of light. These visual metaphors urge the viewer to try to find a more efficient way of mechanical devolution of the appearance of the real, as well as unique moments of photographic ecstasy.

selected by Eder Chiodetto JoAN What is commonly understood as art has become a mere genre of culture, a genre aimed at the production of artis tic merchandise and ruled by the laws of the marketplace and the entertainment industry. It is a genre in the way that any other cultural form such as design, fashion, film, advertising, or the circus might be.

There is another art which doesn’t draw the spotlight or walk the red carpet but which, from the most clandestine dissidence, proposes to fight the laws of the marketplace and the entertainment industry at precisely the same time as it reinvents itself as art. It’s an art which rejects the splendour of the museums and biennials and any other efforts at subjugation. I want in fact only to talk of the future of this type of confrontational guerrilla art because the social chronicles and cultural anthropologists already joan fontcuberta take care of the other.

F o We live in a world saturated with images: we live in the image and the image lives in us and makes us live. Since McLuhan in the 1960s, the preponderant role of the mass media has been confirmed and the iconosphere can be considered the model of the global village. What change has brought now is not the immersion in new communica tion frameworks (digital formats, internet, social networks) but the degree to which this extraordinary flow of images is found accessible to everyone.

N We are therefore passing through an age of access. It is an era that crowns a process of secularization of the visual experience: the image ceases to be the domain of magi cians, artists, specialists or professionals. We all produce images as a natural way of interacting with others. On the other hand, the consolidation of new work and be havioural habits (such as cloud computing) will catalyze t cu many more dynamic cultural stages on a large scale (cloud imaging, cloud living).

This situation implies substantial changes for photo graphy and the image in general that in the near and medium term will only increase. ›

bertA 203 encourage recycling. will penalize saturation and an ecology of the visual which On the artist’s responsibility: 3 tent of the image. will prevail over the con - management of the image the circulation and On the function of images: 4

This9On the experience will of art: creative practices which accustom us to dispossession will be privileged: it is better beto share than to own.its

foam magazine #29 what's next? decalogue:

anonymities and orphan works). creation, interactivity, strategic (co - authorship, collaborative tion of the models authorship of the author and reformu we will find greater camouflage On the dialectic of subject: 6 7 On the dialectic of social: in overcoming further advances private the between tension the and the public. la

1On the role of the artist: no longer a case of producing works but of prescribing meanings.

204 and the boring. boring. the and to the solemn aspects and less given to the ludic more play will be On art’s horizon: 8

2On the artist’s behaviour: the artist merges with the curator, with the collector, with the teacher, with the art historian, with the theorist... (all facets of art have become chameleon like and authorial). In short, it is a matter of greeting a joan fontcuberta new visual culture able to prepare us for resistance, which trains us not just to live in the image but to survive the images. con -

0 5On the philosophy of art: discourses of originality will be delegitimized and 1 On the politics of art: not to surrender glamour and sumption but rather to embark on the act of agitating consciences. appropriationist practices will be normalized.

205 Andy Best (1975, Australia) is a Photographiques. He was one of the wide web. His work is shown The university offers also four master multidisciplinary artist, working five curators of the exhibition From internationally at places such as degree programmes in partnership primarily in painting, sculpture, Here On as part of Les Rencontres the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Art in with the Sandberg Institute. photography and works on paper. d’ Arles (July 2011). General and MWNM galleries in Exhibitions include Primavera at the New York; the ICA in London; NIMk, Foam Lab is a special activity Museum of Contemporary Art, Eder Chiodetto (1965, Brazil) is an de Appel, W139 and the Stedelijk created by Foam in 2007. A group of Sydney (2009), and 2004: Australian independent curator of photo Museum in Amsterdam. ambitious youngsters heading Culture Now at the National Gallery graphy and video, a journalist, towards a career in the creative of Victoria, Australia. He was photographer and photography École Nationale Supérieure de la industry develop different projects awarded an Anne & Gordon critic based in Brazil. He is Professor Photographie/ The National School and events based around photo Samstag International Visual Arts of Photojournalism and Photogra- of Photography (ENSP), founded in graphy during the run of one year. Scholarship in 2006. Andy Best is phy Essay at Museum of Modern Art 1982 in Arles (South France), is a For its third edition that started in represented by Greenaway Art of São Paulo. higher education establishment February 2011, the FoamLab Gallery, Adelaide, Australia. under the general supervision of the participants are Jerry Celie, Liset Jörg Colberg (1968, Germany) is French Ministry of Culture. The van der Laan, Fenna Lampe, Eelke Adam Broomberg (1970, South the founder and editor of Conscien- School’s principal mission is to train Mol, Hugo van de Poel and Rosa Africa) and Oliver Chanarin (1971, tious, a widely read weblog artistic photographers, who acquire Ronsdorf. England) are artists living and dedicated to contemporary fine art both solid theoretical knowledge working in London. Their latest book photography. He is a faculty and in-depth technical skills. It is Frits Gierstberg (1959, the Nether- War Primer 2 is published by MACK member of the MFA Photography also actively involved in organising lands) is an art historian and critic. (2011) and interrogates the nature programme at Hartford Art School exhibition while contributing to He has worked as Head of Exhibi- of the images of conflict that have (Northampton). His writings have various publications, and publishing tions and curator at the Nederlands proliferated since 9/11. They have appeared in international maga- its own journal Infra-Mince. Fotomuseum in Rotterdam since exhibited widely and produced zines and he has contributed 2003. He is co-editor of a number of seven monographs. Broomberg and introductory essays to monographs Hasan and Husain Essop (1985, books on photography and visual Chanarin are Visiting Fellows at the by various photographers. South Africa) are two brothers and culture, among them The Image University of the Arts London. photographers based in Cape Town. Society. Essays on Visual Culture Lauren Cornell (1978, United Their exhibitions include Powerplay (2002), Documentary Now! Arnold van Bruggen (1979, the States) is Executive Director at (2008), Halaal Art (2010) at the Contemporary Strategies in Netherlands) is a writer and Rhizome and Adjunct Curator at Goodman Gallery, the Havana Photography, Film and Visual Arts filmmaker based in Amsterdam. the New Museum of Contemporary Biennial (2009) and Dak’Art (2005) and The Dutch Photobook Together with Eefje Blankevoort he Art in New York, where she oversees Biennial, Dakar (2010), the V&A 1945 - 2010 (upcoming). founded and runs Prospektor, a and develops Rhizome’s pro- Victoria and Albert Museum, company focused on the production grammes, all of which support the London (2011) and the Gallery Jefferson W. Hack (1971, Uruguay) of documentary practices. He is creation, presentation and Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai is a journalist and magazine editor. currently working on the Sochi preservation of art engaged with (2011). Hasan & Husain Essop are He co-founded Dazed & Confused Project with photographer Rob technology. In addition to her represented by Goodman Gallery, with photographer Rankin in 1991. Hornstra. curatorial work at the New South Africa. Hack has been a contributor to The Museum, Cornell organizes the Daily Telegraph on men’s style and Bruno Ceschel (1976, Italy) is a monthly New Silent Series, Fantom Photographic Quarterly is has guest-edited The Independent. writer and curator; he lectures in featuring screenings, events and an international publication about He sits as a judge on the panel for photography at the Camberwell performances by emerging artists. the uses and abuses of photo the Paris ANDAM fashion award. College of Arts, London. In 2010 he graphy published by Boiler Corpora-

contributors founded Self Publish, Be Happy an Charlotte Cotton (1971, United tion s.r.l., Milano, Italy. A voyage Rob Hornstra (1975, the Nether- organization promoting and Kingdom) is the Creative Director of into photography, first and lands) is a documentary photo studying self-published photobooks. the National Media Museum in foremost Fantom features the voice grapher. In 2009, together with the He has organized events at The Bradford, England. She is the of photographers, in interviews, writer and filmmaker Arnold van Photographers’ Gallery, ICA Institute author of Imperfect Beauty (2000), portfolios, and statements. Fantom Bruggen, he started the Sochi of Contemporary Arts and Guy Bourdin (2003), Then Things is edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz Project. He is co-founder of Whitechapel Gallery in London, Went Quiet (2003) and The (New York, USA) and Selva Barni FOTODOK – Space for Documentary OffPrint in Paris and at Flash Photograph as Contemporary Art (Milano, Italy). Photography in Utrecht (NL). Rob Forward Festival in Toronto and (2005 and 2009). She is also the Hornstra is represented by Flatland Boston. founding editor of wordswithout- Joan Fontcuberta (1955, Spain) has Gallery, Utrecht (the Netherlands). pictures.org. had his work exhibited globally, Cia de Foto is a photography including at MoMA in New York and David Horvitz (1982, USA) is a collective based in São Paulo, Brazil, Nickel van Duijvenboden (1981, the the Art Institute in Chicago. He is photographer, writer and perform- founded in 2003. It recently Netherlands) investigates forms of the founder and editor of the ance artist from Los Angeles. He is exhibited Histories of Maps, Pirates writings that border on visual art. In magazine PhotoVision and has currently based in Brooklyn. He has and Treasures in the Itaú Cultural 2003 he published a collection of written several books about the published several books. His works institute (São Paolo), an individual essays, The Grand Absence, and history, aesthetics and the teaching have been exhibited in various exhibition Entretanto at the Galeria graduated as a ‘photographer of photography. galleries and museums, including Vermelho and the series Carnaval without photographs’ at the Royal Galerie West (The Hague, NL), Art at the New York Photo Festival. The Academy of Art, The Hague (NL). Gerrit Rietveld Academie is a Metropole (Toronto) and the New collective participated at the 3éme He teaches at the Photo Depart- university of applied sciences for Fine Museum (NYC). Last summer he biennale des images du monde – ment of the Gerrit Rietveld Arts and Design in Amsterdam. After was nominated for the Discovery Photoquai 2011 in Paris. Cia de Foto Academie in Amsterdam and a general first year, called the Prize at the photography festival is represented by Galeria Vermelho, supervised the second year’s Foundation Year, the student Les Rencontres d’ Arles. São Paolo, Brazil. photography students taking part continues with a three year long in the What’s Next? project in-depth study within one of the Max Houghton (1970, United Clément Chéroux (1970, France) is initiated by Foam. twelve specialisations. By specialis- Kingdom) is editor of 8 magazine a curator at the Centre Pompidou / ing in Photography at the Rietveld and foto8.com. She is Course Musée National d’Art Moderne. A Constant Dullaart (1979, The Academie, students are trained as Leader of the MA in Photojournal- historian of photography with a Netherlands) is a Berlin-based autonomous photographers, ism at Westminster University. doctorate in art history, he is also artist and curator who works creating conceptual work in which Based in Brighton, she writes about the editor of the journal Études primarily on and with the world photography serves as a catalyst. photography and the media on a 206 freelance basis for a variety of Erik Kessels (1966, the Netherlands) cadre of ‘conceptually oriented Lisa Oppenheim (1975, United international publications. is a founding partner and creative books that have added a fresh States) lives and works in New York director of KesselsKramer, an vision to the photography world’. City. Her films and photographs Michiel van Iersel (1978, the international communications have been recently been exhibited Netherlands) co-founded Non- agency based in Amsterdam. He Nicholas Mirzoeff (United Kingdom) at the Guggenheim Museum in fiction, an Amsterdam based office has curated numerous photography is Professor of Media Culture and New York and Bilbao, the New for cultural innovation, in 2008. He exhibitions such as USE ME, ABUSE Communication at New York Univer- Museum, and at the Museum of speaks and writes about art and ME at the New York Photo Festival sity. His publications and projects Fine Art, Houston, as well as in culture on a regular basis and has 2010 and most recently From Here contributed fundamentally to the many gallery exhibitions through- hosted or co-hosted conferences on On at Les Rencontres d’Arles, general development of Visual out the United States and Europe. museum innovation, including France. Culture as a field of study and a Recent solo exhibitions include McMuseum (2002), Open Museum methodology. He wrote and edited Blood to Ghosts at Galerie Juliette (2008) and Curating the City Kadir van Lohuizen (1963, the An Introduction to Visual Culture Jongma (Amsterdam) and at (2009). Netherlands) is an independent (2nd ed. 2009) and The Visual Klosterfelde; and Invention without photojournalist. He has covered Culture Reader (3rd ed. forthcoming a Future at Harris Lieberman. The Impossible Project was conflicts throughout the world, but 2012). His very last book just came initiated by Dr.Florian Kaps (CMO), he is probably best known for his out: The Right to Look: A Counterhis- Arthur Ou (1974, Taiwan) is an André Bosman (COO) and Marwan projects on the seven rivers of the tory of Visuality (2011). artist and writer based in New Saba (CFO) in 2008. Its mission world and the diamond industry York. His writings have been was not to re-build Polaroid film (published as photobooks Diamond Alison Nordström (1950, United published in Aperture, Artforum. but to develop a new product with Matters, the diamond industry and States) is Senior Curator of com, Afterall.org, Bidoun, Fantom, new characteristics. In 2010 Aderen). In Via PanAm Van Photographs and Director of X-Tra, and Words Without Pictures Impossible introduced its first, Lohuizen brings the focus back to Exhibitions at George Eastman (Aperture: 2010). He is currently the brand new analog Instant Film Latin America, which is hardly House International Museum of Director of the BFA Photography materials. Impossible initiated also visible in today’s news coverage. He Photography and Film in Rochester. Program at Parsons the New School several projects dedicated to has received numerous prizes for his In 2011 she curated a major for Design. Ou co-organized the support and promote Instant work, and established with ten retrospective of more than 150 conference The Photographic Photography amongst artists and others the photo agency NOOR photographs by Lewis Wickes Hine Universe together with the Aperture photographers. Impossible Project images (Amsterdam). at the Fondation Henri Cartier- Foundation, The Shpilman Institute, Spaces have opened in New York Bresson in Paris. and the Vera List Center for Art and City (USA), Tokyo (Japan) and Flora Lysen (1984, the Netherlands) Politics. contributors Vienna (Austria). is an independent writer, curator Sean O’Toole (1968, South Africa) is and researcher, currently teaching a Cape Town-based journalist and Outlook Magazine is China’s Anne-Celine Jaeger (1975, at the Master program in Artistic writer. His writings on South African leading original creative lifestyle Germany) is a British-based Research at the Royal Academy of photography have appeared in the magazine. It covers content journalist and critic. Among her Art, The Hague. In 2010 she was the magazines Art in America, Camera ranging from fashion to architec- books is Image Makers, Image curator of The Smooth and the Austria, DAMn Magazine, eye ture, from travel to art, and from Takers: The Essential Guide to Striated, an exhibition in collabora- Magazine, Frieze and Kyoto Journal; culture to design. Outlook has Photography by Those in the Know. tion with the University of Amster- and in the books Alias (2011) and been published in Shanghai She has written for many publica- dam, showing the work of eight Ghetto (2004), both by photogra- continuously since October 2002. tions, including The Guardian, The contemporary artists. phers Adam Broomberg and Oliver The editor-in-chief is Jiaojiao Chen Sunday Times, Foam Magazine and Chanarin, Joburg Circa Now (2004) and the art director is Peng Wallpaper* as well as Süddeutsche Lev Manovich (1960, Russia) is by Terry Kurgan and Jo Ractliffe, Yangjun, both them used to be Zeitung and Du magazine. professor in the Visual Arts and Positions (2010), which authors of COLORS magazine Department of the University of included an essay on Guy Tillim. during 2006 to 2008. Michael T. Jones (1960, United California, San Diego, director of States) is Google’s Chief Technology the Software Studies Initiative, and Marisa Olson (1977, Germany) is a Asmara Pelupessy (1981, United Advocate. He was previously Chief a professor at the European visual artist based in New York. Her States/ the Netherlands) is an Technologist of Google Maps, Earth, Graduate School (EGS). He focuses work combines video, perform- independent curator, researcher, and Local Search. He has developed on developing analytical tools that ances, drawing and installations. writer, editor and project organizer scientific and interactive computer can model new patterns and trends Her research focuses on the cultural in photography and visual culture. graphics software and has used a within web-based cultural produc- history of technology, the politics of Together with Sara Blokland she is home-built 4-gigapixel camera tion and social media. participation in pop culture and the the co-founder of UNFIXED made with parts from the U2/SR71. aesthetics of failure. She is Projects, a non-profit organization Anne Marsh (Australia) is Director Assistant Professor of New Media aimed at creating platforms for JR (1983, France) is an artist of the Art Theory Program and at the Purchase College State dialogue between photography, describing himself as a photograf- Associate Dean Research at University of NY and was previously contemporary art and theory. feur. His artistic research involves Monash University in Australia. Editor & Curator at Rhizome. photography, street art and Her research areas include Willem Popelier (1982, the Nether- participatory art. His first exhibition, photography, performance art, Paulien Oltheten (1982, the lands) is a Dutch visual artist who Expos 2 Rue, was held in the streets feminism, postmodernism and Netherlands) is an artist/photo uses photography. In 2011 he was of Paris in 2001. With the project psychoanalysis. Her books include grapher that focuses her research granted a special mention at Dutch Face2Face (2007) he made portraits Look: Contemporary Australian on prolonged observation of the Doc Awards. He exhibited his works of Palestinians and Israelis and Photography since 1980 (Macmillan public sphere, documenting the at Foam Amsterdam, the Stedelijk pasted them up in huge formats on Publishers, 2010). fleeting human situations. She was Museum Amsterdam and at Les both sides of the wall. After winning resident artist at the Rijksakademie Rencontres d’Arles. His work is the TED Prize in 2011 he started the Lesley A. Martin (1970, United van beeldende Kunsten (the centred on photographic represen- project Inside Out, a large scale States) is publisher of Aperture Netherlands) and ARCUS project in tations of identity. participatory project about identity. Foundation’s book program. She Japan. Her work has been exhibited His current project Unframed was one of the inaugural curators of widely and it’s part of several Laurel Ptak (United States) is a reinterprets in huge formats photos the New York Photo Festival in 2008. collections, including the Stedelijk curator who has been based in New from important photographers In 2006 American Photo named Museum in Amsterdam. Paulien York City for the last ten years. She taken from the archives of muse- Martin one of the Innovators of the Oltheten is represented by Galerie is the founder of the blog about ums. JR is represented by Galerie Year, for ‘breaking the mold for Fons Welters, Amsterdam, the contemporary photography Perrotin in Paris. iconic photography books’ with her Netherlands. iheartphotograph.com. Recently 207 she relocated to Stockholm where rights. Ritchin is the author of After director and editor of SeeSaw since Paris Photo 2008. she serves as curator at Tensta Photography (2008, with transla- its inception in 2004. Schuman, Konsthall and will teach the tions in Chinese, French, Korean, who is an American photographer Jordan Tate (1981, United States) is workshop ‘Towards a History & Spanish and Turkish), and of In Our and writer based in the United an Assistant Professor of Art at the Philosophy of the Online Image’ at Own Image: The Coming Revolution Kingdom, regularly contributes to University of Cincinnati. Tate’s work the photo department of Konstfack in Photography (1990, 1999). Foam Magazine as writer. is currently held in collections – University College of Arts, Crafts nationwide, including Rhizome at and Design in spring 2012. Brett Rogers (1954, Australia) has Lieko Shiga (1980, Japan) gradu- the New Museum, the Museum of been the Director of The Photo ated at Chelsea College of Art and Contemporary Photography and the Ramesh Raskar (India) is head of graphers’ Gallery since November Design in BA Fine Arts New Media in Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Tate the Camera Culture research group 2005. She previously worked at the 2004. She is a recipient of the Kimu- is the founding editor of the at MIT Media Lab in Boston, where Visual Arts Department of the ra Ihei Award and the Young contemporary art blog ilikethisart. he is associate professor. Some of British Council where she held the Photographer ICP Infinity Award. net. his recent innovations include a joint positions of Deputy Director She has released two books, Lilly way to perform an eye test in three and Head of Exhibitions. She is the and CANARY in 2008. In 2009 she Penelope Umbrico (1957, United minutes using a cell phone, a Chair of the Jury for the annual started the project called KITAKA- States) is an artist/photogra- camera based on transient imaging Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. MA, which will be exhibited at the pher who often re-uses published to see around the corner and end of 2012. Lieko Shiga is repre- images from magazines, ads or imperceptible markers for motion RongRong (1968, China) and inri sented by Galerie Priska Pasquer, internet, attempting to redefine capture. Raskar also holds the (1973, Japan) have been working Cologne, Germany. questions of subjectivity and position of Co-Director at the together since 2000 in Beijing. In authorship. She has shown Center for Future Storytelling. 2007 RongRong and inri established Stefano Stoll (1975, Switzerland) is internationally, and her work is the Three Shadows Photography Art the Director of the Festival IMAGES included in major collections such Timm Rautert (1941, Germany), Centre, the first contemporary art in Vevey (Switzerland), focussing on as the San Francisco Museum of studied photography under Otto space solely dedicated to photo monumental photography and Modern Art in California, and the Steinert at the Folkwang School of graphy and video art in China. outdoor exhibitions (next edition Museum of Modern Art in New York. Design in Essen from 1966 to 1971. September 2012). During his studies She currently lives and works in Rautert has been one of the most Thomas Ruff (1958, Germany) is an of art history and economics, he New York. important teachers of young internationally renowned photo co-founded and co-directed the photographers in Germany when grapher who lives and works in first photography festival in Anne de Vries (the Netherlands) is a working as professor of photography Dusseldorf. Having studied Switzerland: les Journées Photo- Dutch artist based both in Amster- at the Hochschule für Grafik und photography from 1977 to 1985 with graphiques de Bienne. He is also dam and Berlin. His work has been Buchkunst / Academy of Visual Arts Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie head of the cultural department of shown in a wide range of museums, in Leipzig, between 1993 and 2007. Dusseldorf, he developed his the City of Vevey. artist spaces, galleries, online and method of conceptual serial printed matter: including Rhizome Ilse van Rijn (1975, the Netherlands) photography. Between 2000 and Sam Stourdzé (1973, France) (New York), Foam (Amsterdam), is a Dutch writer and art critic. She 2005 he taught at the academy became Director of Musée de Villa Noailles Hyères (France) and contributes to magazines such as in Dusseldorf. L’Elysée in Lausanne (Switzerland) The Armory (New York). He has Metropolis M, Open, Mister Motley in 2010. In 2011, he launched ELSE, been organizing various events in and Foam Magazine, as well as to Joachim Schmid (1955, Germany) the Swiss magazine of photography. collaboration with other artists of individual artist’s publications and is a Berlin-based artist. He has His research activity focuses on the which BYOB Bring Your Own Beamer curatorial projects. She is currently been working with found photo- circulation of images, both still and nights. De Vries graduated from the working on her PhD, in which she graphs since the early 1980s; his moving, and the production and Gerrit Rietveld Academie and is researches contemporary autono- works have been shown and interpretation of photographs. As a currently an artist in residence at mously produced artist’s writings. published internationally and are curator he organized several the Rijksakademie van beeldende included in numerous collections. In exhibitions including retrospectives kunsten in Amsterdam. Fred Ritchin (United States) is 1990 he founded the Institut zur of Dorothea Lange, Tina Modotti, Professor of Photography & Imaging Wiederaufbereitung von Altfotos Chaplin and Fellini. Waterfall Magazine is a bi-annual at New York University’s Tisch (The Institute for the Reprocessing independent art and photography contributors & support& contributors School of the Arts, where he also of Used Photographs). Mariko Takeuchi (1972, Japan) is a magazine, which makes connec- co-directs with Susan Meiselas the photography critic, an independent tions between art, daily life, and NYU/Magnum Foundation Photo SeeSaw Magazine is an online curator, and associate professor of common experiences. Based in graphy & Human Rights educational photography magazine dedicated Kyoto University of Art and Design. Taipei (Taiwan) its designers and program. He is also director of to work that successfully captures, She is a guest researcher at the editors are Ho-Teng Chang and PixelPress – an organization that represents and encourages acute National Museum of Art, Osaka. Shauba Chang. Waterfall Magazine works at the intersection of new observation via the photographic She was a guest curator for the is self-published in Chinese and media, documentary and human medium. Aaron Schuman is the Spotlight on Japan exhibition at English.

What's Next? has been made possible with the support of: AgentschapNL, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Beamsystems, Dienst Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling, Eizo high-end-monitors, Igepa, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mondriaan Foundation, Oschatz Visuelle Medien, Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, robstolk, SNS Reaalfonds, Sony Ericsson and VSBFonds.

208 foam amsterdam Editions department. Keizersgracht. Here we schedule a schedule Here we Keizersgracht. website, via our internationally website, enjoy photography, whether it’s at our museum whether it’s photography, enjoy special events. special events. of lectures, discussions, guided tours, workshops and workshops of lectures, discussions, guided tours, in Amsterdam, on the in Amsterdam, on programme also organise a dynamic We changing shows. and alternate with small, quickly Large-scale exhibitions Foam enables people all over the world to experience to experience the world people all over enables Foam the in the museum on talent. or undiscovered as young well photographers as distributed magazine or in our distributed magazine Amsterdam, is located in the centre of The heart of Foam including world-famous exhibitions programme of varied foam magazine # 29 what's next? Joel Sternfeld since 1970 Colour photographs photography beingaccepted inworld.the art Eggleston,William MoMAexhibitionin in whose 1976 colourofficial of signalled the start galleries. Sternfeld was influenced by thecolour theory of theBauhaus and by the work of widely in advertising and amateur photography, but had rarely been seen in museums and graphy became a respected artistic medium in the 1970s. Until that time, colour was used photo colour that it StephenShore,to and Sternfeldsaw Eggleston William with Along offers usanimage of daily life in America over the last three decades. landscape. With a subtle feeling for irony and an exceptional feeling for colour, Sternfeld in his work is his native land America, its inhabitants and the traces left by people on the journey through the United States, and A large selection from such famed series as highlight is Sternfeld’s early work from the 1970s that has never previously been exhibited. than one hundred photos from ten different series in an exhibition spanningtwo floors. A Joel Sternfeld (1944, New York), one of the pioneers of colour photography, showing more of work the of Netherlands the in major retrospective first exhibition presentsthe Foam 16 December2011–14March2012 Summer Interns Having Lunch, Wall Street, New York, 1987 © Joel Sternfeld andLuhring Augustine, New York Stranger Passing 210 American Prospects, the result of his legendary : will be on show. A constant factor • foam amsterdam - • Dazed Dazed & Con

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hy P Chief Chief of � - M e A in - R R eu u g S 07 The Dec u until 2011 FuT M OTO ov 05 Ph N founder founder and Editor - Kramer, curator, collector and collector specialist in ver curator, Kramer, Guest curators: Cornell, Jefferson Hack, Lauren Alison Nordström Erik Kessels, – 7 December 2011 5 November graphy can be presented in a museum. By doing By can in be a presented museum. graphy ), Alison Nordström (US, Director of Photographs, Photographs, of Director (US, Nordström Alison ), The four invited guest curators are Jefferson Hack co (UK, fused of co-founder (NL, Kessels Erik House), Eastman George Kessels Deputy Cornell (US, and Lauren photography) nacular NY). Museum, the New of Curator What's Next? The Future of Photography the Museum fourFour concepts, guest different different curators, four visionary presentations and one museum that offers them aFoam, celebrating stage. its tenth an has invited niversary, four experts different from the cultural fieldtorealize a challenging proposal on how photo so thespecificallyFoam addresses issueof itsfu own as medium a to justice do can museum a how and ture photography. as contemporary varied and versatile 211 • Talent Call Talent issue Foam Magazine high Talent Talent

14 October – 15 December 2011 14 October –

In A World Without Words… Words… Without World A the series In from 2010 , Paper Blue Jang © Ina (Switzerland). Prickett (Ireland), Florian van Roekel (the Netherlands), Netherlands), (the Roekel van Florian (Ireland), Prickett Gosha Rubchinskiy Alberto(Russia), Salván Zulueta Vonplon Ester and (Belgium) Vermeire Katrien (Spain), Dodewaard (the Netherlands), Jessica Eaton (Canada), (Canada), Eaton Jessica Netherlands), (the Dodewaard (Italy), Imbriaco Alessandro (Japan), Hosokura Mayumi Ina Mirko Martin Jang Ivor (South (Germany), Korea), work by photographers: work Renato Abreu Lucas by (Brazil), photographers: Blalock (USA),Raphaël Dallaporta Fleur (France), van by Foam Magazine. For the first time in five years there there years five in time first the For Magazine. Foam by is an extensive exhibition in Amsterdam presenting this exceptional and yet undiscovered work. With In the fifth annual range diverse a in talents young fifteen from work lights The shortlist work. was of photographic selected from year’s this to submissions portfolio 800 over

Talent 2011 Talent foam magazine # 29 what's next? Junger Mann, © Sara2011 -Lena Maierhofer someone who constantly aims to breakaway? who systematically defies character? How do you grab man a characterizes What himself? readjustsstantly How can one construct a profile of someone who con subject; his appearance, his peculiarities, his intentions. bystep, closercomes toartist the togetting know her distance.Stepa from him study to decides she tion, she fails to arrange a meeting with the person in ques different identities. When abandoning and adopting of consists life whose crook fraudster,a a to ment In Clark, Dear Maierhofer Sara-Lena Foam 3h

Lena Maierhofer seeks rapprocheSaraseeksMaierhoferClark, -Lena Dear 1 February 2012 15 December2011– : • 212 arriving to Utrish. Krasnodarsky kray, Russia ©Pavel Prokopchik Lama and at that moment his girlfriend Nastya. Sleeping after presents Stanley’s war images alternated with private alternatedpresentswith Stanley’s images war (1949,photographerStanleyGreenewar York).New It butterfly.’beautiful you stay at it longer than that, you turn. And not into a years.If eight for positive keep only can you think ‘I Passport Black Stanley Greene © Stanley Greene / from the gripsof our society. escape the forsearch in still is that generation new A from all the politics and materialistically driven society. ple in Russia that choose an alternative lifestyle. Away peo of group a following been PavelProkopchikhas Alternative Russian Pavel Prokopchik Foam 3h and the horrors of wars elsewhere. Westernsafelife the between from and to tossed ing images. Like Stanley himself, the viewer experiences be 5 February 2012 16 December2011– 2 February –14March2012 r Noo is the biographythe PassportBlackofis :

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23 March – 30 May 2012 23 March – 24 June 2012 has shaped the possibilities of magazine photo um, from photojournalism to fashion photography and photography fashion to photojournalism from um, the on primarily focusing exhibition, this In portraiture. long-time years, fifteen past behind-the- a provides Ryan Kathy Editor Photo that have processes creative look the at collaborative, photographic for venue leading the magazine this made storytelling news media. within contemporary New York Times York New Magazine weekly the thirtyyears, over For zine through its commissioning graphy, and publishing of medi the of spectrum the across work photographers’ Before Before leaving for a Russian long people journey, sit down for a moment and think about where they will be The going atmosphere in and the why. pictures of Bertien van Manen is with Together like this. photo grapher Stephen Gill she made a selection of pictures in she took 1991-2009 Russia betweenand which have before. been on show never , 1992 © Bertien Manen van , Kazan Kitchen the in Vlada Bertien Manen van Sit Down Let’s Go We Before 213

• NRC vacances Les Les Les vacances de by by Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg . Wendela Hubrecht took photos of the au the of photos took Hubrecht Wendela .

10 February – 18 March 2012 – 18 March 10 February

2010 © Wendela Hubrecht Wendela 2010 © Where is the limit? is Where Material Material that raises Why many do questions: families want to be watched? Grunberg studies them but is private? is What family? a is What himself. studied also away cam -away throw received also families The Grunberg. eras to A take photos selection themselves. of these texts photos, and film are on show in theexhibition. island of Lefkas. island His of Lefkas. report was published in the Handelsblad without and with, holiday on families the of and dition day audition with thirty families in the Holiday Holiday the in thirtyfamilies with audition two -day a ter Inn Hotel in Grunberg chose Amsterdam the family of Greek the to him took who Poel, der van Nick and Maud It began in 2010 with an ad in the papers in Holland. Af Holland. in papers the in ad an with 2010 in began It staying over and taking part in the family life. Grunberg Grunberg life. family the in part taking and over staying with holiday on going by family’ ‘the research to wanted on family holiday is ‘A a them. in family or a warzone, I see it.’ how That’s situation. war in a rather, and artist Wendela Hubrecht is on show. and is Hubrecht artiston Wendela show. several with embedding Grunberg’s of continuation a is meant Embedded Utrecht. of city Dutch the in families first thingyou first pack and after tickets passports, money is the camera. In Foam the project Monsieur Grunberg Grunberg Summer holidays and photos the are interconnected: de Monsieur Les vacances vacances Les FOR SALE ON FOAM.ORG working

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artists Anton Corbijn Lucian Freud 36 × 36 cm, edition of 15, € 1250,-

Also in Foam Editions: Daniëlle van Ark, Karl Blossfeldt, Kim Boske, Hans van den Boogaard, Mitch Epstein, Marnix Goossens, Pieter Hugo, Johan van der Keuken, Marcus Koppen, Marrigje de Maar, Awoiska van der Molen, James Nachtwey, and designers Sanne Peper, Misha de Ridder, Thom van Rijckevorsel, August Sander, Jaap Scheeren, Malick Sidibé and Raimond Wouda www.lecturis.nl www.lecturisbooks.nl

Keizersgracht 609 Open: 1017 DS Amsterdam Wed - Fri: 1 pm - 6 pm +31 20 5516500 Sat - Sun: 11 am - 6 pm www.foam.nl and by appointment editions [email protected] The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds supports Foam

The mission of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds is to support cultural and nature preservation projects in the Netherlands. The foundation emphasizes artistic excellence and educational initiatives. Each year, over 3.500 projects and people receive foundation support. Musicians, artists, photographers, museums, monuments, theatre and dance ensembles all beneﬁ t.

Support us for € 4,00 per month.

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JR was born in the street and raised with the need for freedom. By play. Outside the By love. JR moves about disguised. He runs over the rooftops. He jumps the turnstiles. He shakes off the police. JR is energetic. Whether in the banlieues of Paris, Jerusalem, Rio, Nairobi or New Delhi. He Interview with runs around the world, floating like a super-hero. JR is a gang. Self- taught, he surrounds himself with passion, curiosity and generosity. With his close companions, he plots with JR interview his route, worldwide. Searching for JR the right cause. JR avoids the sun. The shadows are a resource. Light slows him down. And yet, he exposes by Stefano Stoll himself to danger, to the media. In independent the street. And then in the museums. His exhibition is global. From virtual networks online to the brick walls of Shanghai, the largest gallery on earth is at his disposal. The street is his media. He knows no limits but his own. He is at once the artist, the curator, the museum, the gallery. Independence is his fuel.

→ 28 Millimetres, Face 2 Face, Pasting on the Separation wall, Security Fence, Palestinian side, Bethlehem, march 2007 © JR / Agence VU Box 12 13 The cover is printed on Lessebo Design The text pages are printed on Maxi Offset smooth bright 300 g/m2, CO2 neutral FSC 120g/m2, wood-free offset paper EU Flower awarded

Lieko Shiga is printed on heaven42 115g/ m2, Jordan Tate is printed on heaven42 115g/m2, Andrew Best is printed on heaven42 135g/ m2, absolute white coated paper softmatt FSC absolute white coated paper softmatt FSC absolute white coated paper softgloss FSC

Cia de Foto is printed on heaven42 135g/ m2, Paulien Oltheten is printed on Profibulk 1.1, Hasan & Husain Essop is printed on absolute white coated paper softgloss FSC 115g/m2, wood-free white bulky design Profibulk 1.1, 115g/m2, wood-free white bulky paper FSC design paper FSC

Magazine contributions are printed on Magno Gloss 90g/m2, wood-free triple coated gloss paper, a Sappi product Issue #29, winter 2011/2012 Lithography & Printing Publisher Lecturis Printing Foam Magazine Editor-in-chief Kalverstraat 72 PO Box 92292 Marloes Krijnen 5642 CJ Eindhoven -NL 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL [email protected] Creative Director Binding Pjotr de Jong Binderij Hexspoor ISSN 1570-4874 Ladonkseweg 7 ISBN 978-90-70516-24-6 Editors 5281 RN Boxtel – NL Caroline von Courten, Marcel Feil, © photographers, authors, Foam Pjotr de Jong, Marloes Krijnen Paper Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2011. Igepa Nederland B.V. All photographs and illustration Managing Editor De Geer 10 material is the copyright property Caroline von Courten 4004 LT Tiel - NL of the photographers and /or their estates, and the publications in Editorial Intern Editorial Address which they have been published. Elisa Medde Foam Magazine Every effort has been made to con Keizersgracht 609 tact copyright holders. Any copy Magazine Manager 1017 DS Amsterdam – NL right holders we have been unable Niek van Lonkhuijzen T +31 20 551 65 00 to reach or to whom inaccurate F +31 20 551 65 01 acknowledgement has been made Communication Intern [email protected] are invited to contact the publis- Lotte van den Hout hers at [email protected] Advertising All rights reserved. No part of this Project Management Niek van Lonkhuijzen publication may be reproduced or Femke Papma, Betty Man Foam Magazine transmitted in any form or by any PO Box 92292 means, electronic or mechanical, Art Director 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL including photo-copy, recording Vandejong: Hamid Sallali T +31 20 462 20 62 or otherwise without prior written F +31 20 462 20 60 permission of the publishers. Alt- Design & Layout [email protected] hough the highest care is taken to Vandejong: Hamid Sallali, make the information contained Kalle Mattsson, Ayumi Higuchi Subscriptions in Foam Magazine as accurate as Hexspoor Support Center possible, neither the publishers Typography Ladonkseweg 9 nor the authors can accept any Vandejong: Kalle Mattsson 5281 RN Boxtel – NL responsibility for damage, of any T +31 41 163 34 71 nature, resulting from the use of Contributing Photographers [email protected] this information. and Artists Andrew Best, Hasan and Husain Subscriptions include Distribution Essop, Cia de Foto, David 4 issues per year € 70,– The Netherlands colophon Horvitz, Paulien Oltheten, excluding VAT and postage Betapress BV Lieko Shiga, Jordan Tate Students and Club Foam T + 31 16 145 78 00 members receive 20% discount Cover Photograph Great Britain New Work #43, 2010 Single issue € 17,50 Central Books © Jordan Tate Back issues (# 2 – 28) € 12,50 [email protected] Excluding VAT and postage Contributing Writers Foam Magazine # 1 is out of print Eva Bremer, Adam Broomberg www.foam.org/ shop & Oliver Chanarin, Bruno Ceschel, Eder Chiodetto, Jörg Colberg, Charlotte Cotton, Caroline von Courten, Nickel van Duijvenboden, Marcel Feil, Joan Fontcuberta, Max Houghton, Kim Knoppers, Flora Lysen, Lev Manovich, Anne Marsh, Lesley A. Martin, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Sean O’Toole, Colette Olof, Marisa Olson, Arthur Ou, Asmara Pelupessy, Laurel Ptak, Timm Rautert, Ilse van Rijn, Fred Ritchin, Brett Rogers, RongRong & inri, Stefano Stoll, Sam Stourdzé, Mariko Takeuchi, Anne de Vries

Copy Editors Rowan Hewison, Annemarie Hoeve

Translation Karen Gamester, Iris Maher, Gillian Morris, Liz Waters 218

#29 What’s Next? Winter 2011/2012 €17,50