The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph 9780520383982

Citation preview

The Night Albums

Th e publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Judy and Bill Timken Endowment Fund in Contemporary Arts.

The Night Albums Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph

k at e pa l m e r a l be r s

u n i v ersi t y of c a l ifor n i a pr ess

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Kate Palmer Albers Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on fi le at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-38152-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38154-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38398-2 (ebook) Printed in Malaysia 30

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Introduction 1 I Ephemerality, over Time 15 II Ways of Seeing and “Live” Photography: Four Case Studies 39 III Future Visibility

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IV Revised Foundations 107 Coda 121 Acknowledgments

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Notes 131 List of Illustrations Index

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Introduction

Do not open until you understand what is going on. A couple of years ago, I came across a sealed envelope, marked with this handwritten instruction, in the artist Robert Heinecken’s archive (see figure 1). I sat there and stared at it for a minute or two, mulling over how I might interpret this directive from the past. Archival research is always compelling for the sense of immediacy and intimacy one so often feels with the thoughts and working process of a research subject, but even so, I was struck by a nearly visceral sense of being addressed directly by Heinecken himself. This was, in fact, precisely the envelope I’d come looking for when I made my appointment at the archive. I knew what was inside of it. But it gave me pause: Did I understand? Should I open it? I knew that in 1973, Heinecken had made a series titled Vanishing Photographs. The images were fairly elaborate tableaux scenes, featuring the work of his friends Les Krims and Jerry Uelsmann, rephotographed and represented as multiple exposures.1 Heinecken reproduced his friends’ work but intentionally did not fully process the new gelatin silver prints, now

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Figure 1. Robert Heinecken, archive material, c. 1973. Courtesy of the Estate of Robert Heinecken. A similar envelope is held in the artist’s archive at the Center for Creative Photography.

authored by him. Consequently, as the new Vanishing Photographs prints continued to be exposed to light, he knew that they would darken, gradually becoming illegible. The series was conceived, then, as ephemeral photographs: discrete material images that would exist only for a limited duration. Heinecken knew that the images were going to change even over the short course of an exhibition. Their lifespan was understood to be—in fact, designed to be—both temporary and in continuous flux. Such a set of conditions, arrived at intentionally, was nearly unprecedented in the history of photography. But it is not unusual today, in the twenty-first-century ecosystem of images. And, though the intent of photography was always toward permanence, a state of ephemerality was not unusual in the first several decades of the medium’s

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existence. As such, Heinecken’s radical gesture operates as a pivot point, connecting the highly mobile and fleeting experiences of a vast sweep of photographic experience today with the very origins of the photographic medium. Heinecken made his Vanishing Photographs, furthermore, during a period of the medium’s intense consolidation into the art world, as it was being absorbed into institutional systems of value that both perpetuate and prize equivalences between such attributes as permanence and stability with the very possibility of creating enduring meaning. Given photography’s fledgling state as a medium of artistic value at the transitional date of 1973, it was all the more imperative that its images endure. Rhetoric and theory had both developed in alignment with this unspoken yet clearly understood set of requirements.2 The new crop of institutions, both cultural and academic, that would establish a serious foundation for photography, concurred. As I considered how to proceed with this envelope, my thoughts were both more practical and more existential. First of all, though I had known that the prints I was looking for were unfixed, and thus presumably still sensitive to light, I experienced a more urgent sense of my own complicity in the very act of looking than I had anticipated. Accompanying that was a sense of profound responsibility: I clearly considered these photographs notable enough to be worth making a special effort to see (having looked them up in the finding aid, made a request with the archivist, and arrived for my appointment), and yet that desire was squarely met with my own culpability in their eventual disappearance. At what stage, I wondered, were the prints in the process of their own vanishing? How much time did they have left? Was that even something possible to determine? Did it matter? It must have: I didn’t want to be the last person to look at them. And I especially didn’t want to unintentionally be the last person to look at them. It also seemed possible that my questions were all for naught: perhaps the photographs had

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already vanished, and the sealed envelope contained a monochrome of darkened photo paper. I was compelled by considering the more complicated arc of visibility in a photograph’s life: starting from an unseen latent image, moving to its visible phase, and finally returning to a different kind of invisibility, something I might think of as the opposite, in a way, of latent images. At some point in this flood of questions, I began to appreciate the scenario that had been set up, the predetermined conditions I had gotten swept up in. What was happening, of course, was precisely what was supposed to happen—these were precisely the questions Heinecken had intended to provoke, even if I was in an archive rather than an exhibition space. And were the questions I had about the Vanishing Photographs really all that different from the questions I might have about all the rest of photography? The photographic relationship between value and permanence is currently undergoing a profound shift in contemporary culture and technology. We are now in a position to see what was, in fact, a foundational condition of photography.3 Heinecken’s work offers a route into viewing, and understanding, photographs from a slightly shifted, yet fundamentally altered, perspective in which sight and its processes are not taken for granted but rather activated to demonstrate the value of experiencing sight and visibility as an event. Photographic visibility, in the pages that follow, is assumed to be conditional: a durational process to be performed, to be experienced. Artists who offer temporary, fleeting, hidden, and future modes of visibility—whether strictly “photographic” or more expansively media-driven—collectively produce this new, conditional framework. Early on in considering this mode of thinking about photography as a fleeting experience rather than an object of material permanence, a series of “what if” questions emerged. I had come to better appreciate the substantial period of time that elapsed between the ability to create a photographic image and the ability to fix that image.4 During this decades-long period, it seemed, the dogged aspirations of the inventors to fix the image became

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Introduction

materialized—the goal became the definition. Photographs would be permanent, stable objects, no matter how difficult it was to pin them down in that way and to still the sensitivities of silvers. But what if one of the inventors of photography had wanted something different? What if one of them had decided that fleetingness was the very definition of the thing they were after and, instead of seeking permanence, set about seeking a range of temporal parameters for photographs? Perhaps some photographs would last a week, others would last for a few months, or a year. But even those calibrated to a shortened timeframe—say, a few hours or days—would be understood to have a different sort of value than those calibrated for duration. A shift in the history of photographic expectation might well have altered the development of photography as a medium and the development of cultural and practical understandings of what photography “is.” In fact, what I am proposing in this book is that the “what if” that I have just outlined is, in fact, the medium that was invented. It is a simple truth that photographs do exist in a durational range. It is just our understanding that is limited. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the many ways that photographs, today, disappear by design. The most obvious are represented in the rapid proliferation of social media practices, currently exemplified, when it comes to images in particular, by the app Snapchat and, to some degree, by its more mainstream popular knockoff, Instagram Stories. As recently as 2017, Snapchat hosted the creation and social exchange of 3.5 billion photographs per day.5 Yet, as a default condition of this service, the photographs disappear within moments of being viewed.6 Between the app’s early reputation as a sexting platform and its general lack of permanent visual archive (though, naturally, many exceptions exist), academic discussions of Snapchat initially appeared most prevalently within sociological and communication discourses.7 A platform founded on the principles of fleetingness and disappearance presents not just a unique challenge for but also an active argument against the conventional cultural value of archival objects. This durational

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value presents a distinct challenge not only to any visual culture study but also for the conventional tools of art history, which privilege tangible, reviewable objects. With over two hundred million daily active users, the application facilitates a staggering number of photographs, by any measure. This level of popular engagement with making and sharing photos is something that no one interested in contemporary cultural photographic practice should easily dismiss. Just as interesting, though, as the sheer quantity of images is the evident appeal of disappearing photographs, particularly to a generation that did not grow up experiencing printed, material photographs as a typical photographic encounter. Shoeboxes of photos under the bed belong to a different generation. The allure of fleetingness is not just experiential but driven as well by privacy advocates. Tools such as Xpire and Dust incorporate the ephemeral aspects of both text- and image-based communication into online exchange. Indeed, technology journalist Farhad Manjoo declared apps that were at odds with the model of saving everything online (or, in tangible archival storage, forever) “the most important technology of 2013,”8 embodying the potential for establishing a newly private and “erasable” internet. Though a default mode of saving everything characterizes much of the online world, there is nothing inherent about internet technology that requires material to be permanently saved. These are settings created by the people who design the programs. Similarly, within photography, a default mode to save imagery characterizes the vast majority of approaches to the medium. And yet, again, there is nothing inherent to either analog or digital photographic technology to require this: there is no chemical or digital predetermination that photographic imagery need be fixed. In her extensive work on West African photographs, photographic practices, and archives, the photo historian Jennifer Bajorek has foregrounded the critical importance of taking seriously the insistently present variability in photographic life expectancy. What is typically held as a default expecta-

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tion for fixed photographic duration is, for Bajorek, primarily evidence of a deeply Eurocentric notion of the medium that takes not just cultural and aesthetic expectation but even the impact of climate and storage as shaping an operating understanding of the medium’s parameters. Speaking to this Eurocentric audience, Bajorek writes: If we listen to these images, many of which may appear, to us, to be neglected, fading, or fragmented—or which document, in themselves, material traces of lost photographic histories and processes of ongoing archival loss, we find ourselves faced with different forms of photographic temporality, with nonlinear histories, and with experiences of loss and futurity that are largely missing from contemporary discourse.9

Crucially, Bajorek points to the inadequate language around photographs and photographic theory, and the clear inability to account meaningfully, or even accurately, for the experiences of photographs in West Africa with what becomes, by extension, “colonial notions of history and memory, presence and absence, abundance and loss.” Far from situating her subject matter as an isolated geographic or regional outlier or anomaly, Bajorek points to the possibility of “an avant garde with regard to the future of all photographs.” I have to agree with her assessment that “the notion that a photograph is a fixed image, or even an image, becomes impossible to sustain.”10 How long we understand something to last profoundly impacts how we experience it, as well as how we care for, describe, and remember it. These varied photographic conditions, I suggest, are pervasive, and even foundational, within canonical Eurocentric histories and practices as well. The French inventor Louis Daguerre was certainly not the first to experiment with light-sensitive silvers, but his public announcement of success, in January of 1839, generated intense public engagement and marked the beginning of a public discourse on photography.11 The press immediately honed in on permanence as a central and key aspect of the new invention. In

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hindsight, all claims to permanence were clearly a collective leap of faith, as no one could really know how long the plates, all newly made, might ultimately last. In his collection of reactions to this moment, Steffen Siegel has suggested that the crucial element of what 1839 marks is precisely this newly public discourse, namely, that its “countless participants . . . fashioned a way of talking about photography that has formed the basis for all the different discourses that have developed since.”12 Collectively, this discourse formed a conceptual framework for the very notion of what photography “is.” And, certainly, the concept of permanence was utterly central to the public’s fascination with the new invention.13 And yet, in his recent study of Daguerre, the photo historian and curator Stephen Pinson suggests a more nuanced set of concerns that occupied Daguerre as he worked through the invention process.14 Namely, through his deep devotion to and concern with the development of the diorama, Daguerre was chiefly fascinated with the representation of effects. The subtle effects of shifting light that Daguerre had achieved in his Paris diorama, to great popular acclaim and widespread wonder, were necessarily fleeting. Daguerre wondered: How might these effects of shifting light be translated into a graphic medium? He wanted to move the effects from their performative mode—an ephemeral experience for a specific audience—to a medium in which they could be shared in a different way. But the root of it, for Daguerre, was a fleeting experience of the subtleties of light and the creation of such perceptual effects.

dagu e r r e’s n igh t a l bu m a n d t h e n i g h t a l b u m s Already in 1835, Daguerre had begun spreading news of the success of his new invention. However, one dubious reaction to Daguerre’s early claim reveals an accurate skepticism but also, perhaps inadvertently, proposes a performative scenario that feels downright contemporary. Doubting

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Daguerre’s success in producing a permanent form for images made by light, the young French architect Alphonse Eugène Hubert responded in the Journal des Artistes that for this to be the case, Daguerre would have had “to make a night-album, enclosing his results between black paper and only showing them by moonlight.”15 That is to say, in his doubts that Daguerre has really materialized an image that is permanently impervious to the further effects of light, Hubert imagines an album of photographs that can exist only ensconced in darkness. These imagined images must be both kept in darkness and viewed in darkness; only moonlight might preserve their sensitive state. Hubert’s point was surely the folly of such a scenario. Yet his evocative description conjures a scene one can imagine playing out today. It would be a performative and experiential event: Perhaps an artist would announce the semisecret gathering through social media and offer a late-night performative viewing to a select few, those in the know, those who opted in for this unique, one-of-a-kind experience. The lucky few might gather at midnight on the night of a full moon (perhaps even a super moon, a blue moon, or a wolf moon for maximum dramatic effect) to view the images enclosed in the delicate night album. They would wait for their eyes to adjust to the darkness, anticipating the images they would see “between black paper.” They would relish the privacy, and the unphotographability, of the moment, recognizing the uniqueness of the situation. They would be alert to the subtle task of looking in the dark and impressed with the need to remember without the future possibility of recourse to a reproduction at some later date. And what images would be contained in a night album? Abstractions? Portraits? Studies of the moon or other celestial bodies? Evidence of the scientific apparatus around lunar observation? Whatever the contents, the small group of viewers would know that the images were fragile and deeply susceptible to the faintest traces of light. The images would have been made to be seen, but only by a few, and only temporarily. And viewers would know that their very act of viewing—even if only by moonlight—was predicated on the loss of the image.

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Hubert’s imagined night album is not the same as Heinecken’s Vanishing Photographs (and both differ from my speculative twenty-first-century moon viewing). But the two examples have enough in common that both have served as conceptual touchstones for the thinking in and approach to this book. How might an engagement with photography shift if the activity of looking was understood as a fleeting experience, performative in nature? An assumption of flux, rather than permanence, shifts that experience, as does attention to a range of existence, from visible to invisible, or the reverse, from invisible to visible. Daguerre’s night album never existed, but the idea of it, which did exist at the tender date of 1835, resonates with a range of contemporary practice. I realize that evidence of historical imagination—in this case, Hubert’s night album provocation—is not the same as historical evidence; it is not a thing that existed, and certainly not a thing that exists today. But it is precisely this set of conditions that have made extending the once-imagined night album into the framework of this book, The Night Albums. A night album, as I’ve come to think of it, is a kind of conceptual framework for a set of real conditions. A night album takes on the qualities and characteristics only gestured at by Hubert in 1835 and realizes them in an artwork, event, or experience that radically foregrounds the conditions of viewing and, by extension, the conditions of visibility. The form is mutable. To speak only of photographs in the year 2020 is to fail the medium, it is to willfully conform to the arbitrary and deeply limiting logic of the solander box that, regrettably and yet pervasively, not just informs but also underpins many institutional notions of what constitutes “photographs” of value. Night albums may be photographs, they may be photographic, or they may be a photographic experience. I am not unconcerned with definitions, but I am most curious about their edges and their outliers, exceptions that prove the rule or, better yet, offer a new way forward, a new way of seeing or of thinking or of understanding.

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As such, while focusing on the contemporary, this book takes up examples spanning the history of the photographic medium, from the protracted hesitancies of its origins, to the emergence in the 1960s of artists’ work unraveling those concepts and ingrained theoretical modes, to the waves of both artistic and technological experimentation flourishing today in the realms of the ephemeral. That said, it does not proceed strictly chronologically. The series of observations, histories, and case studies that follow are not intended to be comprehensive; rather, they are meant to be provocative, offering a framework for considering the parameters by which we may understand photographic experience and proposing a revised structure for understanding the value of ephemerality and unseen images in the expanded realm of that photographic experience.16 The Night Albums is organized into four parts, each of which addresses the central themes of the book through a distinct framework. This introduction and part I form the conceptual foundation of the book, connecting our contemporary moment with the sustained (and since suppressed) conversation seeking an end to ephemerality. Extending (back) from my own experience in the archive of Robert Heinecken, seeking to make sense of his provocative Vanishing Photographs (1973), I trace the emergence, primarily from the 1840s to the 1880s in France and England, of the concept of photographic permanence. Reports from Britain’s so-called Fading Committee, established in 1855, demonstrate that scholars and historians have not fully recognized the extent to which the earliest photographic practices were overwhelmingly impermanent, nor have we recognized how long this state persisted and how frustrating it was. Indeed, as late as the 1880s—some forty years after the public announcement of photography—practitioners still struggled with fading, persistent image degradation, and achieving photographic “permanence.” Yet these decades of efforts to “fix” photographic imagery offer a view of the medium that, I suggest, can be understood as akin to a timebased live performance in which photographs are seen as objects and images

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of variable duration. This conceptual shift in how we view and value photographs is, I propose, both one that has existed all along and one that is deeply resonant with current contemporary photographic experience. Part II highlights four distinct yet interrelated artist’s projects—from the 1970s to the present—that engage with visibility and sight: Robert Heinecken’s instant/durational double-portraits of critic Susan Sontag, constructed from a range of options in photographic visibility that correlate to the Zone System; conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit, which moves literal visibility into the realm of consciousness and identity; Oscar Muñoz’s “protographic” work of durational and ephemeral viewer-activated engagements with histories of violence and photojournalism; and the performative and fleeting visibility of Cassils, foregrounding a vulnerable moment of exposure in order to resist conventions of “fixed” vision. I consider the artists in this section to each have made a night album of a sort, responsive to the cultural and political moment of each of their geographies, biographies, and aesthetic concerns. Artists’ work in and around matters of contemporary technology animate part III, which moves into future realms of (often) imaginative possibility, following the proposals for potentially dystopian futures seen through the technologically inquisitive practices of Zachary Norman, Trevor Paglen, and the creators of Astronaut.io. Each of these artists has speculated either an alternative to a current prevailing norm (such as YouTube) or an imagined future of invisibility in the wake of political and environmental collapse. These, too, are night albums, setting new terms for the concepts of photographic visibility and fleetingness, and inviting viewers’ engagement and imagination. Finally, part IV returns to the material realities of photography’s early monuments, offering a conclusion (which could just as well be an introduction) to this extended reflection on visibility, ephemerality, and the experiential value of photographic images, objects, and futures. This section includes

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case studies of the current state of objects that have become canonical in the history of photography and have now largely disappeared themselves (a fact persistently unrecognized in popular histories of the medium): Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s Untitled “point de vue” (known previously in English as View from the Window at Le Gras), circa 1827, and Louis Daguerre’s Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités, circa 1837. The unacknowledged—even suppressed— transience of these images, demonstrated by their widespread perpetuation through reproductions that are either enhanced or that show earlier states of more visible imagery, both perpetuates a false framework for photographic studies and perfectly summarizes the crucial yet internally contradictory role of transitory imagery in the very foundations of the medium of photography. Though the images persist in reproduction, the objects themselves have faded into near disappearance.

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Pa r t i

Ephemerality, over Time

To proceed, in earnest, with this framework in place, What does the (imaginary) night album look like today? I see it in a range of experiences designed to put viewers in close contact with the questions Heinecken articulated through the Vanishing Photographs. Take, for example, the Los Angeles–based artist Phil Chang. In 2012, Chang presented a series of photographs titled Cache, Active (see figure 2).1 The title itself suggests a secret and dynamic stash, which in fact aligned with the contents of the exhibition: twenty-one matted and framed eleven-by-fourteen-inch unfixed photographic prints that began to change immediately upon being exposed to light at the exhibition’s opening.2 Chang’s motifs were an array of photographic conventions— portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and abstractions—chosen so viewers would not slip into a reading based primarily on the subject matter of the images. One reviewer described the show this way in Artforum: “Presenting photography as a durational performance, the artist literally unveiled the works at the opening, exposing them to the gallery’s bright fluorescence, which gradually darkened the pictures until, after several hours, all appeared a uniform dull maroon tone.”3 For the remainder of the exhibition, the photographs appeared as monochromes. Chang suggests a shift in our understanding of where the importance of photographs lies: Is it in our minds, with the object, or in the image? Cache, Active isn’t presented by moonlight—as Hubert imagined for Daguerre’s night-album—but it engages some of the theatrics and drama suggested by the anecdote. In watching the gradual disappearance of the images, the viewer may wonder which, if any, of the billions of photographs

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Figure 2. Phil Chang, Cache, Active, 2012, installation view. Courtesy of the artist; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; and Praz-Delavallade Gallery, Paris.

made on a daily basis in our culture do we want or need to last. It doesn’t seem possible that we need all of them. More fundamentally, though, the series challenges the notion that a photograph’s value is equivalent to that of the image it presents.4 Importantly, Chang’s images have two primary modes of existence: first, the period of their visibility, and second, their “monochrome period.” Of the former, the scholar Walter Benn Michaels notes, “There is an important sense in which you don’t simply look at these photographs, you watch what they’re doing; it’s a kind of performance.”5 And, like a live performance, it is ephemeral.

t h e fa di ng c om m i t t e e These questions, about the value of the image and its slow shift from visibility to invisibility, bring us back to the nineteenth century. The dialogue

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around the lasting instability of photographic images has been sharply undertold by historians, a habitual omission that collectively, and falsely, suggests that the matter was settled upon the introduction of Sir John Herschel’s superior hypo fixer. But in fact, the problem weighed heavily upon early practitioners for decades after this date, evidenced by the immediate prevalence of the topic in the Journal of the Photographic Society, one of the first organized vehicles for communication of shared interests in Britain. The journal was launched in 1855, a full sixteen years after the emergence of a public discourse on photography. Published notes of the April 5 meeting that year record the Photographic Society’s chairman’s statement on the crucial role of photography in culture: The varied objects to which Photography can address itself, its power of rendering permanent that which appears to be as fleeting as the shadows that go across the dial, the power that it possesses of giving fixedness to instantaneous objects, are for purposes of history (not only the history of one particular branch of human industry, but the history of everything that belongs to man and the whole globe that he inhabits) a matter of the deepest importance. It is not too much to say that no individual—not merely individual man, but no individual substance, no individual matter, nothing that is extraordinary in art, that is celebrated in architecture, that is calculated to excite the admiration of those who behold it, need now perish; but may be rendered immortal by the assistance of Photography.6

Because of photography, “nothing that is extraordinary in art . . . need now perish.” The chairman continued: We cannot conceive a more perfect history of everything that belongs to man than Photography is able to record; and not merely of what belongs to man himself, but of everything that can occupy his attention, in short, everything that can be the subject of visual observation is rendered permanent, so that whatever is noticed now may be noticed by all the world for ever.7

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It is a powerful notion and a shift worth dwelling on for a moment: the perfection of the photograph is not just that one can record objects in one’s possession but also that “whatever is noticed,” anything that can occupy visual attention, can be shared, with everyone, forever. From the vantage point of 2020 and the pervasiveness of social media, as well as the depth of surveillance and computer vision that so deeply affects our daily lives, it is easy to see—if difficult to share—the extension of the enthusiasm. In the very issue, however, in which this declaration of the deep stakes of the core feature of permanence was both anticipated and recorded, an open call was issued to members and readers on a topic “of the highest importance as regards the future prospects of the Art,”8 namely, the elusive quest for photographic permanence. The risks of fading photographs included “the effects of disappointments” and “the real diminution of the utility of the Art,” and the call recognized that, very simply, not enough was known to reach any conclusions. Thus, the issue asked openly for readers to please send in information about processes and conditions so that a record of evidence might be made and progress might ensue. The coexistence of the chairman’s declaration of the value of photographic permanence and the urgent recognition that photographs were nowhere near in a reliably fixed state suggests the identity crisis this enduring problem clearly created for serious practitioners of the medium in the years around 1855. Standard histories of photography typically suggest not just that stabilization of the medium was achieved by this time but also that clear technological progress was being made.9 Frederick Scott Archer’s wetcollodion negative process and albumen positive print combination had been introduced already in 1851, advances generally understood as quickly rendering the one-of-a-kind daguerreotype and the reproducibleyet-grainy paper negative processes fairly obsolete.

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But the problem was not just far from settled, it was pervasive. And the extent of it became particularly evident as practitioners of the young medium organized and consolidated their shared interests through societies, journals, and exhibition. At issue was not just that photographs faded but that nobody understood why, or even which were the right questions to be asking. The Journal of the Photographic Society recorded this prolonged state of uncertainty: Was it part of the chemical mixture? (And if so, which part?) Was it how the prints were washed? Was it the relative moisture in the air, once the print was made, or other environmental factors, such as sulfur in the (polluted) atmosphere? Was it how a print was mounted, or perhaps the lighting conditions of how it was stored? The variety of processes in use in this great period of experimentation, each with custom recipes, meant that there was no standard formula to begin testing in a systematic way. One member wrote, beseeching his fellow photographers to share information about what they had found worked and what didn’t, There is an absence of evidence, there are no facts. . . . The other day at the Crystal Palace, I did not perceive a single photograph that had been fairly exposed, with nothing but the light of heaven above, for a long time, that had not faded. I have never met with a photograph so treated that has not faded to a certain extent. If we could be informed of any photographs which, under those circumstances, had not faded, . . . more might be done.10

It is a remarkable observation: no facts, no evidence about why it was that seemingly all photographs exposed to “the light of heaven” had faded. And it is followed by a remarkable plea: for news of any photograph that had not faded when exposed to light, in order to share knowledge about how to proceed toward the (still) elusive goal of permanence. The reply of a fellow member gives some sense of the challenge they collectively faced: he had found a new process and was eager to share that his photograph had remained fixed for the three weeks (!) since he had tested it.

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The very next issue of the journal announced a new initiative: the Fading Committee. The evocative name is justly a source of fascination from a contemporary position, yet histories of photography rarely venture beyond a brief mention of the group’s existence. In fact, the official description was “the Committee appointed to take into consideration the Question of the Fading of Positive Photographic Pictures upon Paper” or, more concisely, “the Committee on Positive Printing.”11 The group’s charge was understood to be imperative and urgent: “The question is one of vital importance, and has already occupied the attention of both the producers and collectors of photographs.”12 Six members were charged with considering and reporting on the question, with the support of ten pounds from the society and, in a modest demonstration of royal support, an additional fifty pounds from His Royal Highness Prince Albert—an amount equivalent to about $7,000 today. At the outset, the committee members understood their mission as twofold: first, “to ascertain whether there are any [photographs] which appear to be quite unaltered by time” and to find out the methods of their production, and second, to conduct a set of experiments to find the combined method of process and exposure to produce in “the highest degree the essential qualities of permanency and beauty.”13 The language is noteworthy: the fact that they were trying to ascertain whether there were any photographs unaltered by time suggests that this was still, in 1855, an entirely open question. The committee’s goal seems open to the possibility that perhaps, after fifteen years of public experimentation with paper prints, there were none that qualified as “unaltered by time.” The Fading Committee’s charge with experimentation would have been precisely the moment for my initial “what if” scenario to play out, if perhaps one member of the committee had attended to the particular combinations that might reliably produce a one-minute print, a one-day print, or a one-week print. This did not happen, but the next several months of Royal Photographic Society meetings and journal articles saw extensive dis-

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cussion, experimentation, and debate on the matter. During this process, recorded in the publication, Mr. Malone, a former assistant to William Henry Fox Talbot, particularly at his Reading printing establishment, secured a dubious sort of primacy for his early role in suspecting the existence of photographic fading, while other members bickered with greater and lesser degrees of passive aggression as to who really knew if fading was due to the toner or the fixer or the caustic potash or the wet air, and who actually washed their prints well enough in the first place. In the meanwhile, T. Frederick Hardwich published A Manual of Photographic Chemistry (1855), in which he made the useful observation that, actually, the image itself (by which he meant the subject rendered) was stable and that it was rather the surrounding area that changed.14 Once he had officially joined the Fading Committee (a late addition, along with Malone), Hardwich also reliably contributed his findings to the journal, taking great care to describe the temporal and experiential effects of his different experiments on how exactly photographs faded, and in what time frame. His writing is deliberate. Hardwich chose his words carefully to accurately describe and convey which process produced a print that faded slowly yet could be watched over a period of, say, fifteen to twenty minutes; which resulted in a print that might remain “unaltered for years”; and which “quickly eats away the picture,” characterized by a sense of immediacy.15 Along with being attentive to a range of temporal duration in the photographs he observed and the different perceptual experiences those durations facilitated, Hardwich noted where the fading began— perhaps at the edges, or in the halftones or shadows. The subtle distinctions of chemical actions—their speeds and their movements over a picture plane—clearly fascinated this observer. One can easily imagine him absorbed in the process, and perhaps the wonder, of observing a photograph changing before his eyes. Reading his reports, one has the sense that Hardwich experienced the photographs he studied as living objects, created by

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specific means and responsive in distinct and individual ways to their surroundings. Hardwich referred to his experiments as being devoted to the “comparative permanency of Photographs”16 as he sought to provide “the true theory of fading.”17 However, there can be no mistaking this attentiveness for affection; elsewhere, Hardwich referred to the “evil” forces causing fading.18 Other members of the committee felt similarly: Shadbolt, for instance, (perhaps optimistically) referred to the period of unstable fixer, before Herschel’s reliable hypo, as “the dark ages of photography.”19 Remarkably, however, a somewhat open—or, at least, accepting—approach to the fading of photographs was offered by the esteemed photographer Roger Fenton.20 Fenton had returned from his highly visible trip to photograph in the Crimea, made under Queen Victoria’s patronage, and had recently stepped down as chairman of the Royal Photographic Society. He was, then, a voice of authority within these close-knit photographic circles. During a rather heated debate regarding fading, and specifically in response to a member’s denial that fading was a problem, Fenton spoke up and brought attention to the fact of “the duration of works of art” as “a comparative matter,” and furthermore cited a conversation he’d had with M. Niépce (the cousin of one of the earliest inventors of photography, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, to whom we will later return), in which Niépce, according to Fenton, “expressed his belief that every negative would in proper lapse of time disappear.”21 Though Fenton’s remarks did not generate immediate discussion within the meeting, they are noteworthy. In contrast to the polar oppositions of “permanent” (the elusive goal) and susceptible to fading from all manner of causes (the reality), Fenton was positioning photography, in a nonspecific way, within a spectrum of durational aesthetic possibility, noting that different media, from watercolors and oil paintings to marble sculptures, hold different temporal expectations. He did not make a judgement but rather recognized and, as I would like to read it, seems to have accepted that

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absolute permanence was perhaps an unnecessary—if not unreasonable— goal for every art form. Additionally, that he invoked a colleague, M. Niépce, as also recognizing the fugitive nature of photographic materials positions the coexistent concepts of photography and ephemerality as an idea with buy-in beyond his own position.

s t i l l e ph e m e r a l In March of 1856, Mr. Malone conceded that not much had changed: “We are still . . . in the dark as regards the exact conditions required for the permanence of photographs.”22 He continued, “We must admit that we know nothing as yet of the substance which produces the photographic image, and that we consequently know nothing of the conditions for preserving it.”23 And later, to further underscore his position, he stated, “We know nothing at all at present about the image with certainty.”24 Six months later, the Fading Committee issued its first report, and it contained an impressive degree of ambiguity: “They have not found that any method of printing which has been commonly followed, will necessarily produce fading pictures, if certain precautions be adopted, nor have they evidence that any method which has been adopted, will not produce fading pictures unless such precautions are taken.”25 Perhaps the most poetic response to the persistence of fugitive photographic experience came several decades later, in 1892. In a discussion about best exhibition practices, members of the Photographic Society of London considered whether photographs that would be known to fade over the sixweek run of a show ought to be automatically disqualified from exhibition. One member, a Mr. Debenham, argued against the proposal, saying, “If a man thinks he can get the most beauty, even though it be a fleeting beauty, by a certain process, let him do it. If necessary let the process be mentioned, so that those inclined to undervalue the work because it is not what they consider permanent may do so if they please.”26 Debenham thus recognized,

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counter to his colleagues, not only a place for ephemeral beauty in photography, but the connection between permanence and subjective perceptions of value. The degree of difficulty that clearly existed, a full fifteen years after the first public announcement of photography, in keeping an image fixed on paper, begs the question: How are we to think of these surely vast numbers of lost or deeply faded images? Are they necessarily “failures,” as their makers clearly considered them? Or can recognizing their collective existence suggest something about how to think differently about not just photography in its early years but photography as a whole? What do they have in common with fleeting images, made intentionally, in the twenty-first century?27 If nothing else, this period makes evident that despite the affirmative rhetoric surrounding photography’s permanence, there is no “natural” or predetermined state of photography as a medium of fixed imagery. The decades it took to reliably produce fixed images demonstrates that the prolonged period of uncertainty, evidenced by these years of discussion and disagreement, is not separate from any history of photography but, in fact, foundational: there is nothing more basic to photography than its capacity to fade, to disappear, to be short-lived. How we think of this is up to us.

f l e e t i ng va lu e , or how t o pr e se rv e t h e c a rc a s s Until 1855, the dogged persistence of photographic fading had been treated largely on its own terms—that is, as a matter of course, no photographs should fade. But, in 1856, Charles Lake Price introduced a particular circumstance to consider: the relationship between photographs and money. Simply put, he argued, “there are photographs which are produced at great expense, the purchasers of which must have great interest in their being kept in an unaltered state. . . . I think it desirable that photographs, for

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which a high price may be paid, should be as much as possible protected from the action of the atmosphere.”28 With this, Price injected a practical economic issue into the discussion and, consequently, introduced the highly subjective question of value in distinctly measurable and economic terms. Price’s concerns were twofold: he proposed that photographs that were expensive to produce should be treated in a special way (he suggested portfolios, to keep the effects of the atmosphere at bay) and that photographs that were purchased for a high price should be similarly protected. Price’s concerns revolve strictly around economic value; no mention is made of aesthetic value, cultural value, familial value, or any other way in which a photograph might assume a particular level of importance.29 We can return, for a moment, to Phil Chang’s Cache, Active and to other contemporary works that similarly engage with the relationship of ephemeral imagery to various forms of value, in particular, economic—and perhaps by extension, institutional—value. I have described Cache, Active from the vantage point of its exhibition, a period that encompassed a distinct and irreversible visual change from the visibility of the images to their demolition, by the means of the continued chemical action of sensitive silvers surrounding the initially visible image. Chang, as an artist, participates in the art market: his work is exhibited in galleries, collected by individuals and institutions, and written about in the art press. So what happens after the performative value of the exhibition? For starters, the framed prints stay on view for the duration of the exhibition, in what Benn Michaels calls their “monochrome” state. They then enter what might be considered their “collected” or “archived” state. Unusually for a collected art museum object that is not an abstraction from the outset, this state lacks visible images. So if a collector wishes to purchase a work from the Cache, Active series, what is it that she is purchasing? Is it the piece of photographic paper, with a no longer visible image, a relic or “leftover” from a performance? Is that an object with intrinsic, or even subjective, value? Chang’s solution seems to suggest that it

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isn’t: collectors will purchase the monochrome print and, additionally, receive a second print in a light-proof box that has not yet been exhibited. In other words, a component of the purchase is the material anticipation of repetition: like savoring the notion of a future experience, a Cache, Active collector buys both the result and the future possibility. In a way, the collector becomes a curator, put in the position of imagining and deciding when, where, and even if to show, or “perform,” the work again. The notion of latency has always held some magic in chemical photography. The latent image describes the chemically recorded image that is not yet visible; it is there, but it has not yet been transformed, through the process of development, into a visible state. Chang’s series, and, in particular, the anticipatory purchase a collector may make, activates this notion of latency in an altered way. Rather than savoring the moments of an image’s slow emergence into visibility, with Chang’s second print, one may savor the promise of a future event, of the anticipation of change. It is a temporal reversal that upends the typical directional flow of photographic events: that photographs record and, to a greater or lesser degree preserve, immediately and always, past events. This is the famous “that-has-been” aspect of photography identified and dwelled upon by Roland Barthes in his oftcited Camera Lucida. In some way, considering the experiential dimensions of disappearing photographs can only be an amplification of this deeply felt photographic effect: all photographs, nearly by definition, record that which simultaneously is captured in the frame and yet is also, concurrently, both in the space of the photograph and in human experience, gone. A photograph that actively and visibly fades surely dramatizes this core feature of many, many photographs. And yet it also produces a live-ness to a photographic experience that may otherwise be blissfully (or painfully, depending on one’s view) easy to overlook in a more typical photographic viewing experience. Either way, Chang’s anticipatory photograph poses

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the questions: When is the photograph? And which part of its experience is of value? This is a question with theoretical and experiential dimensions, but it’s also one with material dimensions. And again, returning to the earliest days of the medium provides a longer temporal framework to consider this intersection of image, materiality, and value with some historical perspective. The photo historian Jordan Bear has written compellingly about Sir Humphrey Davy’s early and “failed” photographic experiments in the early 1800s. Those experiments can be considered to be failures, Bear points out, only if one is attached to “an artifactual history of photographs.”30 As Hardwich would later dwell on the particular, distinct, and subtly different manners of the fleeting photographic image, Davy, too, even at his earlier moment, was compelled to more broadly share his unique experience with ephemeral photographs. Hardwich wrote his reflections within the framework of seeking a community that might finally help the cause of persistently elusive photographic permanence. Davy, an eloquent and charming figure, performed his fleeting photographic experiments publicly. In doing so, Bear suggests, Davy occupied a transitional space between the lone Romantic genius and the public figure of science that would emerge somewhat later. Davy’s central performative challenge, then, “was to negotiate between the private sensation and public demonstration of fleeting effects, and to furnish an artifactuality for his ephemeral images and experiences.”31 Whether in his early photographic work or in other transitory sensorial experiences that he sought to publicly share, his ongoing task “was to retain the experimental insights gleaned from his own sensory experiences, while allowing them to register within accepted evidentiary structures that were fundamentally public in nature.”32 Moreover, whether seeking to convey the subjective experience of inhaling nitrous oxide or seeking to fix a photographic image, Davy “developed a sophisticated repertoire of practices to help bridge the realms of ephemeral sensations and material objects.”33 At

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their core, then, Davy’s concerns had to do with taking something experienced privately and expressing it in a shared, public way. It’s not hard to imagine, were he alive today, that he would be intrigued by the performative theatrics embedded in Chang’s exhibitions. Nevertheless, as Bear details, since Davy did not produce any material artifacts, his value to the story of photography’s origins has remained stubbornly in the discourse of failure. However, a recent episode throws this equation into the starkest possible terms of value: in 2008, a photograph said to have been made by Davy’s frequent collaborator Josiah Wedgewood was discovered and put up for sale at a Sotheby’s Nineteenth Century Photography Sale, prompting speculation that such an object might fetch $2 million.34 In short, Davy’s value to the history of photographs is as a failure, unless a paper object exists, in which case its value is $2 million. Chang’s solution to provide collectors with a second print is both a practical and a conceptual gesture. Its practical dimensions address what, from a collecting standpoint, is a fairly straightforward question: Why would someone want to buy a photographic object that no longer contains an image? The answer to this seems obvious: they wouldn’t. But in fact, in Chang’s scenario, a collector buys not just one photograph-without-an-image but two of them: a “before” and “after” set. Thinking of it this way illustrates the themes nicely. With before-and-after photographs, the pair of images are activated, in relation to one another, by the viewer’s knowledge of an unseen event that separates the two images.35 Whether they depict the abrupt action of a natural disaster or the slower individual process of something like weight loss, the images themselves, by definition, do not visualize the primary event. In either scenario, the “event” is understood as something that has happened in the world. But in Cache, Active, the “event” is the photograph itself. Other artists have offered related provocations. For instance, the New York– based artist Matthew Buckingham’s 2001 Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until

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Figure 3. Matthew Buckingham, Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001. Continuous color 35 mm slide projection and framed text, dimensions variable. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Fund purchase. © Matthew Buckingham. Photograph by Ben Blackwell. Courtesy of the artist; Murray Guy, New York; and Daniel Marzona, Berlin.

It Vanishes is a continuous projection of a 35 mm color slide that, as the title indicates, is meant to be projected until it vanishes (see figures 3 and 4). The character, whose statuary likeness is seen from behind in the slide, is Absalon, a Danish warrior bishop and the founder of the city of Copenhagen. As the text that accompanies the projection relays, Absalon used some of the wealth he plundered during the crusades to commission the first written history of the Danish people. Absalon also built himself a castle, and, to point out the obvious, he himself is (doubly) memorialized in the slide’s image, an equestrian statue that has now been photographed. In other words, Buckingham—the artist—invokes multiple forms of memorialization and preservation: history writing, monument building, and photographic

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Figure 4. Matthew Buckingham, Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001, installation view. About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 14–September 15, 2016. Photograph by Katherine Du Tiel. Courtesy of the artist; Murray Guy, New York; and Daniel Marzona, Berlin.

record. Of the three, it seems the photographic record is the most fragile, and that fragility plays out before the museum visitor, the projector’s lamp slowly but inevitably burning the slide’s emulsion into whiteness, or nothingness.36 But the work suggests the question: What does the collector—or the museum—do when the slide’s emulsion is projected into nothingness? Buckingham devised a solution to ensure the lastingness of the work, even as it prompted an apparent experience of disappearance for viewers. Upon purchase, the buyer receives both a master slide and a set of exhibition slides. Instructions are included: “The MASTER is NEVER to be projected.” They

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continue: “A new copy of the slide is made each time the piece is exhibited. That copy is projected during the opening hours of the exhibition for the full duration of the show.”37 In this scenario, photographs fulfill several properties at once. Buckingham literalizes two basic conditions of photography: its fragility and susceptibility to the light that makes it visible in the first place, and its reproducibility. But its reproducibility is predicated on isolation: the master slide must not be used. Like Buckingham’s solution, Chang’s two-print provocation mirrors this institutional solution to a problem more recent than nineteenth-century fading silver prints. The history of color photography processes is similarly vexed, and now the fate of those objects is as uncertain as that of early photographic processes in the 1860s. Today’s corollary to Britain’s Fading Committee may be something like the Whitney Museum’s Replication Committee, a similarly evocatively named group with the very practical challenge (among others) of preserving color photographs in museum collections.38 Indeed, there are a number of parallels in the responses between the 1850s in Britain and the 1970s and 1980s in New York, the extended moment during which it became clear that collecting color prints for museum collections also meant ensuring the preservation of these highly unstable and fugitive objects. The pages of the progressive photography journal Afterimage from the 1970s and 1980s were, like those of the British Journal of Photography, filled with reports of such instability, and, following the concerns Charles Lake Price had expressed in 1856, this was a challenge inextricably linked to definitions of value. In the 1975 symposium “Collecting the Photograph,” held at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall at $50 a ticket, the director of the New Orleans Museum of Art argued not just that museums had a responsibility to collect the best contemporary photographic work being made, regardless of medium, but that they should purchase two prints of color works that would be expected to fade within twenty years.39 Other museums followed suit: by

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1984, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a similar policy in place and, shortly thereafter, so too did the Museum of Modern Art.40 In hindsight, the two-print strategy has obvious drawbacks. Beyond the fact that this approach requires double the storage space, one wonders what a museum does once the first print is sufficiently faded as to require its replacement with the second print. Or, more to the point, what does a museum do when the second print has shifted in color beyond an accepted rate? Once the “reserve” second print has been exhibited, a collection is back, effectively, to having just one print. Alternatively, a museum department might decide to hold the second print in storage, unexhibited, in perpetuity, existing for the sole purpose of preservation. Either way, it is a strategy only of delaying the inevitable, not a permanent solution.41 Not long after the Lincoln Center convening, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House hosted a day-long colloquium on the same pressing topic, reported on in Afterimage as “Color Photographs: Must They Always Fade?” The director of the Eastman House noted that “the tendency of color to fade was an issue that gave the museum ‘grave concern’ but one that ‘they had ignored in the hope it would go away. But it hasn’t and won’t,’ he said.” 42 This seemingly counterintuitive mix of grave concern and denial strikes me as a not entirely inaccurate description of how both institutions and individuals have continued to deal with the fact of photographic fading. One participant rather boldly suggested that museums simply “accept that reality of life and live with it.” 43

robe r t h e i n e c k e n’s v a n i s h i n g p h o t o g r a p h s It was this sort of proposition—accepting reality and living with it—that intrigued the radically experimental photographic artist Robert Heinecken during the same decade. Heinecken had been on the photo faculty at UCLA and, famously, referred to his own position as a “paraphotographer”—

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an acknowledgment that his true role was not to craft conventionally fine photographic prints but rather to create work around and about photography and photographic issues. His Vanishing Photographs series actively engaged with the provocation to simply “accept that reality of life and live with it.” The curator Eva Respini characterizes Heinecken’s Vanishing Photographs series as representing “a departure” in his career, but it is also possible to understand them as continuous with earlier efforts and concerns. Already in 1970, Heinecken had begun to experiment with the chemical foundations of photography, demonstrating an engagement with the photographic medium that did not take the various chemicals’ roles as a given.44 In other words, Heinecken was not concerned with using the chemicals and light-sensitive materials intrinsic to the medium in a prescribed manner. Rather, he took these foundational elements of the medium as malleable and fluid aspects of the photographic process. In 1970, he worked with bleaching and chemical stains as components of the photographic printing process, actions that produced images, typically of nude forms, that read as ghostly traces and absences. The absented figures in these bleached and stained prints convey an active sense of not seeing something—or, rather, of seeing only its trace or afterimage. Around the same time, Heinecken was also experimenting with iterative photocopy (Xerox) representations. He ran a single image through multiple generations of photocopy reduction. With each iteration, the image changed, becoming smaller and less well defined. The process was certainly one that took place over time, as Heinecken fed the same image into a Xerox machine over and over.45 The technology itself recorded the movement and change that it produced, and the image Heinecken started with slowly faded into obliteration through the accrued detritus of visual noise. These studies demonstrate Heinecken’s processbased interest in the material and technical conditions of image loss and degradation, as well as connections between the visual aesthetics, chemical

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materiality, and technology of each. The Vanishing Photographs series is a variation on this extended set of interests. In keeping with his tendency to work with images already circulating in the world, Heinecken created the Vanishing Photographs by layering preexisting images made by his friends Les Krims, Jerry Uelsmann, and others (see figure 5). His use of fine art images, rather than media images, is a departure. The choice of fine art photographs, rather than the media images he more frequently worked with, as subjects of disappearance makes sense: norms of cultural value suggest that the preservation stakes are higher with fine art photographs, as these are, by the default assumption of their image category, objects to be cared for and preserved (we can look back to Price on this front). The Vanishing Photographs that I looked at live in Robert Heinecken’s archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and there are other versions held at the artist’s estate in Chicago. These material details matter: because they are categorized as archival material rather than fine prints themselves, the prints are still housed in the original folder that Heinecken put them in, in 1973, with his instructions intact. Heinecken exhibited the prints several times in the 1970s; his set of installation instructions for the exhibiting venue is worth citing in full: 11 unprocessed prints. Do not open the black envelope until the last convenient time before the opening. These prints will gradually darken because of the exhibition lighting. I am supplying a total of 11 prints (6 Krims, 5 Uelsmann) + I suggest you show 4 prints at a time (2 Krims + 2 Uelsmann) and when those become too dark, exchange them for 4 different ones. Space the 3 changes to last through the span of the exhibition. This may require that at some points you are exhibiting fairly dark obscure prints. If you sense you will run out of pictures, notify me and I’ll send some more. . . . Or if have any questions, call me. All are 11 × 14 and need a board behind them, no matte [sic] etc. All the Krims are horizontal. The Uelsmann are 2 horizontal and 4 vertical. You can open the envelope to see what you have but keep them [out] of the light until ready.

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Figure 5. Robert Heinecken, Untitled, from the series Vanishing Photographs, 1973. Courtesy of the Estate of Robert Heinecken.

*new note—8 have been shown and are green, 3 have not and are still yellowish. Do whatever you feel is right.

As a researcher in the archive, I was at a remove from the role of a curator, whom I imagined unpacking these prints and doing their best to interpret and execute the artist’s instructions, which manage to be both highly specific and impossibly open ended. The series is not for the curatorial faint of heart. Heinecken, rightly, treats the prints as objects with a discrete lifespan, a lifespan that the curator will be responsible for both activating and ending. In a way, his notes read as the framework for a theatrical production: each set of images will comprise one act of the performance, which, in turn, is equivalent with the run of the exhibition. In fact, particularly in 1973, one more

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easily imagines this provocation within the realm of performance art, an area of aesthetic practice in which ephemerality and the performative nature of aesthetic engagement is a given. But the fact of Heinecken’s insistence that he operate within the discourse of photography—or rather, paraphotography—persistently pushing at the medium’s edges, highlights the specifically photographic aspects of Heinecken’s provocation. The concluding note is particularly evocative: “Do whatever you feel is right.” This is perhaps simply a necessary act of trust and a demonstration of an artist’s willingness to surrender the outcome of a process to a curatorial collaborator. But it also prompts the larger (and literal) question: What is right? What is the correct response to watching a photograph fade before one’s eyes? Is it scientific fascination, perhaps along the lines of what the experimenters studying fading prints in 1855 felt? Is it a sense of sadness or loss? Is it, as the participant in the Eastman House symposium proposed, an acceptance of the fleeting nature of life itself? Beyond these emotional states, there are practical questions for the exhibiting institution: How dark is too dark? When is the image “over”? And what do you do with the print at that point? These questions predate, by decades, the creative set of solutions offered by Phil Chang’s Cache, Active but begin to engage both the experiential and material concerns that the Vanishing Photographs prompt.

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Pa r t i i

Ways of Seeing and “Live” Photography Four Case Studies

the s.s. c opyrig ht proje c t: “ o n p h o t o g r a p h y ,” 1978 In 1978, Heinecken revisited the potential of actively fading photographic processes, this time with a more clearly delineated subject and narrative. The New York–based writer and critic Susan Sontag had just published her extended series of essays, originally written for the New York Review of Books, as the now iconic book On Photography.1 It would be difficult to overestimate the book’s impact in photography circles, nor the level of disdain heaped on it. But tracing this provides a useful window on the state of the then still nascent field of photography and photographic studies. In 1977, Heinecken was a faculty member in the UCLA Photography Department, which he had founded in 1962. Southern California was, at the time, an experimental outpost of photographic activity, occupying a position like Chicago, Rochester, or Nova Scotia, all of which were somewhat fringe satellites with their own distinct identities of experimental photographic practice in relation to the most visible hub of activity, New York. New galleries dedicated to photography were just beginning to emerge, more museums were beginning to collect photographs as art, and universities were incorporating the medium in their arts programs. For those dedicated to photography’s expressive potential as a distinct medium in art, there was a heartening level of new activity, disparate though it must have seemed. Writing about photography was largely confined to journals and publications specific to an audience of photographers championing the medium’s value as an expressive art form.2 Sontag’s interest in photography was different, however, and, by dint of her

41

position in the literary world, she had a broad and public audience that reached far beyond the circles of art photographers and an emerging generation of curators, scholars, and educators devoted to their work. Sontag was interested in photography as an art form, but she was also interested in how photographs were used in social situations, as tools of communication, and, fundamentally, as instruments of power. The first edition of On Photography included Sontag’s author photo, made by Jill Krementz, who has a specialty in photographing writers at work. The image shows Sontag at her desk in her New York apartment: she leans back over the arm of her chair, at ease, cigarette in hand, meeting the gaze of the camera with the relaxed confidence of a professionally and intellectually accomplished forty-one-year-old woman.3 The set of portraits Heinecken made in response, both titled The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography,” are simultaneously straightforward and bafflingly complex (see figure 6). They are among the most materially complex photographic works I know. Each side of the double portrait is comprised of hundreds of instant black and white prints, the tones of which collectively produce Sontag’s image. On the left panel, each individual print depicts a text passage from On Photography; they are deliberately overexposed, underexposed, or “properly” exposed. This pattern of exposure repeats on the right panel, but, rather than text passages, the prints depict scenes from daily life. In short, one of the two portraits is built from Sontag’s text, the other from Heinecken’s images. As the curator Eva Respini has noted, to a contemporary eye, the collected set of small, rectangular prints evokes nothing more than the pixels that build a digital image.4 Art critic Christopher Knight has described them as akin to the Ben Day dots in a Roy Lichtenstein painting.5 From a distance, the portrait on the left, built from text, appears to be less visually interesting; this makes sense, as it is simply more visually uniform. From up close, however, the text snippets invite the viewer to puzzle over their meaning: How (or why) did Heinecken choose these snippets over

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Figure 6. Robert Heinecken, The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography,” 1978. Collage of black and white instant prints attached to composite board with staples, a. 47 ¹⁵∕₁₆ × 47 ¹⁵∕₁₆ in., b. 47 ¹³∕₁₆ × 47 ¹³∕₁₆ in., c. 11 × 8 ½ in. Purchased as the partial gift of Celeste Bartos. © Robert Heinecken Trust. Courtesy of Petzel, New York. Digital image © Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

others? My own viewing notes—I found these snippets within the text panel portrait—reflect both Sontag’s themes in On Photography and the necessarily fragmentary experience of “reading” in this way: photographs point with oppressive wonder . . . control over tonal values . . . opened the blinds to a new world vision . . . the camera looks for me . . . to the picturesque desolations . . . one must already see it . . . taste cannot be overestimated . . . society contradicts their form . . . photographers often have sexual fantasies . . . it worked with equally stunning effects . . . not piercing but democratic . . . virtually exhausted by painters . . . impartially observing, witnessing . . . I am the one who changes focus . . . photographers feel obliged to protest . . . the camera looks for me . . . subjects considered to be disreputable . . . not only enlarge the camera’s powers . . . close-ups of cigarette butts . . . art as reactionary, elitist . . . this very passivity—and ubiquity—of photographs.

One gets an idea of tone, but nothing of content; the snippets provide a glimpse, but nothing more.

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By contrast, although the portrait on the right panel follows a similar built structure to create Sontag’s image, the individual prints record an array of what appear to be scenes from Heinecken’s everyday studio life. From the overexposed upper left corner, following the pattern of lighter prints that create both part of the background and Sontag’s face, we see what look like casual pictures taken on a midday walk around a building: the wheels of a car, a wall with foliage and shadows, a parked motorcycle, a manhole cover, the view from a car’s dashboard into a parking lot, a figure standing in a doorway, and another figure in a plain room. Many of these prints are overexposed enough that the subject of the image is no longer discernible; the print is simply the bright white of a sunny day in Los Angeles (though not a conventionally visible subject, the bright light of the city is familiar and distinct). Prints in the mid-tone range appear primarily on the left and right edges of the portrait and around Sontag’s facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) and shoulders. Though cars and motorcycles appear in these tones as well, for the most part we’ve left the bright glare of a sunny day and moved either inside or to areas of shade and foliage: individual prints show interiors and, prevalently, the same two figures that appear in the lighter prints—a shirtless man in jeans in various degrees of an exaggerated contrapposto pose, flaunting his pale torso, and perhaps the same man, in a button-down shirt, standing without exaggeration. Finally, the darkest prints form Sontag’s long, dark hair and lips. These images, when discernible at all within the dark exposures of the individual prints, seem to repeat a darkened interior composition and also include a kind of still life of an arced arrangement of prints against a dark background. Throughout the composition of both panels, a number of individual prints are visibly yellowed. This is the result of Heinecken’s choice of material: Polaroid instant prints. The process was unusual for instant prints: the particular camera model Heinecken used required the photographer to manually coat the surface of the developed print with a handheld

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applicator in order to fully fix the image. Heinecken chose to not fully coat all of his prints, knowing that they would fade over time, some more than others, depending on both the original exposure and the degree to which they were “properly” fixed. Indeed, in a letter responding to John Szarkowski’s query on the issue, Heinecken replied that “the gradual aging yellowing process was conceived by me and built in as an integral part of its eventual context.”6 Szarkowski, who had just acquired the large work for the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, had written to Heinecken that “it looks wonderful, and may be the first photograph ever made that will become a great ruin.”7 Seen next to the text-based image panel, the image-based half of the Sontag portrait has remarkable visual depth: at a distance, Sontag’s face is primary; when viewed more closely, a whole world of imagery opens up. Within this detailed visual array, because of the exposure levels, some images reveal themselves fully, and one has the sense of peering into them to see clearly, an experience somewhat like seeking to see in the dark. Like these underexposed images, the overexposed images, too, give hints of their subjects without offering immediate clarity. Together, the objects create a range of photographic perception for the viewer, from the full-size composite image of Sontag that seems, initially, to offer itself clearly; on to its individual parts, themselves evoking a breadth ranging from a brightness that evokes blindness; through visual clarity; and on to a challenge of night vision. This range mirrors the full range of photographic possibility. Heinecken deftly manages to demonstrate that, though mid-range exposures are culturally understood as “correct,” each end of the spectrum has its experiential benefits, and no one type of exposure is more natural than the other. In other words, photographically speaking, there is nothing fundamentally or chemically correct about a “proper” exposure—the images produced by such an exposure are just easier to discern. But discernibility, Heinecken suggests, is not the only valuable criteria.

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I have spent the time to articulate the visual components of the larger images for two reasons: first, because the specific materiality and visual elements of this portrait have never been fully described (and there is ample room for far more detail than what I have noted here), and second, because this double portrait has a duplicate—another version of the “same” double portrait made in the same year, held at the Art Institute of Chicago (see figure 7). The material process of the double creation of these double portraits is worth unfolding: Heinecken, in short, used a tool marketed as “instant” photography to create a temporally complex portrait of individual instantly made images. If it sounds confusing, and even baffling, it’s because it is. The two double “instant” unique portrait sets are a counterintuitive paradox in almost every way; they exceed themselves at every turn. There are over three hundred individual prints in each portrait panel; together, each pair is comprised of six hundred to seven hundred individual prints.8 Each print has been trimmed of its white edges,9 and many are varied in size in order to create the details of the montage. In short, the time involved in creating six hundred to seven hundred instant prints, trimming them, and creating the montage takes this work about as far away from the promises (and premises) of “instant” photography as possible. Heinecken then went on to double this initial process of creating the double portrait by creating a second version—a double double. Together, the two sets—one double portrait held at MoMA in New York, the other at the Art Institute in Chicago, each of which is unique—become an extended and dispersed experiment with the concepts of singularity and reproducibility in photography. Among the distinct attributes of the instant photography process that Heinecken used for The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography” is that, unlike the vast majority of images made at the time, each individual instant print is unique: there is no negative. With this in mind, the initial pair of images reads almost like the result of a challenge or a dare: How might one create a noninstant, nonunique whole out of instant,

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Figure 7. Robert Heinecken, detail of The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography,” 1978. Silver diffusion prints (diptych, photocollages) with typed text panel, 121.5 × 121.3 cm (image, each collage), 27.9 × 21.6 cm (text panel paper). Acquired through a grant from the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation; restricted gift of Sondra Berman Epstein, Reva and David Logan, and the Photography Circle. © Robert Heinecken Trust. Courtesy of Petzel, New York. Photo credit: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. In this image, only one half of the photocollage diptych is reproduced.

unique components? Creating a slowly built, doubled image on a large scale while preserving instant singularity on a small scale is a nice solution. The double of this reads like the ante was upped on that initial challenge or dare— or rather, doubled down. Because now the large-scale pair is also doubled, with another six hundred to seven hundred unique instant images. Fittingly, though, many of those unique images in the AIC version (which I believe was created after the MoMA version) also focus attention on these photographic dynamics of the singular and the reproduced image, and the role of time in a viewer’s concept of the photographic medium. As an embodied photographic paradox, it is incredibly effective. From a distance, the AIC version of The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography” mirrors the MoMA version. Minor visual differences that emerge fairly quickly include a slightly different tilt of the chin, location of the mouth, shape of the hair, tonality of the clothing, and, perhaps most distinctly, a bright white fleck that reads visually as an earring peeking from behind Sontag’s long, dark hair (but is not found in Krementz’s image). A closer comparison shows a different set of individual images: here, Heinecken looks at outdoor street scenes and LA’s distinctive palm trees for the overexposed exteriors, though, notably, some studio scenes and a pale-skinned woman’s bare arms, breasts, and torso, seen from a radically low angle, also fill in the bright areas of the composition. The mid-tones are more complex: a TV; many interiors, including a figure pointing at an exit sign; images from Heinecken’s studio, including a Heineken beer sign; photographs showing the images pinned up around the studio; more cars; a woman’s rear, the shadows forming the shape of a cross; a fan with the image of Jesus; a sign reading “God Is Love”; a woman posing nude on a lawn; another woman wearing a sweatshirt but nude from the waist down; calendars; photographs of other artists’ work; a man in double denim and sunglasses reclined on a lawn; a wall of keys; the shadows of foliage; a motorcycle; the same bare-torsoed woman that appears in the bright areas, shown here in different poses; and more.

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Intriguingly, among the studio shots, two instances of playful selfreferentiality in particular stand out. One is the appearance of sequences of instant prints, arranged on the floor, at least one of which even shows the backs from which the images were peeled after their instant development. The other is the presence of at least ten individual images of the Sontag montage as it is being made in Heinecken’s studio, appearing in the montage itself. Again, the image multiplies itself, is built from itself. The artwork documents its own production. Perhaps the most provocative appearance of this portrait-within-itself is in the top left corner: Sontag appears in an individual print immediately adjacent to a print taken in Heinecken’s studio of the Heineken beer sign and the woman’s bare bottom. Sontag and Heinecken, side by side. This portrait-within-a-portrait game continues in the opposite, lower right-hand corner, where, like in both of the MoMA portraits, Heinecken’s signature is rendered in staples. Immediately above the black prints that back the stapled signature is what appears to be a self-portrait of Heinecken, his face obscured by the camera he uses as he looks at a mirror. It’s the original bathroom selfie as artist’s signature. The highlights of Sontag’s face are built largely from shots of Heinecken’s studio and images of nude women, while her dark hair is largely composed of underexposed images of the montage in production—further documents of the portrait-in-process building the portrait itself. The time necessary to create these works speaks to a kind of obsession, as the artist’s repeated visual pairing of himself and the author seems to confirm. His choice to build Sontag’s face from images of his studio and images of nude women reads unavoidably as the trope of the male artist’s creative space as the source of the female-author-turned-subject, rendered as literally as possible. This layer of self-referentiality, which does not appear as overtly in the MoMA iteration, also includes the appearance of large format cameras: one appears next to a bright window, and the other appears next to a bright television screen. In the spectrum of available cameras, the cheap instant pictures that

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build The S. S. Copyright Project portraits are on the opposite end of production value as the prints made by large format cameras.10 Finally, Heinecken embedded a clear reference to the famed Zone System, developed by the preeminent figure in American photography at that time, Ansel Adams. The top right strip of prints in the AIC version demonstrates the full range of the ten zones, each, notably, as necessary as the next. To summarize: the original portrait of Sontag inspired four different painstakingly produced montages, made from over 1200 individual instant prints, each individually trimmed and placed to create the larger whole. Why was Heinecken so devoted to this image? The text panel that accompanies the diptych goes some way toward verbally articulating the artist’s fascination and repeated return to Sontag’s portrait. In it, he writes that he is interested in “the relationships between A. Knowledge B. Subject Matter, C. Craft, and D. Distancing: to content.” On Photography was met with deeply mixed reactions—and quite vocally negative ones from several in the photography community—upon its publication as a book. The curator Lynn Warren suggests that Heinecken’s response with the portrait is “sarcastic,” and A. D. Coleman reads it as a full critique of Sontag.11 But in terms of their views on photography, Heinecken’s and Sontag’s sensibilities were not far off from one another. Heinecken’s message is not, to me, clear. And yet what does seem evident is Heinecken’s material interest in this large set of images as, potentially, a pivot between chemical instability and fading and a broader set of considerations about the cultural expectations of photographs as they are rendered along a spectrum (a zone system, as it were), from visibility to disappearance.12

a dr i a n pi pe r’s f o o d f o r t h e s p i r i t , 1972 In both versions of The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography,” the individual prints exist along a range of tones, each of which has value for its contribution to the image of the larger montage. It demonstrates the collective value

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of even the darkest of exposures of any one image. While there is a practical function to these tones, in building the image, there is a self-referential aspect as well: Sontag’s image is built, in one version, with her own image, which the viewer must work to discern. While both the artist and the work occupy a different realm of aesthetic discourse, American artist Adrian Piper’s iconic Food for the Spirit (1971) engages not completely unrelated issues. And, while I wouldn’t want to take the comparison too far, both works feature prints exposed along an axis of light to dark, both address a dialogue between text and image, both engage lowbrow photographic techniques, and both address gender. Food for the Spirit has generated a robust critical commentary since Piper first wrote about the experience of creating the work, in 1981, and exhibited the work, in 1987. It occupies a foundational spot in the artist’s multidisciplinary oeuvre.13 To be clear, there is nothing chemically unstable in Food for the Spirit; the images are properly fixed. Piper’s engagement is with the corresponding question of visibility, and both the personal experience and politics of that visibility, as potentially rendered by the photographic medium. In the summer of 1971, for the month of July, Piper sequestered herself in her New York apartment, immersed herself in an intensive study of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), practiced yoga, and fasted, consuming only juice. In what has since been referred to as a private performance, she created two sets of documentation from the period, one photographic and the other an audio recording. The audio recording has been lost, but the photographs present a significant philosophical and experiential engagement with concepts of presence, visibility, and objectivity. Unlike Heinecken’s portrait set, which was a playful experimentation with the Zone System and with the ideas of a critic that moved through questions of a complex but essentially photographic nature, Piper’s visual and philosophic study opens more broadly into ruminations on and experiments with the existence of a self in relation to an exterior world. The

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Figures 8–10. Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971. Fourteen gelatin silver prints (reprinted in 1997), each 14.81 × 14.5 in. (37,7 × 37 cm.). Detail: photographs 2, 6, and 13 of 14. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Family of Man Fund. © Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation Berlin.

fourteen photographs she made during this period are widely recognized as foundational to her career-long embrace of working as an artist, a philosopher, and a serious practitioner of yoga. The photographs present a challenge to the conventional terms of visibility. In each image, Piper stands alone, facing a mirror, expressionless and in various states of dress (see figures 8–10). As the sequence progresses, the darkness of the room in which she stands varies; at the conclusion, her form is nearly indiscernible from the darkness surrounding her. The camera she used to make the images, a Kodak Hawkeye Instamatic R4 camera, appears in every frame, held at torso height.14

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The impulse to make this record stemmed directly from the experience of reading, practicing yoga, and fasting, in relative isolation. She recalled the experience ten years later in an essay published in the journal High Performance in 1981: The Critique is the most profound book I have ever read, and my involvement in it was so great that I thought I was losing my mind, in fact losing my sense of self completely. . . . Often, the effects of Kant’s ideas were so strong that I couldn’t take it anymore. I would have to stop reading in the middle of a sentence, on the verge of hysterics, and go to my mirror and peer at myself to make sure I was still there. Since I was on a two-month juice and water fast at the same time, this seemed often to be a serious question. It felt as though I was on the verge of abdicating my individual self on every level.15

The photographs in turn reflect this physical and mental dynamic: over fourteen pictures, Piper’s reflection in the mirror becomes increasingly difficult to discern, increasingly absorbed into the darkness of the room and the air around her. As Piper peers at herself in the mirror, we, too, peer at her. The photographs produce, for the viewer, the visual sense of a self vanishing before one’s eyes. She is seeking affirmation of her material self; a viewer, by contrast, may be considering the opposite. In her recollection of the experience, Piper explained the process and its effect on her: To anchor myself in the physical world, I ritualized my frequent contacts with the physical appearance of myself in the mirror through Food for the Spirit. I rigged up a camera and tape recorder next to the mirror so that every time the fear of losing myself overtook me and drove me to the “reality check” of the mirror, I was able both to record my physical appearance objectively, and also record myself on tape repeating the passage in the Critique that was currently driving me to self-transcendence. The sight and sound of me, the physically embodied Adrian Piper, repeating passages from Kant reassured me by demarcating the visual, verbal, and aural boundaries of my individual self, and reminded me of the material conditions of my mental state.16

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Piper had experimented since the 1960s with alternative states of consciousness, an effect of which can be the felt or perceived sense of one’s own physical body disappearing or dissolving into its surrounding space. Her impulse to make a material recording—both visual and verbal—speaks to the perceived objectivity of the tools at hand: photography and tape recording. Though Piper hasn’t described the temporal aspect of the original photographs, the objects’ physical relationship to her lived experience is worth considering. They are small and square and appear to have been commercially printed, perhaps at a nearby drugstore. She would have had to have exposed the roll of film, taken it to be developed, waited to pick it up, and then later arranged the prints in the black binder (in which they still reside), perhaps at that point sequencing the images from lightest to darkest.17 While the act of making the pictures was clearly significant, she would not have seen the visible results of her reality check until some time later. Likewise, the details of this performance were slow to become public, emerging bit by bit, or becoming lost altogether. Piper first wrote about the experience almost ten years later in the High Performance piece quoted above; the short essay was accompanied by photographic images from a different private performance. The photographs documenting Food for the Spirit were not publicly shown until 1987, a full sixteen years after they were made, on the occasion of a twenty-year survey of Piper’s work, Adrian Piper: Reflections, 1967–1987, at the Alternative Museum in New York. By this point, the audio recordings no longer existed, having been accidentally recorded over. This period of not being seen seems fitting for the images at hand. The art historian Kobena Mercer glosses the text in which Piper was immersed, The Critique of Pure Reason: “Kantian rationalism, broadly speaking, rejects the empiricist view that our knowledge of the world is dependent on our senses; it mistrusts perception and makes the phenomenal world of appearance secondary to the noumenal realm of things-in-themselves.”18

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Mercer reads the work in relation to Kant’s ideal of “a transcendental self that overcomes all limitations of time and place in its quest for true knowledge.”19 This dissolution of self entails an abdication of individual and subjective ego in favor of a detached and universal consciousness. Piper’s self-portraits show this, while simultaneously demonstrating her resistance to this very process: photographs and, indeed, the very act of photography serve precisely as an interruption to such a dissolution of self, a material reminder of the thing-ness and present-ness of a distinct body in a distinct space. The struggle, as Mercer puts it, of experiencing disembodiment “as simultaneously ecstatic and entropic” is seen in the “movement of an ‘I’ between appearance and disappearance.”20 The photographs, rather succinctly and brilliantly, demonstrate this simultaneity: they convey both the dissolution and its interruption. In imagining the moment of Piper’s performance, too, the act of taking the pictures (prior to the existence of the photographs as material objects) likewise gestures toward this simultaneity of a dissolving, transcendent self suspended in the space of a frame, as record. This duality, expressed so movingly by the photographs themselves, is tempting to read on the level offered by the sequence of images, as a contemplation of a body at one with its surroundings, both immersed into and absorbed by a transcendent field. In this regard, the images are both calm and poised, accepting of this dissolution. To my eye, they bear none of the anxiety Piper expresses in her later text. Reading the two together, image and text, I am struck most of all by their divergent moods and emotional states. Visually, Piper appears to regard her reflected self-image in a state of balanced contemplation: Her direct gaze never wavers. Whether fully nude or fully clothed, her body language echoes the unwavering tone of her gaze. She calmly absorbs her surroundings, and they absorb her. In the text, however, Piper conveys a state of visceral and emotional intensity and flux, the swirling inner counterpart to a resolved outer state.

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Mercer suggests that the movement in the images “between visibility and unvisibility, is not so much a ‘Who am I?’ question about identity as an ‘Am I?’ question about the very limits of human ontology.”21 His choice of the word unvisibility rather than invisibility is instructive. It’s not that Piper cannot be seen, which the latter “invisibility” would suggest; rather, she is not seen. Her lack of visibility, in Mercer’s reading, is active rather than a consistent state. In this regard, Piper’s experiment with visibility assumes both a racial and a gendered dimension, which are perhaps both unavoidable and central to Food for the Spirit, as is the struggle conveyed in the text: Piper is not the privileged white, male body that conventionally—and, typically, unquestioningly—assumes the role of a “universal” voice, the transcendent I that Kant implicitly invokes. Citing Fred Moten’s analysis of Food for the Spirit, Mercer recognizes Piper’s “confidence in her entitlement to speak from that universalist position,”22 while seeing, in the same breath, the clear cultural discrepancy between Kant’s subject position and Piper’s—a discrepancy that puts the very possibility of the transcendent universalist ideal offered by Kant into radical question by the enactment of Piper’s study and the visual nature of her own critique. In Food for the Spirit, the aesthetic potential of photographic unvisibility, and a slow shift from appearance to disappearance, is intertwined both with fundamental questions of what it means to be or to experience a sense of self in relation to the surroundings of that self and with the necessity of recognizing the invariably shifting meaning of the condition of visibility in relation to one’s sense of consciousness. In this regard, the extended private state of Piper’s initially private performance is crucial: in the very fact of its becoming public, the terms shift. Her personal experience, of being sequestered alone in her loft, is entirely internal. The impulse to interrupt that experience of dissolution—to record it and, thus, arrest it—is what makes it both visible and marked with an individual identity: nonuniversal. While experience may be transcendent, a portrait, especially a photographic one,

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is always marked by material context: place, time, identity. That central role of the photographic medium—to fix—is rendered here in arrestingly, and perhaps painfully, public terms. Food for the Spirit experiments with conditions of visibility in modes moving from philosophic abstraction to photographic enactment. In the face of the dissolution of self at the level of consciousness, Piper’s impulse in the photograph’s creation was to remind herself of her own material existence. Correspondingly, as the photographs visualize the dissolution of self into the space of consciousness, they also, simultaneously, interrupt that very process. The prints serve as the record of that act of interruption. The historian and critic Ariella Azoulay proposes a deepened study of understanding what she calls “the event of photography”: the role of the camera itself, and the photographic act, as it “generates events” and acts in a catalytic mode, often facilitating exchange and relationships among people.23 Azoulay differentiates between “the event of photography” and “the photographed event.” While her examples center around the political impacts catalyzed by picturing marginalized populations, the proposal is, at its core, of an ontological nature, about how we understand and approach what photography is. Azoulay’s insistence on a temporally expansive view of photography is useful when considering Food for the Spirit: the prints that exist in the three-ring binder and the 1997 editioned prints, which circulate more often for exhibitions and publication, each comprise moments of this ongoing, and highly specific, temporality. Piper’s own photographic encounter with her mirrored reflection, in the private space of her Hester Street loft, is similarly worthy of attention. As are the innumerable, ongoing, never finished individual viewings of Piper’s images. Azoulay writes, “The event of photography is never over. It can only be suspended, caught in the anticipation of the next encounter that will allow for its actualization.”24 And, for Azoulay, this event “is made up of an infinite series of encounters”—it is a “unique form of temporality.”25

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Azoulay’s model is compelling for the capaciousness with which it understands both photography and the photographic, and the degree to which the very action and activity of photography holds both profound and nuanced forms of power that, in turn, are deeply consequential to the behavior and thought both of individuals and human relationships. While historically, photographic prints have held the clearest (financial) value, and while dematerialized images are increasingly recognized as well as deeply meaningful bits of code, among the most provocative proposals of artists engaged in questions of photographic ephemerality and visibility are precisely those that redirect conventional notions of value from the seen and fixed to the enacted and unstable. Food for the Spirit occupies all of these realms: the fourteen prints exist as fixed prints, but collectively, they gesture to an expanded photographic experience, a private impulse to render one’s own materiality visible, thereby both visualizing the dissolution of self and ensuring the opposite. Photography, that flexible medium, is central to both aspects of experience. While Piper’s gesture relies on a viewer’s experience of reduced visibility to provoke a sense of fleetingness, and corresponding vulnerability, there is also a power to photographs that can’t be seen at all, that are actively and intentionally withheld. Like the fleeting gestures, these types of images—if we can call them that—may serve primarily to spur imagination, to rely on collective viewers’ knowledge of similar images and, indeed, of the (often crushing) weight of photographic convention. Remarkably, within the category of photographs that glean their impact by virtue of their own invisibility, there are several modes of “being” unseen.

v i si bi l i t y a n d du r at ion: o s c a r m u ñoz , a l i e n t o a n d e l t e s t i g o The Columbian artist Oscar Muñoz has experimented with the relationship of photographic visibility not just to a viewer’s sense of time and value but

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also to the very status of a document. At different moments, Muñoz has asked: How visible does a photograph need to be? And how durational? In short, how much visible substance do we—the viewers—need for a photographic experience? Muñoz has experimented in multiple ways with concepts of photographic ephemerality, considering how history is “a permanent construction made from the episodes, from the events, from the traces and the imprints, or the erasure of the traces, from the past.”26 His series Aliento (Breath) (1995–2002) engages directly and experientially with viewer engagement with such a provocation. Aliento presents a series of polished silver discs that appear simply to be reflective mirrored surfaces; at twenty centimeters in diameter, they are approximately the same width and height as a human face (see figure 11). As the title suggests—but art protocol generally prohibits—to reveal the image, a viewer must not just stand very close to the disc but also breathe onto it, exhaling warm air.27 The moisture in the breath reveals the images: portraits that the artist has mined from his local newspapers covering hostages, missing people, and obituaries. Muñoz comments that the French critic Roland Barthes’s ideas about photography are central here: “[Photography] acquires a power, its full power, when the referent disappears. When we no longer have our loved ones, but only photographs of them, whereupon photography carries the full force and all the evocative power of that person.”28 The journalistic source of Muñoz’s images is significant, referring to the daily—even routine—ravaging of the artist’s Columbian city of Cali by the active drug cartels and their extended violence. Muñoz describes the effects of Cali’s gang rivalry in blunt terms: The cities began to fill up with dead bodies and people started disappearing; bombs went off in businesses and public spaces in Medellín and Cali; people stopped going out at night and movie theaters were empty. Destruction, rubble, broken windows, pools of blood, dust, ashes, and a red river were frequently present in the urban scene, the press, and the TV news.29

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Figure 11. Oscar Muñoz, Aliento (Breath), 1995–2002. Courtesy of Oscar Muñoz and Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas.

But the viewer’s action—in Azoulay’s terms, the event of the photograph coming into being—is central as well. These portraits that viewers are put into the position of breathing life into, one knows, have had multiple lives, likely first existing within the private and domestic realm of family photography, the framework in which photographs often mean—or matter— the most, if to an audience only as extensive as one’s family. The images

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were then reframed at least once before they ultimately appear in Aliento, moving from the private space of the family to the—surely unwanted and unanticipated—space of the obituary page or the news article. Muñoz speaks often of his fascination with the document. In this transition, from the domestic to the public, a visual document has been revised, its referent has irrevocably shifted. And those newspaper pages themselves are fleeting documents, existing in a particular time and place for a limited duration with a function that will itself soon expire: telling the news. Finally, as part of Muñoz’s series, the images return to a latent mode, their visible existence now coterminous with the effort of the viewer. The metaphor of “breathing life” into an image writes itself, but more compellingly, it is the performative action of the viewer that Muñoz insists upon that is worth dwelling on. There is no image, he seems to say, without effort, without intent. You can see it, but you have to work for it, you have to want it enough to do something: you can’t take it for granted or sit back, passively. Muñoz evokes Barthes again, crediting him as the writer who “was fundamental to me to start thinking about photography not as a photographer, but as a person who looks at the act itself more than at the end result.”30 Muñoz revisited the notion of the viewer making an effort to see in his 2011 series El testigo (The Witness) (see figure 12). These images, too, insist that a viewer both slow down and try harder, but through different means. Here, rather than existing in a latent state, waiting for an activating breath, the prints reveal only the faintest emergence of a photographic image: through the series, a largely opaque photographic imagery appears to depict groups of people.31 A viewer knows from the description of the images that, as with Aliento, Muñoz has again chosen journalistic photographs as his source material—documents, again, that carry the “look” and thus, perhaps, the “sense” of what one might imagine a news photograph to be: objective, efficient, neutral, transparent in meaning. The description of the work also informs viewers that these are not just any news photographs; they are

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Figure 12. Oscar Muñoz, El testigo (The Witness), 2011, installation view. Courtesy of Oscar Muñoz and Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas.

iconic moments in Colombia’s history, equivalent, perhaps, to the common visual currency of photographs that, in the United States, are similarly iconic: Neil Armstrong on the moon, a little girl running from napalm, the Times Square V-J Day kiss. The artist describes them as having “been widely circulated in Colombia for decade. . . . They are embedded in the collective consciousness.”32 For an audience outside of Colombia, these iconic images will likely prompt less personal resonance, but Muñoz doesn’t show the known images themselves, at least not in their most recognizable form. Rather, he reframes the imagery toward depicting the bystanders and what he calls the “supporting characters” (see figure 13). As an example, Muñoz shared one source image with me, published in his copy of the multivolume Nueva Historia de Columbia. It is nearly the definition of a textbook image, illustrating a handshake between two guerrilla leaders, establishing a momentary peace that would not last (see figure 14). As Muñoz interprets it, the ostensible protagonists recede, along with their handshake, and the artist turns his attention—

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Figure 13. Oscar Muñoz, El testigo (The Witness), 2011, detail. Courtesy of Oscar Muñoz and Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas.

and thus, ours—to the man between them, “the witness,” to imagine his role, his perspective, his place in this photograph, and in history.33 It is a gesture of shifting historical focus away from the usual, and known, protagonists to consider and account for a more expansive view of whose histories count, who gets recorded, who is named, and whose words, and images, last. I try to imagine a corollary for the U.S.-based iconic images I know best: Who is in the background of John Filo’s photograph that centrally depicts a fallen student at Kent State University and a woman kneeling beside him, crying out? What would it mean to focus on the other figures in the frame

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Figure 14. Source image for Oscar Muñoz’s El testigo (The Witness), 2011. From Jorge Orlando Melo, Jesús Antonio Bejarano, eds., Nueva Historia de Columbia, vol. 2 (Bogotá: Planeta colombiana editorial, 1989), 144. Courtesy of the artist.

instead? Muñoz seems to suggest that viewers might find themselves struggling to recall, or to reconstruct, the details outside of the main event. But in calling attention to this difficulty, Muñoz has already shifted a viewer’s attention to what we—collectively speaking—don’t see, don’t remember. With El testigo, while a viewer isn’t called upon to act, she may struggle to discern an image, question its source, or seek out a previously unseen (and perhaps unheard) figure. Regarding the consistent thematics, achieved through different means, Muñoz writes, “I think that my work is located at a critical or uncertain point where the image or the document is consolidated (or not), materializes (or does not), is created (or is not).”34 The curator José Roca uses the word protografías to describe this uncertain image state.35 But it may be just as useful to see Muñoz’s practice not as prior or adjacent or otherwise somehow

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distinct from photography “proper” but rather as fundamentally central to all of photography. We don’t need a new word, we need a new conceptual framework for the word we have. And, though critics have been compelled to corollate the actions of the viewer with an affective identification with either the subjects or their families, such a distant identification is not necessary. I don’t need to feel I’m somehow affectively and metaphorically keeping a person “alive” with the action of my breath; I can, however, and perhaps more usefully, be more aware of my own attention and the corresponding functions of how I see and understand history, archives, and the impacts of margins and underseen stories relevant to known or commonly seen histories and stories. Muñoz’s aesthetics direct a viewer’s attention to both the physical act of seeing and the desire to see in the first place. Both are novel approaches to photographic images in the twenty-first century: How often today does anyone have to try very hard to see a photograph, let alone to conjure it into being? And yet, in a way, the action that Muñoz both literalizes and extends— the effort involved in viewing a photographic image—reflects the way many, many images operate today. I currently keep about forty thousand photographs in “the cloud,” accessible at any time from either my phone or my computer. A tiny fraction of these images exist in printed material form. All those images seem accessible, though in fact, if I haven’t asked to look at them, they almost don’t exist at all, at least not in a way that is meaningful to me. Rather, speaking materially, those images exist as code, itself a new form of latent image. As one writer has observed, at the heart of Muñoz’s work are “the entropic processes to which both photography and digital archives are subjected.”36 I’ll return to this connection to digital archives, but ultimately, the point I want to underscore here is Muñoz’s attention to the activity of seeing, whether it is a matter of one person’s breath that activates a latent image or an interest in describing a state of indiscernibility, and correspondences between a visual reality and a conceptual experience.

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“l i v e” pho t o gr a ph y Despite photography’s deep connections with the formation of memory and history, Muñoz understands and insists on it as an activity of the present, an activity that is live, right now, happening because of the actions of the viewer. “Live” photography can be figured as a counter to our habituated expectations of the medium, in which looking is attuned both theoretically and experientially toward looking back via a discrete image depicting a necessarily earlier moment. The temporal shifts offered by digital photography have moved decidedly toward present-ness. Think, to start, of the common gesture of a group huddling around a cell phone’s screen to inspect an image (perhaps of themselves) that has just been made, or the speed with which these images can be shared and circulated. I have something different in mind here, however: not just a faster turnaround from the making of an image to its visibility, but a mode of viewing that offers just one chance at visibility, with no further opportunity for repeat viewing. This conception of visual engagement is familiar, even foundational, to the performing arts, although it has remained quite alien to the more static visual arts. Furthermore, a time-based viewing of photographic imagery that is accompanied by distinct parameters of access is in many ways the very opposite of how digital and online media are built. By default, online platforms and systems are generally designed with storage and retrieval in mind. Given the image ecosystem in which they are produced, an insistence on ephemerality can be read only as oppositional. Intentional ephemerality offers a valuable experiential shift for viewers. In Muñoz’s work, the actions of the viewer are central to determining the visibility of the image. In the play of photographic power structures, that shift of the burden of responsibility to the viewer is a weighty one, and it calls to mind the critical role of the viewer in a similarly participatory installation, the Canadian artist Max Dean’s As Yet Untitled (1992–95), which features a robotic contraption that offers viewers an endless supply of vernacular

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photographs, asking, over and over: “This one? What about this one?” A viewer can intervene at any moment to “save” a particular print. Inaction— or passive viewing—results in the print being dropped onto a conveyor belt and sent off to a shredder. Live photography can also shift the power to look away from the viewer, illustrating the social complexity of visibility—a term that has become only more prevalent in recent years, often for its connotations in promoting a visual activism and social justice of representation. Yet the condition of visibility is not so ethically straightforward that its desirability is a given. Visibility can equate to power, presence, and influence as easily as it can launch a profound vulnerability and loss of privacy.

c a s si l s’s b e c o m i n g a n i m a g e Audience members file into a room of total darkness, each person tentatively making their way to a spot around the periphery, knowing to leave space in the center for the forthcoming, and anticipated, performance. While waiting in the black of the room, viewers reach out for the reassurance of a nearby friend or, if alone, consider the strangers standing shoulder to shoulder around them. The darkness shifts marginally, incrementally, as viewers’ eyes adjust, and minor physical shifts are now fully perceptible. The edge of visibility is in sharp focus and so, too, are the shuffling sounds of a group maintaining quiet. This collective anticipatory event precedes and shapes what follows. Eventually, the Los Angeles-based trans performance artist Cassils—who is also a bodybuilder and personal trainer—finds their way to the center of the room and, for the next twenty-five to thirty minutes, pummels and shapes a two-thousand-pound block of clay (see figure 15). During this feat of creation, aggression, endurance, and depletion, the audience hears the sounds of Cassils’s physical exertions, which are only periodically viewable by way of the strobe-like illumination of a photographer’s flash. Since 2012, Cassils has

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Figure 15. Cassils, Becoming an Image, Performance Still No. 4, National Theater Studio, SPILL Festival, London, 2013. Photograph by Cassils with Manuel Vason. Courtesy of the artist.

performed Becoming an Image fourteen times, each time working with and against a photographer to disrupt the dynamic of being seen and made a subject while at the same time creating a distinct space of embodied visibility for one specific trans body and, by extension, an underseen demographic. The scholar Jennifer Doyle described the visual aspect of the performance this way: “You only see a flash image, frozen for a second into the retina. . . . The image the audience member sees feel distinctly photographic.”37 And Cassils, too, has offered a reinvigorated conception of the possibilities of the photographic medium within the framework of the performance: “When the flash of [the photographer’s] camera goes off, it will illuminate the image for maybe an eighth of a second, and the light is so bright that it will burn an image into your retina, creating, essentially, a live photograph.”38 Ultimately,

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a central question of the performance is a straightforward one: How does the camera record and make visible specific identities? Though this is hardly a new question, the basic dynamic of looking and recording is one that operates only within and against existing paradigms of visibility. While some subjects are overly seen, or rather, made visible to the point of oppressing particular demographics through the construction of visible frameworks of existence, other subjects—entire communities and demographics—remain far too unseen, literally illegible to the common cultural functions of image creation and, ultimately, historical visibility. Becoming an Image engages a full spectrum of this dynamic, ranging from the initial creation of an image, to its consumption by an audience, to its ultimate presence (or lack thereof) in an archive, a location that sets the stage for the possibility of future histories. For Cassils, these aesthetics and politics of the visibility of trans bodies operate both currently and historically. Culturally, the performance arrived in advance of a highly politicized national conversation in the United States around trans visibility and, specifically, both the policing and legislation of trans bodies’ movement through and occupation of public spaces and the very possibility of visibility within new imaging and data technologies.39 Cassils conceived the piece as a response to the thin historical representation of trans and non-gender-conforming bodies in the One Archives, a resource dedicated to preserving the largest repository of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender materials in the world.40 It was framed, then, as an implicit critique of the institutional modes of establishing histories through archival documentation—a practice that favors those subjects deemed visible in the first place—in the existence of primary documentation. It became, too, a counterpoint to the experience of having been made a subject, having been subsumed into representations designed to augment the ideas, gestures, and careers of others. To this end, for each performance,

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Cassils requests a photographer who is white and male, ideally with an ego prepared to respond and react to Cassils’s rigorous parameters.41 These parameters are explicitly designed to interrupt a usual photographic encounter: the photographer must work in total darkness, with no possibility of intentionally framing his subject, able to respond only to cues of the sounds of bare footsteps, breath, and the physical exertion of the sculpting. Cassils describes the relationship of subject to photographer as one that inverts the typical power dynamic, but also one that thrives primarily on a shared collaborative tension between the two as they enact a form of dance. The photographer, ideally, responds rhythmically to Cassils’s breath, footsteps, and movements, either heard or felt in the darkness, as a kind of blind dance.42 The audience is similarly foundational to the performance (see figure 16). Passive participation in Becoming an Image is unlikely, if not impossible. In the absence of typical vision, even subtle sound becomes vital, and eyesight is transformed into a disorienting experience of blinding brightness followed by retinal afterburn, all intended to jar viewers into a bodily engagement with the very act of viewing.43 Becoming an Image, in short, engages a deeply photographic framework of production and resistance while refusing, at every turn, the ingrained internal dynamics of that exchange, from durational expectation, to photographer/subject power structures, to the privileging of eyesight over a more fully embodied awareness of vision and visibility. This refusal inverts the typical dynamics of a photographic exchange or encounter and creates a viscerally enlivened viewer: sounds heightened in the darkness, the discomfort of bodies together, fleeting— yet searing—visual flashes, and the perceptual persistence of those flashes, lingering and present well after the moment of visibility has passed. The dynamics of looking, visibility, and the cultural and systemic power structures that shape these exchanges are activated, at every level.

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Figure 16. Cassils, Becoming an Image, Performance Still No. 3, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Historic Casting Hall, 2016. Photograph by Cassils with Zachary Hartzell. Courtesy of the artist.

t h e bi a s of r e c o gn i t ion Becoming an Image is about disrupting the logic of visibility. As such, though it insists on a highly performative and “live” notion of engagement, Becoming an Image also intersects—as I see it—precisely with the emerging yet deeply hidden codes of visibility that are being written into the algorithms charged with preserving, organizing, “seeing,” and therefore “understanding” our individual, private lives. Nascent forms of computer vision are routinely trained to understand gender as a binary—to visually predict “male” or “female” based on average physiognomic appearance. One must be one or the other. The logic of the machine reproduces the logic of the public restroom as both, ultimately, enact preexisting human bias. We are accustomed to understanding this subjective dynamic in the realm of politics, where it is expected. But

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a more nuanced danger presents itself in the realm of algorithmic coding, as this system appears to be objective yet in fact augments and perpetuates the priorities and world view of the engineers designing the artificial “vision.” In his 2017 essay “Physiognomy’s New Clothes,” software engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who leads Google’s Machine Intelligence group in Seattle, examines the current state of affairs with regard to bias and machine learning, taking into account both a history of scientific racism, which is deeply informed by photography, and other seemingly objective measures, as well as current practices either squarely within or highly at risk of perpetuating existing cultural biases around race, gender, and other often visibly encoded identities. He succinctly explains: Rapid developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled scientific racism to enter a new era, in which machine-learned models embed biases present in the human behavior used for model development. Whether intentional or not, this “laundering” of human prejudice through computer algorithms can make those biases appear to be justified objectively.44

Agüera y Arcas further cautions: In an era of pervasive cameras and big data, machine-learned physiognomy can also be applied at unprecedented scale. Given society’s increasing reliance on machine learning for the automation of routine cognitive tasks, it is urgent that developers, critics, and users of artificial intelligence understand both the limits of the technology and the history of physiognomy, a set of practices and beliefs now being dressed in modern clothes.45

Parallel cases exist in race, criminal study, temperament, and gender, illuminating the risk for already vulnerable populations to remain unseen, and thus repressed, in machine learning and computer vision applications.46 Agüera y Arcas’s account is useful particularly as a window into the clear alarm within the very tech companies that are at the forefront of widespread

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abuse of customers’ rights and privacy. In her widely influential book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018), the scholar Safiya Umoja Noble looks at Google in particular and presents the company’s long history with profoundly racist and gendered search results as evidence of the false claims to neutrality such results tend to suggest. The disproportionate harm inflicted by new and seemingly “objective” technology on vulnerable and already marginalized populations and communities is, itself, increasingly visible. In their 2016 volume The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online, Noble and her coeditor Brendesha M. Tynes called for intersectional critical race technology studies to address the increasingly pervasive power yielded by the deployment of artificial intelligence and technology in ways that reinscribe the racialized and gendered power dynamics prevalent in politics, culture, and daily life that routinely oppress and marginalize.47 A robust scholarly discourse and critique has mapped both the histories and the futures of the dynamics of visibility in racialized terms. Simone Browne demonstrated the through line in the United States from slaveowners’ use of visibility as a means of surveillance to the common use of digital surveillance today.48 While visibility is often understood as a desirable and empowered state, these studies clearly demonstrate that such a framework is predicated first and foremost on an individual’s or community’s position within a system of power that has, at least in the United States, been defined for centuries by the extraordinarily limited vantage point and imagination of white men.49 Accordingly, the biases of those creating new systems of visibility and the biases already embedded in cultural products, such as the extensive archives of photographs on which much computer vision is trained, are both repeated and extended in new codes and algorithms that, paradoxically, appear as neutral. Facial recognition is, in many ways, the most visible way many contemporary users of smart phone technology encounter the immediate and visible

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results of artificial intelligence and machine learning as it relates to computer vision. In the popular consciousness, 2017 was something of a banner year in this regard. Updates to the iPhone, for instance, in that year included automatic facial recognition technology in the camera and photography applications, which was marketed as a convenience to help users sort their photographs, connect with their friends, or even simply open secure access to their phones.50 Individual tagging became more visible on social media sites as well, with users routinely shown suggestions of “friends” to identify, ostensibly for purposes of social connection but ultimately to enlarge the pool of readable faces in the social networks’ facial recognition data training sets.51 Popular facial recognition computer vision programs regularly include a narrow repertoire of ways to identify individuals. The visual recognition API Clarifai, for instance, will discern a human face and offer sentiment recognition, the percentage likeliness that a particular face is expressing anger, joy, sorrow, or surprise. The binary limits of gender are also readily apparent features of computer vision programs. Microsoft Cognitive Services, for example, will isolate human faces within a photograph and offer an age and gender (for example: fifteen years old, male).52 The artist Trevor Paglen has experimented in some depth with these programs, collaborating with the artist Hito Steyerl to produce Machine Readable Hito (2017) (see figure 17). In this series of photographs, Steyerl enacts the sentiments visible to the computers, contorting her face into a series of images that, particularly in the work’s gridded presentation, recalls nothing so much as the physiognomic studies in the 1850s that isolated and electronically stimulated specific groups of facial muscles, all toward the greater cause of objectively reading the signals of human faces and, ultimately, outsourcing the job.53 Each image is captioned by the percentage of confidence the program has in its identification of either age, emotion, or gender. Collectively, they demonstrate the lack of nuance available in computer vision. Confidence in assigning Steyerl’s gender oscillates wildly from image to image, from a low of 49.2 percent

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Figure 17. Trevor Paglen, Machine Readable Hito, 2017. Adhesive wall material, 55 ⅛ × 193 in. Courtesy of the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

to a high of 91.96 percent probability that Steyerl is female. It is difficult not to notice the gender stereotypes at play. The most “male” image in the grid shows a rather neutral Steyerl, her expression conveying to my (human, subjective) eye a sense of weary disregard, whereas at her most “female,” her expression is contorted into a vaguely maniacal smile, a theatrical send-up of a “woman on the edge.” Similarly, throughout, there is an unfortunate lack of ability to capture the overall sentiment of a person clearly aware of the absurd overacting necessary to produce this range of expression.54 More troubling than a computer vision program failing to discern the nuances of either a particular expression or an artwork is its failing to detect a human being at all. This was the experience of Joy Buolamwini, a Ghanaian American computer scientist based at the MIT Media Lab, who found that her dark skin made her virtually undetectable to facial recognition programs. Unnervingly, Buolamwini resolves her encounter with invisibility with the all too simple gesture of donning a white mask, nearly featureless

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in its plastic contours, so that the computer can “see” her. The experience prompted Buolamwini’s digital activism, featured in the recent 2020 documentary Coded Bias.55 Returning to the thorny problem of search results that conform to the biases of those writing the algorithms and, worse, to the biases deeply embedded in received visual culture, the cofounder of the AI Now Institute, Kate Crawford, outlines the scope of the challenge: “We can scrub these systems to neutral. We can ‘delete’ bias. But we have to ask the question, ‘Remove it to what?’ What is the baseline of the world that we are establishing as neutral?”56 Pointing out the challenge of demographic representation by citing the fact that fewer than 8 percent of CEOs in the United States are women, Crawford asks: Should that be what you see? Or should we be choosing something more aspirational? Or would we show 40 percent of CEOs as underrepresented minorities? What we’re talking about now is either, do you try to replicate the world as it is, with its already extraordinary forms of inbuilt inequality, or do you try to make an intervention with these systems? Do you try to make the world as you would have it be; do you try to make it into a utopian machine? And if so, whose utopia will it be?

Such new visual frameworks enacted by machine-readable images are vastly more consequential in the potential (and actual) dynamics of visibility, power, capital, and control in relation both to individuals and to groups. These new terms and updated dynamics are important to track and understand, and it is also important to find modes and strategies of resisting their consuming operations, if only for the sake of creating space in which to actively value the compendium of indeterminable traits and characteristics that collectively create human individuality and creativity.

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Pa r t i i i

Future Visibility

How do we become aware of what we can’t—or simply don’t—see? And what are the new systems that govern these possibilities? I think often of the sensibility of the writer Nora N. Khan, who, in her 2015 essay “Toward a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence,” wrote that she is “most interested in how we manage to express joy and wonder, and maintain our creative energy, within the bounds of increasingly oppressive systems.”1 Proposals for how to do so can come from surprising places. A couple of years ago, I clicked on to a website an artist had suggested I look at: Astronaut.io. As I navigated my way into the site, a series of short video clips, about five to ten seconds each, played across my computer screen: there were skiers on a slalom course, a young boy wrapping a book, two horses cantering in an open field, a crying baby, a bird’s-eye view of an industrial area, a choir of singers . . . I had the sense the scenes would go on and on. And, while they were not photographic per se, I was immediately conscious of the way in which the images were appearing and disappearing, again and again, regardless of my actions as a viewer. I backtracked a little. The landing page for the site provided just a few specifics: These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

The page harvests imagery from the vantage point of the International Space Station, imagining the viewer as an astronaut looking down at Earth from one hundred miles above. The text continues: “You peer through your

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window and this is what you see. You are people watching” (see figure 18). As with the experience of coming across a box filled with a stranger’s old photographic snapshots, no intimacy is promised, no real knowledge of the subjects is ever suggested.2 The viewer is configured as a remote surveyor, anthropological in her interests. But the viewer is also configured as human—not as a machine or a computer with vision. These short clips play twenty-four hours a day, back to back, a steady stream of imagery excerpted automatically from the vastly larger—and increasingly un-stream-like—reservoir that is YouTube. Because the videos have all been uploaded in the past week, they reflect cultural events. Watching in late October, for example, yields a number of high school football games and Halloween-themed videos. By contrast, watching in late January yields a notable number of dance and music practices and performances, tech demonstrations, and indoor sporting events. It’s a kind of documentary, as its makers have suggested, but one that enacts new tensions in the long and complicated history of that mode. The scenes I watched were at once highly specific and, often, quite ordinary, typically featuring what appeared to be amateur footage of events just special enough to be elevated above the mundane—having crossed over the threshold into “recordable” (see figures 19–22). They were modest, vernacular offerings, a few seconds of airtime, giving a glance into another place, another culture, another person’s life—though nothing more than that glance. As the clips appeared on my screen, and then disappeared a few seconds later, I felt I had been granted a glimpse into someone else’s everyday— and a seemingly easy kind of glimpse at that, one that requested no response and no responsibility. The content differed substantially, moving across geographies and through languages. One moment, I was looking at a teenage girl practicing sign language in her Western bedroom, and in the next, I was witnessing what appeared to be a religious blessing taking place in a bare white room. But the consistency of the videos was a shared amateur aes-

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thetic, a contemporary update to the old snapshots one comes across at thrift stores, flea markets, or in one’s own old family albums. And as soon as the clips had disappeared from my screen, they were gone; there was no back button, no replay option, no link to follow to an original source if I wanted to see a clip again or see more of it. The strangeness of this situation struck me. The videos that I had just watched had, as the page told me, barely been seen before, but even more strikingly, now that I had seen them, they were all irretrievable. The briefness of the views made me want to look again or, rather, to look at new clips (since the ones I had already seen were gone) but pay closer attention. The temporary existence of the images is, in fact, their central provocation. As the sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has written about the fleeting experience of images, “Ephemerality sharpens viewers’ focus. . . . Given only a peek, you look hard.”3 Astronaut.io is run by an algorithm that searches for videos on YouTube that are identified only with their default titles of IMG_ or DSC_, factors that indicate the maker either did not bother to attribute a verbal or narrative title to the upload or didn’t know how to do so. Either indicates a lack of selfconsciousness and a disinterest in being easily searchable, simply because text associated with online imagery is a primary method of encoding its subject content.4 The raw file titles signal a certain kind of nonintent and offer results to a search that can be seen as “language agnostic”: autogenerated file names are without the cultural and geographic specificities necessarily imposed by human languages.5 More intriguingly, though, once a video is located by Astronaut.io, it plays on the site for only five to ten seconds before being replaced by the next. Viewers do not have access to a playlist or the source material; clips that play on the screen do so only at that moment. The site goes on without you, whether or not you are there. Despite the shared source material, the differences between viewing YouTube and viewing Astronaut.io are vast, marked initially by the relative

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Future Visibility

Figures 18–22. Screenshots from Astronaut.io, captured July 30, 2019. Astronaut.io was designed and built by Andrew Wong and James Thompson.

aesthetic sparseness of Astronaut.io. Unlike YouTube, Astronaut.io has no sidebar menus of recommended videos to click on next, no titles, no commentary, no ads, no page views or view-like quantifications, no links to external sites. Astronaut.io is also characterized by a novel sense of the fleeting inaccessibility of its videos once they have passed. They become irretrievable. Ultimately, the cumulative impact of these differences points to a method of undermining common habitual expectations for social media and

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modes of sharing and viewing. It speaks to an image economy that is, on the one hand, radically disrupted and, on the other, most alarming for its ready amplification and augmentation of all the structures of visibility reenacted, consciously or not, by those who build and program the sites and new literal codes of sight. We can return here to Kate Crawford’s poignant observation about the capacity of contemporary systems of visibility to reproduce and thus reinscribe and perpetuate the gross biases of visibility in both our present and the past. The strangeness of these disappearing videos throws into relief the more typical condition. Usually, in the unsettling but pervasive logic of our cloudbased era, it takes more work—a lot more work—to ensure that an image (or anything) is not seen again. The ability to disappear online is a new kind of privilege, requiring a new skill set.6 The work required for deletion—that is, the work required to terminate visibility—is necessary for even the most ordinary of images. To take an utterly mundane example, I can easily delete from my own Instagram page an image I have publicly posted, but that action does not reach the several sites that automatically harvest and store, on their own servers, duplicates of all images posted on the social media platform. Data researchers have extended this easily observed anecdotal observation into the realm of fake news, online trolling, and international politics—all stages of far greater potential consequence than most private individuals’ actions. For example, the data journalist Jonathan Albright has studied the pervasiveness of Russian disinformation posts shared on Instagram that are designed to circulate in the United States and rouse viewers’ political anxiety, fear, and alienation in order to affect voting and political behavior.7 These posts, like any other posts on Instagram, can be officially tracked and sometimes deleted or censored due to inflammatory content, but, also like any other post on Instagram, they spread easily through the social media ecosystem via “copies” or regrams, shares, and data

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harvesting, underscoring a system massively stacked against the possibility of any single image vanishing. Similarly, Albright studies the pervasiveness of fake news videos on YouTube, specifically those that are generated by artificial intelligence. AIgenerated fake news posts circulate via hashtags and keywords designed to promote propagandistic interest from ideologically motivated viewers; in other words, the videos are offered to YouTube viewers through keyword association (“You may also enjoy . . .”), reaching those who have selfidentified an interest in conservative political topics through their own search terms and are now spoon-fed videos produced by artificial intelligence. As they are with photographic circulation online, tagging and other forms of linguistic metadata are key as this information allows computers to read visual content. The photo historian and theorist Daniel Rubinstein has observed that “the importance of tagging for the economies of the web lies precisely in the bridging of the gap between human perception of images and the computer’s blindness to them,” a crucial step to enter “the economy of the search industry.”8 Though the rise of computer vision has shifted this necessity to some degree, tagging and textual metadata remain crucial methods of translating—and mistranslating—visual imagery into a language necessary for the algorithmically enabled processes of automated sorting, storage, retrieval, and circulation that are central to the influence and impact of visual images today. Visibility on YouTube is a fundamentally opposite proposition to visibility on Astronaut.io.9 For those who want to be seen on YouTube—to be famous, viral, visible, iconic—articles, advice, tips, and how-to lists on the topic abound, filled with promise for aspiring stars, or maybe just for corporate social media managers who want to do well at their jobs. These tutorials help advice seekers get more likes and shares, show up in the “Up Next” queue of suggested videos, and soak up as much viewing time as possible.

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Future Visibility

Within this system, value is correlated with quantifiable measurements of duration: How long did eyeballs stay on the screen? Whose eyeballs were they, and how many were there? It is a rubric in which duration itself is both cumulative and generative. A 2017 essay by the artist and writer James Bridle sought to bring the automated dimensions of YouTube imagery and its consumption into view.10 Bridle’s work as an artist addresses contemporary image production in the arenas of drones, surveillance, and new systems of autonomy in particular, though the caveat is that so-called autonomous systems are always algorithmically programmed by humans. To that end, Bridle’s recent installation on citizenship is provocatively described as “a guide to algorithmic citizenship.”11 At root, Bridle consistently seeks to make sense of—or at the very least, to translate—either the experience of negotiating new realms of automated imagery or the implications of living in a society that depends, in increasingly profound ways, on computational forms of imagery.12 In his 2017 essay, Bridle attempted to excavate the porous line between human-produced and machine-produced content on YouTube, focusing specifically on content that, because of its use of nursery school titles and search keywords, appears to be geared toward young children yet in fact is rife with violent and unsettling content produced by a machine programmed to riff on popular entertainment for babies and toddlers, ostensibly to increase ad revenue, which is generated based on quantified levels of clicking and viewing. His attempt yielded an illustration of the practical impossibility of ascertaining such a line, even for a well informed and critical viewer, leading Bridle to conclude that the interplay of the search function and the algorithmically driven suggestion lists that YouTube thrives on has combined with the staggering scale of the platform’s content to produce a system of “infrastructural violence” that is difficult to comprehend, let alone discuss, critique, or, ultimately, dismantle.13 Recognizing that his narrow example of going down a rabbit hole of content generated for young

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children could easily be replaced with parallel examples “about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies,” Bridle concludes: “This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us—all of us—in systematic and automated ways.”14 It is worth pointing out that this argument has become only easier to observe in the years since 2017. Astronaut.io does not address any of this directly. But to me, viewing the manufactured simplicity of the site, with its consciously sought out untagged content, hidden away from search engines and algorithmic codes of visibility, only points to its opposite, to the condition from which it emerges as a site of refusal. In this way, I see its provocation as similar to that of Cassils’s Becoming an Image. Both work as productive counters to the massive weight of how to understand and engage with the extensive changes brought into the contemporary photographic realm, particularly those bound up at the intersection of individual and subjective human experience in negotiation with a radically increased role of automated vision. That automated vision is employed to make sense of accumulations of images, as well as the effects of those accumulations on individual embodied experiences of visibility and privacy in heavily mediated realms of vision. In both cases, the work of creating intentionally ephemeral images offers individuals a kind of control, of a necessarily and appealingly fleeting sort, that may counter the oppressive voraciousness of the online and emerging automated systems of images. Astronaut.io exists as nearly authorless in the free-floating, geographically indeterminate realm of online experience, accessible anytime and anyplace to anyone with an internet connection. A viewer encounters a version of fleetingness that is always available, outside the structures of art. But its appearance as a framework outside of the conventional structures and

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framing devices of art says something about the current state of cultural image production and consumption, by way of offering an alternative. The creators of Astronaut.io interrupt typical viewing experiences in order to draw attention to the passive scaffolding that accompanies most acts of looking and seeing—that is, the condition of visibility—whether that scaffolding is built in emerging forms of media consumption, in the archives that come to serve as repositories of historical existence, or in the daily systemic accumulation of microglances and microaggressions that collectively create the patriarchal and misogynist culture that is then unconsciously reinscribed in new technologies of computer vision and data storage. It makes visible how we see and the degree to which that sight—and visibility itself—is shaped by external forces.

t h e n e w l at e n t i m age A very common way of viewing photographic imagery today is one that allows for the image to continuously appear and then disappear again, repeatedly. For instance, when I think of a photograph that I took some time ago on my phone, and would like to send to a friend for one reason or another or include in a presentation, where is that photograph? It exists, in some form, of course, but not one I often consider. I can easily and unthinkingly open my phone, scroll to an album, locate the image in the album, and conjure it forth for viewing, but one moment prior, the image can’t be said to have existed in the same way. It was, rather, in its dormant version. It is legible either way to the innerworkings of my phone and other connected devices but, for my human visual needs, essentially nonfunctional in its dormant state. The visible lives of images have shifted in a way that is difficult to overstate but also difficult even to grasp. In this regard, they have perhaps become more complex—and they certainly are so in their reach. This is a particularly urgent topic presently, as the notion of seeing photographs

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has moved quickly beyond human eyes and human perception, with profound ethical, practical, and legal effects and implications. There is no way for me, or you, to see the photograph I took on my phone last week without an elaborate—yet highly discreet and efficiently executed—series of electronic commands intended to transform machinereadable collected data into human-viewable form. But before and after that moment, the image has a different life. And its information can be accessed in different ways. In the era of networked images, much of what happens with images happens as a result of nonvisible information, the new fascia of photographic imagery, readable to machines and designed for that purpose, not for human viewing. The artist Trevor Paglen summarizes the significance of this shift: What’s truly revolutionary about the advent of digital images is the fact that they are fundamentally machine-readable: they can only be seen by humans in special circumstances and for short periods of time. A photograph shot on a phone creates a machine-readable file that does not reflect light in such a way as to be perceptible to a human eye. A secondary application, like a software-based photo viewer paired with a liquid crystal display and backlight may create something that a human can look at, but the image only appears to human eyes temporarily before reverting back to its immaterial machine form when the phone is put away or the display is turned off.15

The temporal dimensions of this shift are noteworthy, particularly in their repetitive possibility. An image comes and goes and, for all human eyes, essentially disappears whenever it is not seen. This creates a distinctly different form of archive, one that is activated in different ways from the conventional model of prints stored flat in solander boxes. But perhaps most counterintuitively, the new fact of ephemerally (or temporarily) produced photographic images corresponds to a state of perpetual imagery. Comparing printed photographic objects contained in an album to a seemingly corresponding “album” of images

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shared on a social media site, Paglen writes, “In the machine-machine visual landscape the photograph never goes away.” Paglen addresses the cumulative collective impact, which is well removed from the human exchange often seen as characterizing social media activity. With each post and individual shares, he continues, “you’re feeding an array of immensely powerful artificial intelligence systems information about how to identify people and how to recognize places and objects, habits and preferences, race, class, and gender identifications, economic statuses, and much more. . . . In aggregate, AI systems have appropriated human visual culture and transformed it into a massive, flexible training set.” In such an image ecosystem, the notion of disappearing images holds particular allure, far from the crushing weight of an image that will live forever— whether you want that image to stay or not.

f u t u r e i n v i si bi l i t y In many ways, however, what is accessible to human sight is just the beginning. Most photographic images today contain much more information than is initially visible. To start, a host of metadata, from embedded date and time to geolocation coordinates, makes even the most basic sorting and sharing functions possible. This information shifts the function of photographs into realms of data sharing and nonvisual tracking and identification. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to think of photographic images as sets of data that, when called to do so, assume forms designed to allow humans to perceive them as visual images akin to what we have historically and culturally learned to understand as “photographs.” These data sets (photographs) spend most of their time as dormant numerical sequences until they are conjured into viewable form from the devices we store them on, whether personal computers, mobile phones, or internet servers. But if the data encoded into what we think of and perceive as photographic images is typically out of sight and thus largely out of mind, there are other possibilities.

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The artist Zachary Norman considers this data as a source of potential creative collaboration. Norman is interested in the relationship between human and artificial that is newly posed by emerging photographic technologies, as well as how we might embed other types of data within photographic imagery, beyond the information that is already extraneous to the image. That is, if we think of photographs as already containers for storing information well beyond their visual—and visible—identities, we can begin to imagine additions to the default storage settings for even our most common photographic activity. Here is a thought exercise: Your camera is a sensor, potentially linked to other sensors, that can gather a multitude of information about the world around it at any given moment, information that is both visual and nonvisual. The photographs you take on your phone will automatically also store your location for you, but what else would you like them to contain? What would be useful? In Norman’s 2017 series Endangered Data, one answer to this question is: environmental data, correlated with location over time. In particular, measurements of greenhouse gases, such as methane. Endangered Data embeds the scientific data readings from measurement stations around the world into the data of photographic images of those stations’ locations (see figures 23 and 24). He refers to this embedded data as a form of cryptography known as steganography, a practice in which coded information is hidden within visual images. This is an appealing analogy for all manner of photography and photographic interpretation, but Norman’s use of it is precise, and specifically geared around a critique of the then new Trump administration’s approach to the extensive array of publicly accessible datasets of scientific measurement of greenhouse gases, an approach that appeared to range from cavalier at best to intentionally destructive at worst. By preserving this newly vulnerable data within the framework of photographic images—but in disguised form—Norman’s cryptographic efforts serve as a form of potentially crucial, and creative, preservation of information. In short, the images

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in Endangered Data can be activated to demonstrate, or visualize, rising levels of methane in key environmental locations around the globe. This particular function of data encryption within photographic imagery is densely layered and politically impactful, but it’s also worth pointing out that all photographic images now are embedded with “extraneous” information; whether we call it “encryption” and think of the contents as hidden or secretive is our own choice. We can also think of this kind of embedded data as, now, a normal part of photography that can be marshalled in directions of our own choosing. In this way, Endangered Data points to a newly useful way to think of algorithmic coding interventions as useful and productive possibilities that may alter—and expand—our view of the capacious

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Figures 23–24. Zachary Norman, 41.05°N, 124.15°W, Trinidad Head, California, image progression stills from Endangered Data, 2017. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist.

possibilities of photography and, indeed, our relationship to it. Norman and his data function as partners, working together to both store and share information, as well as information about that information. Norman’s images contain information that is functionally invisible to humans. His goal, though, is to preserve the possibility of future visibility, to escape the potentially destructive forces of political removal. It is a safeguarding, then, through intentional hiding—a preventative protective measure. It is not the image—as we conventionally think of images—that is hidden but, rather, the photographic data. To think of it in terms of the visible life of the image, Norman’s series enacts yet another form of photographic latency. The portion that is revealed corresponds to the portion that

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aligns with visible information. This, of course, is always the case with visible images in digital form; only the data that suggests visible alignment with what we experience as the visible world is “seen.” To the point of Norman’s project, images always contain embedded data that is functional yet not intended for viewing purposes. This is the information that allows digital images to move, it is the unseen connective tissue between images and their networks of visibility.

t h e l a s t p i c t u r e s Future visibility is invoked in a different way, however, by Trevor Paglen in his project The Last Pictures (see figure 25). Like Endangered Data, it revolves around imminent threats to humanity in the face of environmental crisis. Whereas Norman looks ahead to the possibility of intentional and politically motivated data destruction compelled by a desire to literally erase the facts of global warming, Paglen takes an even longer view, imagining out to, as the title of the project describes, “the last pictures.” For Paglen’s purposes, it is inconsequential to consider whether or not photographic images are ephemeral on the scale of human time—whether that time is measured by minutes, a lifetime, or generations. In the face of the assured forthcoming demise of humanity as a whole, all of humankind and its relics are ephemeral. Though it is activated at its core by a sense of existential dread, The Last Pictures is quite simple in premise. In 2012, the communications satellite EchoStar XVI launched into geostationary orbit, its primary function being to broadcast television pictures into the home screens of millions; it is expected to send some ten trillion images and video frames over its expected fifteenyear working life span. Because of the lack of atmosphere, as with other man-made satellites, EchoStar XVI’s working life is just the beginning. The estimated orbit time of the satellite, along with every other human-made satellite in geostationary orbit around the earth, is somewhere between “greater than a million years” and “indefinite.”16 Long after humans have

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Figure 25. Trevor Paglen, The Last Picture Artifact, 2013. Golden disk, 8 × 8 × ½ in. Courtesy of the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

died out and the environment has collapsed, our satellites will still be circling the earth, the last testament to human civilization. Paglen’s project was to put photographs on the satellite, to imagine—and then create—a set of “last pictures.” It is, on the face of it, somewhat baldly ostentatious to pronounce oneself the decider of what this set of images should be, in the event that a future alien species uses them to understand “us.” They are images designed, almost certainly, to remain unseen for a longer version of “forever” than most of us can imagine. The Last Pictures was conceived specifically out of an awareness of the massive quantity of ephemerally experienced photographs that currently populate both our daily lives and our computer servers. For Paglen, the combination of the contemporary experience of photographic images that is largely characterized by a sense of fleeting-ness with the ultimate fact that, ultimately, it’s all fleeting, proved compelling:

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Pictures form the visual atmosphere of our daily lives. But our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time.17

EchoStar XVI, he writes, “embodies the contradiction between the hyperspeed of capital and the deep time of anthropogeomorphology, the torrential flow of twenty-first-century pictures and their utter ephemerality.”18 For both ends, the future invisibility of the images succinctly dovetailed with the observation of a scientist with whom Paglen worked: “The things that most threaten us are those for which there are no images.”19 The scale of environmental challenges and the complexity of our most profound social and political issues are typically summed up only in the most trite of visual clichés. Images might necessarily fail on this count in their visibility, but experiments in visual fragility gesture toward a provocative state of not knowing, of seeking to communicate the massive challenges of the scale at hand.20 The form of The Last Pictures is unique, a suitable solution to the place of these images at the nexus of ephemerality and permanence. Photographic archives on Earth are profoundly vulnerable. Paper photographs must be stored in precisely controlled climate conditions, preferably in darkness. Many of the oldest photographs are so sensitive to light that they are no longer shown, even to researchers. In fact, of the three thousand photographs made by William Henry Fox Talbot, a majority are in this category. They are functionally useless as objects of study and caught in the deepest paradox of collecting: in order to last, they must not be seen.21 And it is a central irony of archival collections today that the digital “backups” created at most cultural institutions are more vulnerable to decay than the objects themselves. With data decay, hard drive crashes, file deletions, and errors in the cloud, our images are more vulnerable than ever.22 To transport his pictures on the EchoStar XVI satellite, Paglen needed “an ‘ultra-archival’

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medium for storing images,” something with “the ability to withstand the stress of a rocket launch, drastic temperature fluctuations in space, and the constant radiation bombardment it would experience in orbit.”23 Neither a solander box nor an external hard drive would do. The solution was imprinting the selection of one hundred photographs on a small silicon wafer through a process of fine etching using a nanofabrication process. It is, according to the artist, “extremely archival.” It is worth underscoring that I realize that these images are, materially speaking, as durable and nondisappearing as possible. And yet their true aim is to never be seen again by human eyes, to outlast, by far, that very possibility, as they outlast the collapse of all earthly images. They allow the imagination of that possibility: the idea of a photograph that exists with no human to see it. They will be unseen because there is no one to see them. In a way, it is an invention of a slightly altered concept of invisibility, a sort of counter visibility. The provocation invites viewers to imagine a slightly altered version of invisibility, where it is not the thing-to-be-seen that doesn’t exist but the eyes that would see it. In that way, The Last Pictures will be invisible in the same way that Norman’s Endangered Data is invisible to humans. Neither are seen until something—alien or machine—knows how to see it, knows what to look for. So what are the images, anyway? They are, currently, very visible—easy to locate and well reproduced in Paglen’s book devoted to the project, on his website, and in the archives from which the images were collected by a team of people over the course of five months.24 The one hundred images cover a range of subjects, including groups of people, the famous Apollo Earthrise picture, drone surveillance, microorganisms, pretty landscapes, sea creatures, references to war, dictionary pages, the work of artists Eugène Atget and Ai Weiwei, political protest, domesticated animals, a massive dam construction, aerial views of suburban tract homes, piles of computer cords, cherry blossoms against the sky, dust storms and glaciers, the Concorde,

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Figure 26. Trevor Paglen, The Last Picture Mosaic, 2012. Courtesy of the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

Timothy O’Sullivan’s photography wagon, identity cards and immigrants, surfers and swimmers, a bee experiment, a Russian cosmonaut, Manhattan at night, and Captain America (see figure 26). When considering this array of images, which is as life-affirming in its variety as in its banality, three similar sets of images come immediately to mind. The first, which Paglen discusses in an essay, is the collection of 116 uplifting images of a connected humanity included in Carl Sagan’s Golden Records, which were placed on board the two Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, whose overall content Paglen fairly characterizes as one of “ ‘It’s a Small

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World’ benevolence.”25 A more apt photo-historical connection (or at least one far more crucially studied by photo historians) in its ambition to summarize humanity with a discrete set of photographs is Edward Steichen’s magnum opus, the 1955 exhibition The Family of Man, which was also put together by a team from a massive number of submitted photographs. Those more than five hundred photographs comprised what is the most seen exhibition of all time; it traveled to thirty-seven countries over eight years, was seen by more than nine million viewers, and the exhibition publication has never gone out of print. Those photographs, not unlike the Golden Record collection, present a vision of global humanity in the aftermath of nuclear war.26 But the selection of images in The Last Pictures is not as collectively benevolent (or at least seemingly so) as either the Golden Record images or the Family of Man photographs. Rather, the group of images it brings most readily to mind is Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence, a collection of fifty-nine photographs published in 1977, the same year that the Golden Records were launched into space. And in a way, if the Voyager images and Family of Man are an apt pair—one earthbound and one launched beyond Earth’s atmosphere—Evidence and The Last Pictures also demonstrate a kind of simpatico temperament regarding the efficacy and even possibility of photographic meaning, questions at the heart of vanishing pictures. From its first sequence of pictures, Evidence dwells immediately on the notions of visible evidence, the possibilities and impossibilities of photographs and visual representation, and the scientific claims of objectivity that so often accompany “evidence,” whether photographic or not. The book opens with a puzzling and irresolvable set of footprints, physical traces that, like photographs, don’t tell the viewer much at all about the events that preceded the image. Sultan and Mandel follow the footprints with an image that contains a handprint, an identity card photograph, and a ruler—instruments of recording, measuring, and knowing (see figures 27 and 28). The following page presents a faded photograph lying on shards of glass, the image, if not

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fully ruined already, certainly heading that direction. We move on to photographic subjects: a person’s legs, a ruined mechanical device, a noose, a bubbled form, leaves. All are recorded being recorded, specimens set against a neutral background for more accurate, more precise, later study. Everything is a subject, everything tells a story. But what about that faded photograph?

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Figures 27–28. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, images from Evidence, 1977. © Mike Mandel; courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery, New York. © Larry Sultan; courtesy of the Estate of Larry Sultan and Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco.

The outline of Mandel and Sultan’s collaboration is well known. The two won a $7,500 NEA grant in 1975 and promptly set about drafting letters to corporate and governmental photo archives, seeking to visit these functional collections of photographic images. They introduced themselves and described their project as one “that explores the role of documentary

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photography in America.”27 Ultimately, both their book and their exhibition presented fifty-nine photographs from seventy-six different files. No image was matched to its source, photographer, or contextual details, resulting in a sequence of images that insist on being read visually, without text. A short essay, however, did accompany the book, written by Robert F. Forth and titled, “The Circumstantial and the Evident.”28 Forth dwells, as the title suggests, on how knowledge is accumulated and, specifically, on the pivot between what is seen directly and what viewers or readers fill in on their own. Forth describes this circumstantial quality as “the unfamiliar and sometimes unrecognizable circumstances which undergird and surround the familiar and evident,” and he is interested, in particular, in “those instances where either the circumstantial or the evident is unwittingly or deliberately withheld or camouflaged.”29 Forth reminds readers of the gaps between images in television, referring to music and words as “compensatory devices to bridge the gaps.” Those gaps become, essentially, spaces for meaning to emerge. He writes, “Our hearing cannot always sense the pause between notes, but that pause when used as an element of musical composition is as essential as the sound.” He connects these notions of pauses to the physiological effects of a visual afterimage—language that it is tempting to connect to Cassils’s notion of producing similar effects in viewers, perhaps to related ends. Evidence was received with enthusiasm by some lovers of photography, and with befuddlement and irritation by others. With the benefit of over four decades of hindsight, one can now see that the collection of images concisely and elegantly made a series of irrefutable points about the evidentiary capacity of photographs by simply demonstrating the degree to which we commonly take for granted the seamlessness of various “compensatory devices” we use to build meaning into photographic images. And at heart, the pauses and the gaps, the silences, whether or not we recognize them, are fundamental to an experience of knowing. It may be a stretch to suggest that the

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fading photograph at the outset of Evidence suggests that those pauses and gaps might come from within the photographs themselves, but it’s a stretch I’d like to make. It seems fitting that the very collection of images that so singularly summarized both the capaciousness of photographic meaning and its eternally mysterious heart through, ironically enough, a series of bureaucratic, corporate, and governmentally produced documents compiled from a far-flung network of image files would in turn inspire a later collection of similarly sourced images gathered with the intent to launch them into geostationary orbit, to one day be found, perhaps, and seen, if not understood, as a record of humanity by some future and alien (to us) life form. This divergence into seen images is necessary because it tells us something fundamental about how photographs are and have been understood as evidentiary documents and the ways, since the mid-1970s, that this concept has undergone enough pressure that I am now, in 2019, sitting in a library writing about disappearance as a unifying conceptual theme of the medium. Evidence, in particular, suggests to me that the productive role of the gaps, or the visual silence, might be found within the photographic document. I don’t want all photographs to lose their images, but there is productive value to dwelling on those that do for what those pauses in information can tell us. And, I would suggest, it is a particularly useful mindset to have now, in our current moment, as not only our contemporary images vanish before us at an unprecedented rate, by the design and defaults of new modes of conversational exchange, but so do the very foundational images of the field of photographic history.

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Pa r t i v

Revised Foundations

The thinking in this book traces back to multiple origins, some professional and some personal. Included among those early strands of inquiry was a colleague’s passing comment that happened to be among the more alarming discoveries of my adult professional life: one of the images I had considered foundational to the field of photographic history in fact no longer existed. My low-stakes frolic through a Snapchat-induced free-for-all of disappearing photographs came radically home to roost in the most substantial of ways. But that comment, to which I will return below, had a significant precursor: in 2008, while studying up to attend a conference at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, I learned from the UT Austin website that the “first photograph” (held in their collection, and no longer described in these terms) was a profoundly different object from what I—or anyone—who had seen it only in reproduction, could have imagined. The story is well known, but it bears rehearsing in the context of this book’s engagement with disappearing, or simply unseen, imagery. All (or nearly all) textbook histories of photography recount the role of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, an early inventor in the medium and, for a time before his death, collaborator with Daguerre. And a solid majority of these histories reproduce what came, over time, to be known as “the first photograph,” Niépce’s view out his studio window at his Le Gras estate, famously exposed over at least eight hours. For introductory students, it serves as a visual touchstone, a bedrock of photo history: the earliest extant photographic image, for decades generally dated to 1826 or 1827. Yet it’s also a confusing object to learn about, in material terms. It fits into neither of the two

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most easily distilled types of early photographic objects: those one-of-akind, direct-positive, and highly detailed metal plates produced by Daguerre and those grainy but reproducible paper objects made by Talbot and others. Niépce had come to photography through lithography; correspondingly, the basic materials for the object are a pewter plate, bitumen of Judea powder, and water. Bitumen of Judea is, essentially, a naturally occurring, lightsensitive asphalt. When its powder form is mixed with water, the powder dissolves into a tar-like substance that can be spread over a metal plate. Niépce exposed that plate to the view out his window all day. In the areas that got the most exposure to light, the bitumen mixture hardened. Then, he poured a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum over the plate, which had the effect of washing away the unhardened areas that had received less light over the day, exposing the dark pewter plate. The process went on to be useful in the production of metal printing plates, but it was not pursued in the development of photographic processes. Nevertheless, because the plate recorded the effects of light in a (semi)permanent way, it is included as an early triumph of what would later, with a much different process, be called photography. The object, often referred to as View from the Window at Le Gras, and now officially known simply as Untitled “point de vue” (1827), became “the first photograph” when, in 1952, the photo historians Helmut and Alison Gernsheim tracked it down to the widow of the last known owner of the object, who had found it in a “forgotten shipping container”; the widow gave the Gernsheims the object, and they published their results soon thereafter. The Ransom Center Curator of Photography, Jessica S. McDonald, who has worked extensively with the plate and its historiography, relays the story: Upon adding it to their collection, the Gernsheims lobbied mightily for its priority in the history of the medium. Of course, in order to make their case, they needed effective PR, and for that, they needed (ironically) a photographic reproduction of Niépce’s plate.1 This, as it turned out, was quite dif-

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ficult to create. For the task, Mr. Gernsheim sought out the assistance of the professional photographers at the Kodak Research Laboratory in England, who delivered back to him a black and white paper print that so failed to capture the plate’s faint subtleties that, in an effort to make the reproduction look more like the original, Gernsheim himself took to it with watercolor, substantially drawing forth contrasts and details barely legible in the original (see figure 29).2 Gernsheim justified his interventions as conveying a greater truth to the original object. As a result, the image that has since been reproduced in virtually every history of photography bears scant resemblance to the object in question. This rephotographed and watercolorenhanced print is still routinely included in general histories of photography and is the predominant image returned in a Google image search. The image I reproduce here, in fact, is of the actual print Gernsheim retouched (its attribution reflects this material specificity), while the reproduction of that reproduction, further derived from copy prints, is the image that is most widely known.3 An intensive conservation study conducted jointly by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Ransom Center in 2002 yielded a new reproduction that was vastly more faithful to the original object. The first time I saw this 2002 reproduction image, in fact, I understood the Niépce plate as I never had before, despite having thoroughly internalized it from my first history of photography course in 1994 and seen (and taught) it countless times since then. This 2002 image was updated again in 2020. Each of these new images (the more recent of which is included here; see figure 30) shows clearly that the view is rendered on a metal plate, which itself has dimension, and that it is notably subtler than the commonly reproduced, and relatively highcontrast, Gernsheim image. Together, the 1952 Kodak reproduction and the recent reproductions tell a remarkably efficient story not just about advances in photography as a reproductive technology but also, more provocatively, about how the impact of this “foundation stone of photography,” as

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Figure 29. Helmut Gernsheim, [Untitled heliograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce; reproduced by P. B. Watt at Kodak Research Laboratories, Harrow; heavily retouched by Helmut Gernsheim], 1952. Gelatin silver print with applied pigment, 19.7 × 21.7 cm (sheet). Gernsheim Collection, purchase, 964:0000:0016. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Gernsheim himself had put it, rests entirely on a now demonstrably false reproduction. The photo historian Geoffrey Batchen eloquently dwelled on this rather conceptual point in his 1997 publication, Burning with Desire: Here we have another one of those peculiar twists of photographic history. The image that is everywhere propagated as the first photograph, as the foundation stone of photography’s history, as the origin of the medium, is in fact a painting after a drawing! The much touted first photograph turns out to be a representation of a representation and therefore, according to photo-history’s own definition, not a photograph at all. We have instead a

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Figure 30. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Untitled “point de vue,” 1827. Heliograph on pewter, 16.7 × 20.2 × 0.15 cm. Gernsheim Collection, purchase, 964:0000:0001. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

painted version of a reproduction that itself “in no way corresponded with the original.” It seems that wherever we look for photography’s bottom line, we face this strange economy of deferral, an original always preceded by another, more original, but never-quite-present photographic instance.4

Batchen published this rumination in 1997, several years before the Ransom Center and the Getty would issue the first revised reproduction. Batchen is clearly compelled by questions surrounding the reproduction itself, as it derives from an object (the retouched copy print) rather than the distinct material form of the heliograph itself. It is strange to consider the impact of

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the new reproduction on how a viewer might understand not just the object but its meaning for the medium more broadly. Unusually, the plate is quite faint itself and yet became known to the world as something quite different. And apparently, the more strongly visible version is still generally preferred; as Jessica McDonald has relayed, authors prefer to reproduce the 1952 Gernsheim watercolor version, even when presented with both options. Surveying the range of general histories of photography, McDonald notes that only the French historian Michel Frizot acknowledges in his textbook history that the “official” reproduction is fundamentally artificial.5 Curiously, the false version has held on, quite tenaciously. But what does this demonstrate? Is it, simply, that people prefer to see what they already know? Or that the more accurate version is too much trouble to explain in an introductory textbook? Or that people prefer a reproduction that allows them to better imagine—even if this contradicts understanding—an image? Given how fully and convincingly the twenty-first-century reproductions communicate the material nature of the object at hand yet “fail” to render much of an image (though that “failure” is due to accuracy), the preference for Gernsheim’s watercolor hack seems to support the notion that the history of photography is a history of images, not a history of objects. An object without a clearly discernible image is not, evidently, much use. Nevertheless, it’s a compelling object lesson for a history of photographic visibility, a “foundation stone of photography,” if perhaps not quite in the ways Gernsheim proposed. As McDonald has suggested, Gernsheim was primarily motivated both by the earlier invention date promised by the view and by establishing Niépce as a photographer (rather than a “proto-photographer,” as Gernsheim’s closest competitor in writing the history of photography, Beaumont Newhall, had relegated him). Furthermore, the Gernsheims insisted in their original announcement that the “rather faint” image “is not due to fading—the image was produced by a permanent process.”6 It is, however, notable that the faintness had to be overcome in order for the image to become

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the foundation stone the Gernsheims imagined it to be. In their announcement, they acknowledged that the reproduction they used “exaggerated the surface impurities of the metal not noticeable to the eye in the original, in which the sky appears as a white blank.”7 This odd characterization suggests that the main difference between the reproduction and the original is an exaggeration of “surface impurities” rather than the more striking visual fact that a barely legible image has become clearly visible. (It may also bear note that the original does not have a “white” sky but rather a pewter plate colored one.) Here, the history of photography—as a field of people dispersed over time and geography—has a remarkable object but has rejected it for being not visible enough. Other examples suggest that this is not at all unique but rather, I would suggest, reflective of a kind of collective unease. Two other objects, both also occupants of a foundational position in the history of the medium, point in this direction: William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, issued in 1846, and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1837 plate generally known as the Artist’s Studio or Still Life in English and Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités in French. Talbot and Daguerre’s joint toehold in photography’s origin story is rock solid, yet the versions of their images that are routinely published in general histories of photography are most often ideal reproductions rather than the messier and more complex material versions. Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, as is well known, was issued in six installments, from 1844 to 1846, and it is among the earliest photo books. In it, Talbot combined tipped in salt prints with short texts suggesting the many possible uses of photographs, including aiding insurance claims, assisting artists with detail, and even standing on their own as works of art. Photo historian Larry Schaaf describes the state of the prints today in blunt terms: The Plates in the various surviving Pencils collectively form a miserable lot. Most are bleached more or less completely. The rest are generally fading in from the edges. Stains and spots are not uncommon, and only the occasional loose print retains the vigor Talbot expected. While some deterioration

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Figure 31. Louis Daguerre, Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités, 1837. Daguerreotype, 16.7 × 21.2 cm. Collection Société française de photographie. Digitization after reproduction of the daguerreotype on a glass plate made in 1925.

undoubtedly continues, it is likely that the bulk of this degradation became apparent during the late 1840s. Most copies are now stored under controlled archival conditions and can be assumed to be on a long-term plateau.8

The facsimile edition, however, created in 1989, is, as Schaaf describes, “a composite embodiment” of the best source material, from various sources; nearly all reproductions of images from The Pencil of Nature follow suit. In other words, again the reproduced “facsimile” version is predicated on an imagined ideal, a composite that does not reflect any actual material object. And while the authors are clearly up-front about this fact, it remains difficult to imagine something otherwise. Finally, perhaps the biggest surprise to me regarding these unstable origins came while I was attending a meeting of fellow photo historians and 116

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Figure 32. Louis Daguerre, Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités, 1837. Daguerreotype, 16.7 × 21.2 cm. Collection Société française de photographie. Digitization of the daguerreotype in 2017.

curators in 2015. During a conversation about this idea of disappearing photographs, a colleague with closer ties to the nineteenth-century world than me pulled me aside and asked if I knew that Daguerre’s Artist Studio plate no longer held an image.9 I was confused, at first, and then sure I’d misunderstood, and then I thought we must be talking about different images. “You mean the one that’s in all the textbooks, the still life with the bas-relief and the bottle of wine in wicker and the two plaster putti?” (See figure 31.) Yes. He had it on his phone to show me, a photograph of the object, which is held in the collection of the Société française de photographie in Paris. It showed an apparently imageless mirror held in a rather elaborate wooden frame (see figure 32). Ironically, it was the best reproduction of the object I had ever seen. Like the recent Niépce reproductions, it conveyed the material object-ness of

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the plate. It made me wonder, if the reproduction honestly conveys the faintness of the image—or in this case, almost no image at all, nearly just a plain mirror—does it become more important to reproduce it looking like a unique object held in a frame, rather than just . . . a mirror? As when I’d learned that the image I’d understood as the Niépce plate actually corresponded to a copy print painted over by a photo historian like me, the news that the Artist’s Studio image existed as something entirely different in reproduction than in object brought a sense of the ground beneath me shifting, because I had, in fact, as Gernsheim had so wanted, taken both images to be “foundation stones” for photography. It turns out they still are, but they mean something more complicated than what I—and many, many others—initially learned. Despite the fact that Batchen did not have the benefit of the 2002 reproduction, his rumination on the deferral of the never-quite-photographic made a compelling case for the continued relevance of the 1952 Kodak reproduction. And Batchen, too (whose influence as a thinker in photography, particularly for historians of my generation, would be difficult to overstate), had weighed in on the Artist’s Studio. This analysis, also in Burning with Desire, situated the Daguerre plate, like the Niépce plate, on conceptual terms. Batchen noted that the plate “is often reproduced in histories of photography as the earliest extant example, as Daguerre’s first photograph,” and that, although frequently published, it had “attracted little close analysis.”10 Batchen dwells particularly on the content of the image, observing that Daguerre’s subjects summarize both the qualities of the photographic medium in particular and a variety of reproductive media in general. But he also considers the recipient of the plate: Daguerre presented it to Alphonse de Cailleux, who the year before had been appointed adjunct director of the Louvre Museum. Batchen wonders: “Could Daguerre, in making this particular image, have been deliberately courting the attention and recognition of the artistic and political power brokers of the time?”11

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He concludes that the plate is “a manifesto of photography intended to certify its conceptual and pictorial identity,” one that “once again represents photography as a reproduction of what are all already reproductions.”12 It is, I was convinced when I first read Burning with Desire as a graduate student, a remarkable image, similar in many ways to the aims of Talbot’s Pencil of Nature to explicate the possibilities and promises of the new medium. But what does it mean for that very image to have nearly disappeared yet for its corresponding image to continue to exist, widely reproduced both in print and online? More recent scholarship suggests that, in fact, the image has been gone for some time. In 2005, Batchen described the plate as having “become virtually illegible,” and, compellingly, he floated the possibility of creating and exhibiting a copy plate, in the absence of the original. McDonald, in her 2015 consideration of the Niépce plate, referred to it as evidence that historians prefer to reproduce legible images, comparing it to the reduced legibility of Daguerre’s plate.13 Stephen Pinson, in his 2012 study of Daguerre, noted that one widely reproduced image was made in 1925 by Daguerre scholar Georges Potonniée, who published the “first and only biography of Daguerre as a decorator and painter” in 1935.14 And, as Batchen has relayed, Beaumont Newhall obtained a new gelatin silver print of the image in 1937 for his iconic publication Photography 1839–1937 (1937), where the reproduction bore the caption: “Photographed for the Museum by A. Dumas-Satigny from the original in Société française de photographie, Paris.” In 1897, the Société française de photographie purchased the original plate from Cailleux, by which point it already, according to Pinson, “was said to be showing signs of deterioration.”15 Between 1937 and 2005, its condition changed quite radically, though more precise details appear to be unknown.16 In presumably wishing to put forward photography’s best foot, by which they mean its best images, historians have been, collectively, and especially at the level of basic education about material objects, rather withholding.

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This makes a certain amount of sense. Whether one is invested in writing a fascinating history of a medium or promoting strong market prices, it helps to have correspondingly strong images. Or at least, it does if your value system is about images one can easily see. From the start, photography has also been about images that vanish, that are about to vanish, and that may one day vanish. These images—and objects—are valuable, too. They allow us to be more honest about what photographs are and their fragile, unstable selves, but they also allow us to embrace and articulate a broader realm of photographic experience.

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Coda

In the long timetable of academic publishing, one hidden bonus, particularly for those of us writing on relatively contemporary topics, can be an unexpected encounter with new work well after the manuscript is completed and reviewed. In my case, this took the form of experiencing the American artist Hank Willis Thomas’s Retroreflective series at the Portland Art Museum in early 2020.1 The work is centrally concerned with archives, visibility, and the critical challenge of engaging with history from the vantage point of the present, a present that Thomas understands to be an evershifting now, embodied by an ever-shifting viewer. Thomas gestures toward this encompassing vision not just by inviting but by insisting upon each individual viewer’s own physical embodiment as necessary to conjure, to activate, a visual experience that is layered through its very existence with both contemporary modes of image-making and historical images. The archive is, quite literally, called forth by the viewer, and it both emerges and recedes in response to the viewer’s efforts. I did not understand any of this right away, but the meaning arrived slowly as I worked my way through the gallery. I, like other viewers in the space, encountered a room filled with faintly discernible, but clearly

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photographic, images. Standing in the gallery, puzzling over what to make of these barely visible surfaces, I first stood back to see what others did. I watched another museum visitor pull out their cell phone and raise it to take a picture. I’ve thought about this gesture, as it plays out in museum spaces, a lot. It has become quite a typical action for museum and gallery visitors. Often, these personal photos of art and art spaces are made as visual notes, but just as often, and perhaps more notably, they are recorded as encounters to document and share on social media, a practice that can amplify the work of artists, curators, and museums well outside an institution’s walls. Nevertheless, this relatively recent behavior is routinely looked down upon by many, often with the perspective that it sullies or diminishes a more pure viewing experience, either for the person with the camera or the person they are bothering. But while Thomas’s work recognizes this newly conventional mode of museum engagement, it simultaneously turns it on its head. In fact, as I came to appreciate, the flash from a viewer’s camera is essential to seeing the complete image. The brief strobe of light activates the reflective surface, making the full subject matter fleetingly visible in the space of the museum. As the art historian Nico Wheadon beautifully summarizes, in this work, “the rules of engagement center black protagonists, and activate technology as a political device for reframing historical narratives.”2 Thomas’s choice of archival imagery matters, of course. Take one example, his 2018 work Public Enemy (Black and Gold). The initial, unreflected image shows a painterly black-and-gold abstraction, though it is an abstraction that immediately suggests meaning, as if a dark veil has obscured the scene behind it (see figure 33). A street scene seems to be hidden visually “behind” the painterly overlay. At the moment of illumination from the flash of a camera, the full photograph reveals a harrowing and racialized encounter: a Black boy turns away from the viewer, his hands raised, to face a menacingly approaching swarm of heavily armed white National Guardsmen (see figure 34). Experientially, seeing the flash in the museum space and then looking down

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at the image caught on one’s camera has the effect of “What just happened?” that may mirror the real-time experience of a sudden event. But of course, the encounter doesn’t end at the moment of the event or, in this case, the flash. It happens over time. The black-and-white photograph was made in Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967 by Don Hogan Charles, the first Black staff photographer to be hired by the New York Times, where the photograph ran. Charles was covering the city’s response to a Black cab driver having been beaten by white officers. The harrowing moment of Charles’s photograph emerged from years of simmering unrest, and its wrenching parallels to the Black Lives Matter movement and the surge of protests against systemic racism and police violence across the United States in 2020 could not be plainer. The work’s title, Public Enemy (Black and Gold), reads simultaneously in my head with the now deeply ingrained “hands up, don’t shoot” refrain that emerged in the wake of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer. Ultimately, in its flash, the work most pointedly conveys the painfully glacial pace of social and political change as structural racism clearly remains deeply embedded in the fabric of public life in the United States. As a museum visitor in the social space of an exhibition, I did not know the full history to which Thomas’s choice of archival images gestured. But their meaning was clear. This image, like the others, depicts a real historical moment with clear contemporary relevance. Yet it had to be activated to be seen; a viewer needed to make the effort. A condition of historical knowledge, Thomas suggests, is participation. Passive consumption will yield only passive, and woefully incomplete, results. The curator Julia Dolan situates the retroreflective series within the broader characteristic of Thomas’s work “to disrupt ingrained viewing behavior” as a means of “underscoring the responsibilities of bearing witness to both history and present-day sociopolitical events.”3 Any viewer’s reception of a retroreflective image is necessarily initiated by that viewer’s own act of conjuring: no effort, no image.

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In my own experience with the images, once I figured out the rules and requirements for viewing, I became fascinated with my ongoing inability to see the image appear on the wall before me in the moment of its illumination from the vivid light of my iPhone’s flash. It seemed I could only view the image from the small screen of my device, as a kind of trace or afterimage that this had happened, the image had been legible. And yet I missed it every time. It was an unnerving sensation for a photo historian interested in ephemerality. I shifted to video, asking a friend to make the flash with his camera so I could capture his flash and then be able to rewatch what I kept missing in person. The disorientation and temporal delay of that experience reminded me of a text I had written at the very start of my interest in the

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Figures 33–34. Hank Willis Thomas, Public Enemy (Black and Gold), 2018. Variation without and with flash. Screenprint on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond. Source image: 1967 news photo by Don Hogan Charles, originally published in the New York Times. © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

value of ephemeral images. The close of this book seems a fitting place to revisit this reflection on value: Consciously and regularly engaging with photographic images one knows to be ephemeral necessarily entails both an intellectual and emotional reconfiguration of understanding the value of those images. In both tradition and culture, whether that of the museum or the family photo album, we generally—if unconsciously—understand photographs under a rubric of value that stems from the sustained capacity of those images and objects to deliver a shifting and yet continually relevant meaning to their past, present, and future audiences. Under this rubric, photographic images move forward through time if they can adapt, if they continue to be invested with material, cultural, and emotional value and are seen anew as they move into their futures.

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Ephemeral photographs trade on a radically different kind of value, but it’s not no value at all. Rather, it is a value that privileges immediacy and exchange, and the place of accumulative drift in memory as a powerful indicator of future relevance. Like spoken words, which we all intuitively understand to be fleeting (and yet value without question) ephemeral photographs can strike a range of emotional notes . . . they may disappear too quickly or even not quickly enough. These are the ways in which photographs are moving more and more in our contemporary image ecosystem, and rather than write them off as inconsequential or inherently less meaningful than objects that stick around, change hands, are cared for and evolve according to the expectations we hold for them, we can be more attuned to the experiential shifts these other kinds of photographic images have to offer.4

Reflecting on Thomas’s retroreflective work now, several months after having seen it in person, I can think of it only in the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement, which, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, has occupied not just my own but the nation’s attention this summer. The language of protest is everywhere again, fleeting and yet collectively dynamic, preserved and shared through journalism and social media.5 The work rests on history, evokes its archives, foregrounds the conditions of visibility, and embodies a politics of visceral engagement; it is a prompt—an offer—for another way of thinking about photographic images and values, an open door leading as much to “old” histories as to new ones.

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a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

The notion of ephemerality in relation to photography lodged in my mind nearly eight years ago now, and I am so grateful to the friends, colleagues, and students who have engaged with me on this topic, sharing perspectives, ideas, insights, suggestions, and, most fundamentally, the encouragement of shared curiosity and interest. My thinking and approach have changed substantially over these years, and I am struck by how deeply my ideas have been shaped by these conversations and encounters, some planned but many serendipitous, in recommendations of artists to look at and tips about the material state of objects, to discussions about style, voice, and audience in writing. In many ways, the formative thinking for The Night Albums grew out of my first book, Uncertain Histories (2015), for which I had been focused so squarely on artists’ engagement with photographic archives and considering the weight of history that I was looking for something a little lighter. In hindsight, perhaps it is not surprising that it turned out that fleetingness and the archives I thought I was escaping were more like two sides of the same coin. In 2013, I started reading short essays by Nathan Jurgenson about his experience with a new app, Snapchat. Jurgenson was, at the time, a grad student in sociology, and he offered, to my mind, a refreshing perspective on photography. I became mildly obsessed with this form of photographic engagement that I’d never previously experienced. It seemed, to me, like a very big deal at the most foundational and theoretical levels; it indicated a fundamental change in how photographs might operate in the

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world, in exchange, between individuals, as fleeting experiences. At the same time, it was hard to find anyone who shared my curiosity enough to actually try the app. A handful of artists, however, goofed off on it with me, and it had an impact. I remember vividly taking a photograph of my then toddler daughter playing at her water table on our back porch in Tucson, Arizona, and sending the photo to the artist Tanja Hollander in Maine, knowing that that was it—the photo existed just for a moment in Tucson, then a moment in Maine, and then it was gone. This felt new, and uncomfortable, and exhilarating. The artist Marni Shindelman played a version of a visual game of telephone via disappearing images with me while she was at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Florida: we exchanged fleeting images around an orange theme, then a ghost theme (very meta, as Snapchat’s icon was at that time a ghost), then a Rick Astley theme. It was ridiculous, and fun, and again, it felt new and full of possibility. Connected to this, sometime in 2014, the artist Alec Soth mused on Twitter, “Is Snapchat the Zen of photography?” It turned out he was riffing on Snapchat, too, and over the next year, he experimented with the platform in a range of ways. I wrote about some of this in a 2015 essay in my own fledgling experiment in online writing, “The Value of Ephemeral Photographs, or, Everything I Know about Alec Soth I Learned on Snapchat.” Rereading that essay now, five years later, shows the early traces of this book’s premise. The breadth of Soth’s experimental spirit has continued to resonate, and, though I don’t write about any of his ephemeral experiments in The Night Albums, the effects of our ongoing conversation on this front would be difficult to overstate. That online essay was part of a larger project to develop the website Circulation|Exchange, which I was able to do thanks to both an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a teaching sabbatical from the University of Arizona in 2015. Together, these allowed me both the time and the institutional and financial support to experiment with my style of writing. Those essays on Circulation|Exchange fundamentally altered my own value system for how an academic art historian might work, and I am grateful as well to all the artists and the scholars, particularly in the digital humanities, who enlivened that work. I have tried, here, to bring these lessons and values to bear in book form. Colleagues at the University of Arizona collectively offered a deeply supportive intellectual community. I want to thank Larry Busbea, Ellen McMahon, Sama

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Alshaibi, David Taylor, Frank Gohlke, Stacie Widdifield, and Colin Blakely at the School of Art; and Rebecca Senf, Leslie Squyres, Jennifer Jae Gutierrez, and Emily Una Weirich at the Center for Creative Photography. Graduate students in my seminars on archives, social media, technology, and photography and those who engaged in different ways on the themes of this book and its writing—including Lindsey Baker, John-Michael Warner, Stephanie Burchett, Meg Jackson Fox, Molly Kalkstein, and others mentioned throughout these comments—contributed so much energy. The joys and rewards of grad students—especially as they become colleagues and friends—are ongoing. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to formulate my early thoughts on ephemerality and photographs at the 2015 College Art Association’s Annual Conference in New York. I am thankful, too, for invitations to continue to work out my ideas in talks and symposia at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (in coordination with the University of Southern California); California State University, Long Beach; the University of North Texas, Denton; Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana; the Transformer Station in Cleveland, Ohio; Georgia State University in Atlanta; the Society for Photographic Education; the University of Rochester; Yale University; the Getty Research Institute; and the Museum of Modern Art. More so than any previous research I’ve done, this material was presented and shared during the course of its development. This research and thinking also developed in print, in various forms, sometimes directly, though more often in tangentially related essays, and I so appreciate having had those opportunities. I thank Kris Belden-Adams, Paul Paper, Lisa J. Sutcliffe and Emilia Layden, and Kyle Parry and Jacob Lewis. Particular thanks to Catherine Zuromskis and her fellow editors for asking me to contribute a chapter on ephemerality to the forthcoming The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture that tracks much of part III of this book. While ephemerality felt like an outlier of an idea early on, many colleagues shared stories and interests that helped me understand both its pervasiveness and, simultaneously, the limited scope of my own research framework. This combination, encouragingly, allowed me to focus amid my increasing awareness of the breadth of this expansive and understudied topic. In particular, early conversations with Katherine Bussard, on the rapidly vanishing family slide show format; Jason E. Hill, on the ephemerality of photographs as they circulated in

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twentieth-century popular news and magazine publications; and Russell Lord, about a series of vanished nineteenth-century daguerreotypes; as well as work I had the privilege of seeing unfold at close range by artists Jesse Chehak and Brian Ganter, all convinced me this was a topic worth pursuing. More recently, the excellent work of Chitra Ramalingam, particularly around her forthcoming exhibition Fixing and Fading: Photographic Histories, and recent scholarship by Jennifer Bajorek and Lorraine Audric confirm the multitude of directions and expanse of topics one might explore from a nexus of photography and ephemerality. Conversations with scholars, curators, artists, conservators, and archivists have been instrumental throughout. In addition to those I’ve mentioned above, I thank especially Sylvie Penichon, Lee Ann Daffner, Karen Hellman, Jessica S. McDonald, Geoffrey Batchen, Phil Chang, Cassils, Christiana Caro, Corey Keller, Danny Jauregui, Monica Bravo, Paul Messier, Rebecca Morse, Max Dean, Jacinda Russell, Susan Laxton, Sally Stein, Zanna Gilbert, Paula Radisich, Susan Crane, Catherine Zuromskis, Luke Batten, Jonathan Sadler, Thierry Gervais, Jordan Bear, Kenric McDowell, Katrina Sluis, Oscar Muñoz, Emily Pugh, Brody Albert, David Horvitz, Mia Fineman, and Pete Brook. I am tremendously appreciative of the readers at UC Press, of Kim Robinson and Archna Patel especially, for their enthusiasm, thoughtfulness, and professionalism, and of the thoughtful copyediting of Genevieve Thurston. My new colleagues and students at Whittier College, particularly in the Art & Visual Studies Department, have expanded my thinking and values in ways I could not have anticipated and am only beginning to understand. For their friendship, encouragement, solace, inspiration, laughs, support, and love, I am so grateful for Mitra M. Abbaspour, Julia Dolan, Lisa Sutcliffe, Russell Lord, Becky Senf, Todd J. Tubutis, and Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw, and for my close-to-home network Mike, Misha, Emily, and Scott. I wrote most of this manuscript in the summer of 2019 and could not, at that time, have imagined what the process of edits and revisions would look like in the summer of 2020, working from my garage, as our family of four spends nearly all of our time at home, together, during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am more grateful than ever for the bountiful support, patience, love, and good humor of my immediate quarantine companions: dear Heide, Porter, and Greg.

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notes

i n t roduc t ion 1.  The handwritten print titles and archival records that correspond to the  prints also note the name “Doubleday.” Molly Kalkstein has suggested that perhaps this refers to an inexpensive series of photo publications produced by Doubleday in the 1970s as a popular market experiment. With this in mind, I consulted  these  books  and  confirmed  that  both  Uelsmann  and  Krims  published  books in the series and, indeed, that Heinecken’s Vanishing Photographs images  correspond  to  images  published  in  the  books.  Based  on  this  and  the  archival  material  at  the  Center  for  Creative  Photography  (CCP),  I  believe  Heinecken  rephotographed the Doubleday books, created black-and-white transparencies  to recombine as a new layered image with multiple authors, and, finally, gestured toward crediting Doubleday as a maker on equal footing with the artists.  All to have the images slowly vanish (though it is worth noting that the rephotographed transparencies are stable). My thanks as well to (former) CCP archivist  Leslie Squyres for helping me sort through the archival material. 2.  I am thinking in particular of an array of recent scholarship examining  the  state  of  photography  vis-à-vis  the  market  and  institutions  in  connection  with its major areas of growth in the 1960s and ’70s (and earlier). See, for example, Jessica S. McDonald, ed., Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012); Mary Statzer, The Photographic Object  1970 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); and Nadya Bair, The Decisive

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Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). See also Peter C. Bunnell, ed., Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976 (New York: Aperture, 2012), and work by Glenn Willumson, Molly Kalkstein, and others, which collectively addresses the so-called photo boom, during which the production, study, collection, and sale of photographic objects were all consolidated. 3. Recent and upcoming convenings and exhibitions trace this arc. In 2016, the Transformer Station in Cleveland, Ohio, organized the group show The Unfixed Image; in 2019, Chitra Ramalingam at the Yale Center for British Studies began a series of events leading up to the exhibition Fading and Fixing: Photographic Histories, including the 2020 College Art Association panel Fixing and Fading: The Material Photograph over Time; and in 2019, Monica Bravo and Paul Messier organized the symposium Material Immaterial: Photographs in the 21st Century at Yale University, and scholars at the University of West London organized the symposium Light | Sensitive | Material. 4. I am particularly grateful to photograph conservator Jae Gutierrez for a series of conversations she and I had in 2014 about the history of photographic stability. Her edited volume Issues in the Conservation of Photographs and the research path into the history of photographic conservation that its essays set me on fundamentally shifted my understanding of the early history of photography and ultimately shaped my thinking around this project. See Debra Hess Norris and Jennifer Jae Gutierrez, eds., Issues in the Conservation of Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2010). 5. Snapchat was launched in 2006 and has moved through multiple iterations of site design that have affected privacy and storage. Saving one’s own posts became, over time, a default option. In May 2015, Business Insider reported that some 8,796 snaps are shared per second, which translates to over 700 million a day, worldwide. See Molly Mulshine, “This Mind-Blowing Graphic Shows How Many Snapchat Photos Are Sent Per Second,” Business Insider, May 28, 2015, www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-photos-sent-per-second2015-5. 6. My thanks to the artists Tanja Hollander, Marni Shindelman, and Jesse Chehak for taking the plunge to try Snapchat with me in May 2013. At that time, no one else I knew was willing, often noting that they weren’t the “right type”

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of person to use the app, which, at the very least, meant they thought they were just too old (I was thirty-eight at the time, hardly the primary Snapchat demographic). The Pew Research Center published an analysis in 2015 that reported that 41 percent of all smartphone users eighteen to twenty-nine years old use ephemeral messaging apps, compared to just 11 percent of smartphone owners who are thirty to forty-nine years old, and 4 percent of those at or above age fifty. See Maeve Duggan, “Mobile Media and Messaging 2015: Main Findings,” Pew Research Center, August 19, 2015, www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/mobilemessaging-and-social-media-2015-main-findings. 7. This continues to be the case. I became interested in exploring Snapchat because Nathan Jurgenson was writing about it from a sociological perspective. See Nathan Jurgenson, “Pics and It Didn’t Happen,” New Inquiry, February 7, 2013, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/pics-and-it-didnt-happen. Since mid2013, Jurgenson has written for Snapchat as a hired researcher for the Venice, California, based company. His Snapchat blog posts include Nathan Jurgenson, “Temporary Social Media,” Snap Inc., July 19, 2013, www.snap.com/en-US /news/post/temporary-social-media; “The Liquid Self,” Snap Inc., September 20, 2013, www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/the-liquid-self; and “The Frame Makes the Photograph,” Snap Inc., January 7, 2014, www.snap.com/en-US /news/post/the-frame-makes-the-photograph. Now, Snapchat is regularly discussed in academic journals and blogs devoted to communication, social media, technology, and sociology. Jurgenson published a book of extended observations in 2019: The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (New York: Verso, 2019). 8. Farhad Manjoo, “Do We Want an Erasable Internet?” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2013, www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405270230477310457927 2723222788620. See also Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 9. These remarks are from Jennifer Bajorek’s talk “Temporal Frictions: On the Geopolitics of Decay” at the panel Fixing and Fading: The Material Photograph over Time, organized by Chitra Ramalingam and Laurel Waycott at the College Art Association annual conference in Chicago, Illinois, in February 2020. I am grateful to have heard this talk, and I thank Bajorek for sharing the written version of her presentation with me. See also her 2013 essay “Decolonizing the Archive: The View from West Africa,” Aperture 210 (Spring 2013): 66–69; and her

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recent and excellent book Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 10. Bajorek, “Temporal Frictions.” 11. Steffen Siegel, ed., First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017). The book brings together over one hundred primary sources from the year of Daguerre’s public announcement; collectively, the volume presents a remarkable window into the public commentary that shaped the very earliest photographic discourse and has had remarkable durability. 12. Siegel, First Exposures, 14. 13. Siegel, First Exposures. 14. See Stephen Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). This engaging and valuable study of Daguerre’s many aesthetic and commercial inventions and ventures is characterized by a sophisticated analysis of a remarkable range of professional activity. 15. Eugène Hubert, “M. Daguerre, the Camera Obscura, and the Drawings that Make Themselves,” Journal des Artistes 2, no. 11 (September 1836): 166–68. To my knowledge, the comment was first cited in Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (New York: Dover, 1956), 73. Hubert’s article is republished in full in Siegel, First Exposures, 26–27. 16. Though I came to think about José Esteban Muñoz’s essay “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts” (Women & Performance 8, no. 2 [1996]: 5–16) quite late in relation to The Night Albums, Muñoz’s premise and, I think, spirit resonates in several ways with the fleetingness, ephemerality, and resistance to institutional structures of value and visibility of the works considered here. And while Muñoz refers more to ephemera as an object that bears a trace, or memory, of a fleeting event rather than being the event itself, the frank address of a common scholarly posture to easily mistrust “anything that we might understand as un-solid or ephemeral” (7) resonates. Most significantly, Muñoz points out that “the presentation of this sort of anecdotal and ephemeral evidence grants entrance and access to those who have been locked out of official histories and, for that matter, ‘material reality.’ Evidence’s limit becomes clearly visible when we attempt to describe and imagine contemporary identities that

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do not fit into a single pre-established archive of evidence” (9). I thank Danny Jauregui for prompting me to revisit this essay.

pa r t i. e ph e m e r a l i t y, ov e r t i m e 1. Chang has iterations of the series on his website dating back to 2010. In years previous to that, he was experimenting with unfixed prints and abstractions in other capacities. I thank the artist for talking with me about Cache, Active on October 26, 2014, in Los Angeles. 2. James Welling describes Chang’s process in greater depth in his essay “Associations for Phil Chang,” nonsite.org, April 17, 2010, http://nonsite.org /editorial/associations-for-phil-chang. 3. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, “Phil Chang: LAXArt,” Artforum, Summer 2012, 325. 4. That said, however, the project does circulate and succeed in the contemporary fine art photography market both because it was well documented and because collectors may buy an “aftermath” version of the objects from the exhibition. For a thorough discussion of the representational expectation of photographs and contemporary efforts to undermine that expectation, see Walter Benn Michaels’s essay on Cache, Active, “Meaning and Affect: Phil Chang’s Cache, Active,” nonsite.org, March 13, 2012, http://nonsite.org/feature/meaning-andaffect-phil-changs-cache-active. I have, elsewhere, discussed the complex relationship between still photographs and performance; the crucial difference here is that it is the photograph itself that is changing, that enacts the performance, as well as its relic, or aftermath. For more on this, see, to start, Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993); Amelia Jones, “ ‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 11–18; and Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” Performance Art Journal 28, no. 3 (September 2006): 1–10. I considered the performative aspects of work by Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day in this context in my book Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 5. Michaels, “Meaning and Affect.” 6. “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society, April 5, 1855, 144. 7. “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society, April 5, 1855, 144–45.

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8.  “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society, April 5, 1855, 143. 9.  I am thinking of any textbook on the history of photography, as well as  typical narratives that follow a technologically optimistic trajectory. 10.  Member discussion following Hardwich’s “On the Use of Salts of Gold in  Photographic Printing,” Journal of the Photographic Society, April 5, 1855, 149. 11.  “Meeting  Notes,”  Journal of the Photographic Society,  May  21,  1855.  Both  descriptions refer to a meeting of the Council of the Society held on Thursday,  May 3, 1855; the long description is repeated verbatim in the November 21, 1855  issue.  I  will  follow  the  impulses  of  other  historians  to  go  with  “the  so-called  Fading Committee” or just the Fading Committee. 12.  “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society 30, May 21, 1855, 159. 13.  “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society 30, May 21, 1855, 159. 14.  T. Frederick Hardwich, “On ‘Fixing’ the Photographic Image,” Manual of Photographic Chemistry (London: J. Churchill, 1855), 36. 15.  T. Frederick Hardwich, “On the Effect of Certain Oxidizing Agents on  Photographic Prints,” Journal of the Photographic Society, December 21, 1855, 269. 16.  T. Frederick Hardwich, “On the Action of Sulphur upon Positive Prints,”  Journal of the Photographic Society, February 21, 1856, 306. 17.  T. Frederick Hardwich, “On the Action of Sulphur upon Positive Prints”,  Journal of the Photographic Society, February 21, 1856, 306. 18.  T. Frederick Hardwich, “Remarks on the Fading of Positive Proofs,” Journal of the Photographic Society, October 22, 1855, 240–41. 19.  As  reported  by  Thomas  Sutton  in  his  letter  to  the  editor,  “On  Positive  Printing,” Journal of the Photographic Society, February 21, 1855, 310. 20.  Roger Fenton, cited in “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society,  March 21, 1856, 4. 21.  Fenton, cited in “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society, March  21, 1856, 4. 22.  T. A.  Malone,  cited  in  “Meeting  Notes,”  Journal of the Photographic Society, March 21, 1856, 2. 23.  Malone,  cited  in  “Meeting  Notes,”  Journal of the Photographic Society,  March 21, 1856, 4. 24.  Malone,  cited  in  “Meeting  Notes,”  Journal of the Photographic Society,  March 21, 1856, 6. By early 1856, while waiting for their own results, members of 

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the society began to look outward, seeking to understand how photographers in other countries were dealing with the struggles to achieve permanency. In contrast to the efforts of photographers in Britain to treat the challenge of fading through what they understood as “purely photographic processes,” photographers in France and Germany were dealing with the problem by improving methods of copying photographs by engraving and use of the printing press. 25. “First Report of the Committee Appointed to Take into Consideration the Question of the Fading of Positive Photographic Pictures upon Paper,” Journal of the Photographic Society, November 21, 1855, 251. Having determined no final conclusions, the committee did, however, offer an extended set of causes of fading, which included imperfect washing of hyposulphite of soda (hypo) after fixing, sulfur in the atmosphere, and issues related to mounting and varnishing. 26. Photographic Society of London, “Preparing Photographs for Exhibition,” Photographic Journal, December, 1892, 78–81, reprinted in Debra Hess Norris and Jennifer Jae Gutierrez, eds., Issues in the Conservation of Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2010), 634. Portions of this section appeared in somewhat different form in my essay “Default Delete: Photographic Archives in a Digital Age,” in Photography and Failure: One Medium’s Entanglements with Flops, Underdogs, and Disappointments, ed. Kris Belden-Adams (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 147–62. 27. There is much more to say about the nineteenth century in particular. For the perspective of a specialist in the period as well as a kindred spirit in posing these questions, see the excellent and ongoing work of Chitra Ramalingam, Curator of Photographs at the Yale Center for British Art, where she is developing programming and a forthcoming exhibition and publication titled Fixing and Fading. It was a pleasure and an inspiration to attend a special seminar session at the YCBA, “Talbot’s Pencil of Nature: Invention and Ruin,” led by Ramalingam and her colleagues Colette Hardman-Peavy and Richard Hark, focused on looking closely at photographic objects and ongoing conservation efforts on precisely these issues. This seminar took place in the course of the symposium Material Immaterial: Photographs in the 21st Century, co-organized by Monica Bravo and Paul Messier at Yale University with the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, in September 2019. I am also grateful to have attended “Fixing and Fading: The Material Photograph over Time,” organized by Ramalingam and Laurel

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Waycott at the College Art Association annual conference in Chicago, Illinois, in February 2020. 28. Lake Price, cited in “Meeting Notes,” Journal of the Photographic Society, April 21, 1856, 18–19. 29. There is much, much more to be said about economic value and ephemerality, not just at the medium’s origins but in relation to the cost of materials, the capital necessary for preservation even at the most basic levels (let alone current museum standards, a topic that also intersects with environmental value and costs), human labor, promotional value, and more. 30. Jordan Bear, “Self-Reflections: The Nature of Sir Humphry Davy’s Photographic ‘Failures,’ ” in Photography and Its Origins, ed. Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón (New York: Routledge, 2015), 185. Bear outlines the degree to which his line of thinking is indebted to Geoffrey Batchen’s work, particularly Burning with Desire (1997), a foundational acknowledgment that we will return to in the last section of this book. I am grateful to Batchen, too, for sharing his extensive knowledge, enthusiasm, and ongoing curiosity with regard to this material, both in his extensive publications and in his correspondence. 31. Bear, “Self-Reflections,” 189. 32. Bear, “Self-Reflections,” 189. 33. Bear, “Self-Reflections,” 189. 34. See Sotheby’s press release, “Intriguing Early Photographic Images,” April 2008, https://sothebys.gcs-web.com/static-files/3a25dd19-1efe-4fe4b590-928c41ae9fbd. 35. These ideas about “before” and “after” pairs of photographs are treated at greater length, and from multiple perspectives, in the book I edited with Jordan Bear, Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 36. The next year, in 2002, Buckingham engaged with a different kind of monument, this one based in the United States: Mount Rushmore. For this project, by way of an altered photograph, Buckingham imagined the iconic monument’s future erosion into an unrecognizable state, which geologists believe will take 500,000 years. The work is clearly a critique of the monument, which was carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, land the Sioux Native Americans consider sacred and that was wrongly taken by the U.S. government.

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37.  I thank Corey Keller for sharing the object and acquisition records in the  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collection. 38.  The Whitney committee was formed in 2008 and is led by conservator  Carol Mancusi-Ungaro; the group, as reported by the Observer in 2009, is “dedicated to thinking systematically about how museum practices must change in  order for the guardians of contemporary art to get on the same page as those who  create it.” Leon Neyfakh, “Copy That! Wait, Don’t. Whitney Ponders Problem of  Replication in Modern Art,” Observer (UK), November 24, 2009, https://observer .com/2009/11/copy-that-wait-dont-whitney-ponders-problem-of-replicationin-modern-art.  See  also  Ben  Lerner,  “The  Custodians:  How  the  Whitney   Is  Transforming  the  Art  of  Museum  Conservation,”  New Yorker,  January  3,  2016,  www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/the-custodians-onwardand-upward-with-the-arts-ben-lerner. In 2003, for instance, the Solomon R.  Guggenheim Museum helped organize the Variable Media Network, an initiative  meant to explore ways that ephemeral art can be preserved so that posterity can  experience it “more directly than through second-hand documentation or anecdote.” Variable Media Network, “Definition,” https://variablemedia.net/e/index  .html, accessed November 20, 2020. 39.  E. John Bullard, cited in Charles Hagen, “ ‘Collecting the Photograph’:  Was It Worth It?” Afterimage, October 1975, 2–3. 40.  These dates are based on participating curators’ anecdotal reports and  memories, shared in a public conversation at the Artist Initiative Symposium on  Photography: Reprinting Color Photographs as a Preservation Strategy, held on  May 10, 2019, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 41.  It is worth underscoring the seriousness and professionalism invested in  the  current  discussion  around  these  topics.  The  topic  of  color  preservation  in  relation  to  visibility  and  ephemerality  could  easily  become  its  own  complete  book tracking the histories and complexities of these issues through chemical  production, exhibitions, collecting practices, the sometimes competing interests of artists and curators, conservation efforts, and the effects and impacts of  digitization. In addition to the excellent symposium at the San Francisco Museum  of Modern Art referenced above, I think of the complexities of commercial color  production  at  Kodak,  Agfa,  and  elsewhere  and  the  persistence  of  its  fugitive  states, the enormous and yet fleeting role of color slides in U.S. households, and 

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more. The art historian Lorraine Audric’s work on the challenges of digitizing Gisele Freund’s archive of color slides and its ethical and narrative nuances, “Losing It: The Question of Color in the Digitization of Gisele Freund’s Archives,” presented in February 2020 at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association in Chicago, IL, delves deeply into this rich terrain. 42. The comments of Robert Doherty, director of the Eastman House, are cited as the event’s opening remarks; the report is otherwise unsigned. “Color Photographs: Must They Always Fade?” Afterimage, November 1975, 16. 43. “Color Photographs,” 16. 44. Eva Respini, ed., “Not a Picture of, but an Object about Something,” in Robert Heinecken: Object Matter (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), exhibition catalog, 19. 45. The set of images I am referring to is in the Heinecken archives at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. It can be found there under AG 45:24 Project files: Production materials, 1969–1974.

pa r t i i. way s of s e e i ng a n d “l i v e” pho t o gr a ph y: f ou r c a s e s t u di e s 1. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), 1977. 2. I am thinking, primarily, of journals like Aperture (founded in 1952 by Minor White, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Barbara Morgan, and others to promote communication among “serious photographers and creative people everywhere, whether professional, amateur or student”), Exposure (the journal of the Society for Photographic Education, launched in 1970; the society was founded in 1962), and Afterimage (founded in 1972 in Rochester, New York, by photographer and curator Nathan Lyons, in affiliation with the Visual Studies Workshop). 3. Krementz also published the image in her book The Writer’s Desk (New York: Random House, 1996). 4. Eva Respini, “Not a Picture of, but an Object about Something,” in Robert Heinecken: Object Matter (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), exhibition catalog, 21-22. 5. Interestingly, Knight’s review of the MoMA-organized retrospective, as it was installed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, describes the AIC version

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of the work. My guess is that Knight looked it up later, online, and found the AIC version, not realizing that the two works differ in visual content. 6. Letters exchanged in February 1985 between John Szarkowski and Robert Heinecken, cited by Sarah Meister in her talk “The History of Reprinting Photographs at MoMA” at the Artist Initiative Symposium on Photography: Reprinting Color Photographs as a Preservation Strategy, held on May 10, 2019, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 7. Letters exchanged in February 1985 between John Szarkowski and Robert Heinecken, cited by Sarah Meister. 8. I counted roughly 340 prints in the MoMA image half and about 306 in the text half, though this number is low because it does not include the detail work in the face. 9. I am grateful to Lee Ann Daffner for clarifying this fact in a phone conversation on June 10, 2019. 10. The MoMA iteration of the pair was first exhibited in John Szarkowski’s 1978 exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 19 60. The museum did not acquire the work until 1982, when it was shown in Big Photographs by Contemporary Artists. 11. Lynn Warren, “Revised for Your Consideration: The Art of Robert Heinecken,” in Robert Heinecken: Photographist, ed. Lynne Warren (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), exhibition catalog, 13–21; A. D. Coleman, “‘I Call It Teaching’: Robert Heinecken’s Analytical Facture,” in Warren, Robert Heinecken, 1–11. 12. MoMA responded to a complaint about the original text panel and the misspelling (which Heinecken says was deliberate) of photographer Jill Krementz’s name. It was resolved by creating a new text panel. It is worth noting that the AIC version still includes the original. My thanks to the MoMA Photography Department for sharing their records on this question. 13. Food for the Spirit was first exhibited in Adrian Piper: Reflections, 1967–1987, Alternative Museum, New York, April 18–May 30, 1987. 14. The camera has been identified in several ways. This identification appears in the catalog accompanying Piper’s recent Museum of Modern Art survey: David Platzker, “Adrian Piper Unites,” in Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 19 65–2016, ed. Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler, and David Platzker (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018), exhibition catalog, 30–49.

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15.  Adrian Piper, “Food for the Sprit,” High Performance 4, no. 1 (Spring 1981). 16.  Piper, “Food for the Sprit.” 17.  These original and unique small prints are owned by the Thomas Erben  Gallery. In 1997, presumably due to market demand, Piper produced an edition of  larger prints from copy negatives. 18.  Kobena  Mercer,  “Contrapositional  Becomings:  Adrian  Piper  Performs  Questions of Identity,” in Adrian Piper: A Reader, ed. Adrian Piper, Cornelia Butler,  and David Platzker (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 126. 19.  Mercer, “Contrapositional Becomings,” 127. 20.  Mercer, “Contrapositional Becomings,” 121. 21.  Mercer, “Contrapositional Becomings,” 128. 22.  Mercer, “Contrapositional Becomings,” 127. 23.  Ariella  Azoulay,  Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of  Photography  (London: Verso, 2012), 15. 24.  Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 25. 25.  Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 26. 26.  Oscar Muñoz, “On Photography with Oscar Muñoz,” video made on the  occasion of the artist winning the 2018 Hasselblad Award and presented in conjunction with the corresponding exhibition at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden, October 10, 2018–February 3, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=  yKm-uZ8c9D0. Thanks to Monica Bravo for suggesting I look at Muñoz’s work. 27.  For a different series of fleeting images, also activated by breath (though  by  warmth  rather  than  moisture),  see  the  work  of  Arizona-based  artist  Brian  Ganter, which is concerned with film stills, sourced online, of gay pornographic  movie actors who have died from complications of AIDS. Ganter covers the surface of the photograph—whether made on paper, metal, or glass—with a matte  black, heat-sensitive coating that obscures the image until it is warmed by the  viewer.  I  wrote  about  the  series  in  my  essay  “Default  Delete:  Photographic  Archives in a Digital Age,” in Photography and Failure: One Medium’s Entanglement with Flops, Underdogs, and Disappointments, ed. Kris  Belden-Adams (New  York:  Bloomsbury, 2016), 147–62. 28.  Muñoz  is  cited  describing  Barthes’s  ideas  in  Santiago  Olmo,  “When  Drawing on Water Is More than Just a Metaphor,” in Oscar Muñoz: Documentos de la

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amnesia [The amnesia documents] (Badajoz, Spain: Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, 2008), exhibition catalog, 157. 29. As cited in Ramiro Arbeláez, “Oscar Munõz in Cali,” in Oscar Muñoz (Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, 2014), exhibition catalog, 75. 30. Muñoz in conversation with Riccardo Giacconi, “Lugar a Dudas: Stories and Memories of a City,” in Oscar Muñoz (Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, 2014), exhibition catalog, 128. 31. There are three images in El testigo; they are, in turn, part of the larger series Impresiones débiles. 32. Interview with the artist, Zoom call, June 19, 2020. Muñoz shared the source image with me, which was published in his copy of the encyclopedia-like multivolume Nueva Historia de Colombia, as well as his impression of the relationship between the photograph and the subjects’ futures. 33. I am grateful to the artist and to Angela Patiño for taking the time to speak with me about this work in a Zoom conversation on June 19, 2020. 34. Muñoz in conversation with Giacconi, “Lugar a Dudas,” 129. 35. Muñoz attributes the word to Roca in a conversation with Riccardo Giacconi, “Lugar a Dudas: Stories and Memories of a City,” in Oscar Muñoz (Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, 2014) 129. 36. Documentos de la amnesia [The amnesia documents], Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain, 2008. 37. Jennifer Doyle, “Becoming an Image: In the Ring with Cassils,” Sport Spectacle, October 6, 2013, https://thesportspectacle.com/2013/10/06/becomingan-image-in-the-ring-with-cassils. 38. Cassils has, more recently, emphasized the subjectivity of the visual effect, noting that it is not uniformly the same for everyone and may just as often produce a retinal “afterburn” as an experience akin to a photographic image. Cassils, interview with the author, Los Angeles, October 16, 2017. 39. Cassils’s recent exhibition Monumental (2017) explicitly takes up the highly visible and politicized narrative of Gavin Grimm, the transgender teenager who, in 2015, sued his Virginia school district for the right to use the boys’ bathroom.

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40.  Cassils,  interview  with  the  author,  Los  Angeles,  October  16,  2017.  Founded  in  1952,  the  One  Archives  are  in  Los  Angeles.  Since  2010,  they  have  been affiliated with the University of Southern California. 41.  Cassils, interview with the author, Los Angeles, October 16, 2017. The  photographer Manuel Vason, whose proposal for a separate project inspired this  set of parameters, typifies Cassils’s ideal partner for the performance. 42.  Cassils,  interview  with  the  author,  Los  Angeles,  October  16,  2017.   The  collaboration  extends  into  shared  authorship  in  the  photographs’  credit   line. 43.  It  is  worth  noting  that  Cassils,  of  course,  is  profoundly  aware  of  the  power  of  still  photographic  images,  as  well  as  their  own  differences  from  the  dynamics of embodiment and visibility that characterize their performances.  Amelia Jones has also written compellingly, as always, on Cassils’s work: “Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New Concepts of Agency,” Drama Review 59, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 18–35. 44.  Blaise  Agüera  y  Arcas,  Margaret  Mitchell,  and  Alexander  Todorov,  “Physiognomy’s  New  Clothes,”  Medium,  May  6,  2017,  https://medium.com/@ blaisea/physiognomys-new-clothes-f2d4b59fdd6a.  I  thank  Kenric  McDowell  and Christiana Caro, both in the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence group  (currently and formerly, respectively), for pointing me to this essay. 45.   Agüera y Arcas, Mitchell, and Todorov, “Physiognomy’s New Clothes.” 46.  Olivia Rosane has recently argued against the term computer vision both  for  falsely  suggesting  that  computers’  sensing  is  “like”  human  vision  and  for  putting too much emphasis on the notion of vision as the most important sense.  See  her  essay  “Beyond  Machine  Sight,”  Real Life,  December  17,  2014,  http:// reallifemag.com/beyond-machine-sight. 47.  Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, eds., The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online  (New  York:  Peter  Lang,  2016).  See  also  Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism  (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 48.  Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham,  NC:  Duke  University  Press,  2015).  Ruha  Benjamin  extends  these  arguments,  demonstrating what she terms “the new Jim Code” in her book Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).

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49.  The  work  of  Rebecca  M.  Schreiber  is  highly  relevant  here  as  well.  Her  book The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2018) demonstrates that “in contemporary  U.S.  society,  visibility  is  associated  with  empowerment  and  invisibility  with  powerlessness,  including  an  absence  from  political  and  cultural  life”  (5)  and  studies the relationship of visibility to vulnerability, particularly among Mexican and Central American migrants to the United States. 50.  This last feature, of course, is an innovation that was offered as a selling  point for the Apple iPhone X, which was released in late 2017. 51.  For  instance,  Google  Arts  &  Culture  capitalized  on  social  media  users’  voracious and presumably narcissistic appetite for selfies with their wildly popular  app featuring computer vision “matches” made with portrait subjects drawn from  the museums and collections in institutional partnership with the Google Arts &  Culture conglomerate. Predictably and rightly, there were immediate reactions of  dismay  as  search  results  skewed  toward  the  white  subjects  that  no  doubt  are  grossly overrepresented—by measure of objective population data—as subjects in  the collections consulted. See, for instance, Adrian Chen, “The Google Arts & Culture App and the Rise of the ‘Uncoded Gaze,’ ” New Yorker, January 26, 2018, www .newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-google-arts-and-culture-appand-the-rise-of-the-coded-gaze-doppelganger. However, and additionally, the  popularity of the app raised privacy concerns that the huge number of uniformly  photographed (and identified) faces would be used as fuel for the growing Google  facial recognition data set, as the app encouraged users to hold their phone at arm’s  length and photograph themselves within a passport-sized box, presumably not  smiling, per the historical conventions of portraiture. 52.  Not surprisingly, mistakes are easily made, as I found in an analysis of an  image  of  a  young  boy  I  was  writing  about  in  a  recent  essay,  “The  Pig  and  the  Algorithm,” Plot, March 4, 2017, https://plot.online/plot/points/the-pig-and-thealgorithm. 53.  I am referring to photographic studies by French neurologist Duchenne  du Boulogne, which he published in 1862. These studies later famously appeared  in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). 54.  I thank Paglen for sharing this work with me in advance of its exhibition  at Metro Pictures (A Study of Invisible Images, September 8–October 21, 2017). More 

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pointedly, perhaps, in the specific concerns Cassils raises regarding nonbinary gender visibility are the series of facial recognition studies Paglen has produced with now-iconic portraits drawn from contemporary art history. These “training sets,” which the artist has exhibited and published in his own writing, most readily legible to audiences for whom the subjects are already known, easily make the point that the gender politics introduced by artists Martha Rosler and Catherine Opie, for instance, are reduced to a deadeningly reductive view of programmed artificial intelligence. 55. Shalini Kantayya, dir., Coded Bias, 2020. 56. John P. Jacob, Trevor Paglen, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Kate Crawford, “A Conversation with Trevor Paglen,” in Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen, John P. Jacob and Luke Skrebowski (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2018), exhibition catalog, 213–29.

pa r t i i i. f u t u r e v i s i bi l i t y 1. Nora N. Khan, “Toward a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence,” After Us, September 25, 2015, https://medium.com/after-us/towards-a-poetics-ofartificial-superintelligence-ebff11d2d249. 2. Astronaut.io presents itself as authorless; no names are associated with the site itself. However, its makers, James Thompson and Andrew Wong, are both engineers who are professionally involved with data visualization and data analysis. That they are not associated with the art world has not prevented serious viewers from paying attention. Thompson and Wong were invited to participate in the 2017 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The category “documentary” is, of course, as fraught within film and video as it is within photographic history; nevertheless, its capaciousness allows for a certain plausibility of understanding Astronaut.io within its framework and history. 3. Nathan Jurgenson, “Pics and It Didn’t Happen,” New Inquiry, February 7, 2013, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/pics-and-it-didnt-happen. 4. The scholars Katrina Sluis and Daniel Rubinstein have written about this form of metadata, as well as its implications. See their article “Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image,” Photographies 6, no. 1 (2013): 151–58.

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5.  The terms nonintent and language agnostic were both used by the designers  of Astronaut.io, James Thompson and Andrew Wong, during a phone interview I  had with them on October 9, 2017. 6.  At the same time, the politics of becoming visible in the first place are as  fraught as ever. For an aesthetic engagement with this issue, see Hito Steyerl’s  mock instructional video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013). In recent years, a cottage industry of popular books has emerged on  how to maintain privacy in a digital age, with titles like How to Be Invisible, How to Disappear, and The Incognito Toolkit. The artist Hasan Elahi has explored this  topic in some depth, in particular with his ongoing project Tracking Transience  (begun in 2003). 7.  Albright coauthored a recent Pew Research Center report, “The Future of  Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online,” March 29, 2017, www  .pewinternet.org/2017/03/29/the-future-of-free-speech-trolls-anonymity-and-  fake-news-online. See also an interview about Albright’s recent work with Harvard’s  Berkman  Klein  Center  for  Internet  and  Society:  Laura  Hazard  Owen,  “News  in  a  Disintegrating  Reality:  Tow’s  Jonathan  Albright  on  What  to  Do  as  Things  Crash  around  Us,”  NiemanLab,  February  28,  2018,  www.niemanlab  .org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-reality-tows-jonathan-albright-on-what-  to-do-as-things-crash-around-us. 8.  Daniel  Rubinstein,  “Tag,  Tagging,”  Philosophy of Photography  1,  no.  2  (2010): 197–200. Rubinstein elaborates: “Social networks encourage tagging as a  playful way of performing the self through the free association of words with  images. The resulting blend of narcissism and marketing fuses identity politics  with advertising while at the same time assisting computers with the identification of non-linguistic objects. . . . The performative element lodged in the act of  tagging is not limited to the construction of identities, as the application of a tag  to an image sets in motion a causal chain of physical changes to binary data that  exerts influence on the structure, processing and display of information. Tags are  linguistic utterances, but their influence on the world is extralinguistic: which is  to say that in addition to their linguistic form, tags have a concrete, transformative  and  non-discursive  dimension  by  which  they  partake  in  the  material   structure of power relations in society” (2–3). See also the 2013 essay by Sluis and 

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Rubinstein, which takes up a broader host of related issues, “Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image.” 9. In 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube viewers collectively watch one billion hours of video per day, an increase largely attributed to the platform’s use of artificial intelligence to customize recommendations for individual viewers. Jack Nicas, “YouTube Tops 1 Billion Hours of Video a Day,” Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2017, www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-tops-1-billionhours-of-video-a-day-on-pace-to-eclipse-tv-1488220851. 10. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, November 7, 2017, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-theinternet-c39c471271d2. 11. See Bridle’s website for the 2017 Citizen Ex installation, which emerged from the 2015 Citizen Ex web browser extension that allows viewers to map the physical location of their own website activity: www.jamesbridle.com/works /citizen-ex-installation. 12. The level of alarm, then, that he sounded about YouTube content was all the more surprising given his previous predilection toward seeking meaningful— if critical—engagement with our new mediated reality. 13. Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet.” 14. Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet.” 15. Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures are Looking at You),” New Inquiry, December 8, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-yourpictures-are-looking-at-you. 16. Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 4. 17. Paglen, The Last Pictures, xiii. 18. Paglen, The Last Pictures, xiii. 19. Paglen, The Last Pictures, 13. 20. On a more modest scale, the Minnesota-based artist Peter Happel Christian has similarly gestured toward the long timescale of environmental concerns with his disappearing newsprint, Nearly a Million Sunsets (2011–2012). 21. There is a good deal of literature on the material state of Talbot’s prints. See, for example, Larry J. Schaaf, “Brief Historical Sketch,” in the 1989 anniver-

148

Notes

sary facsimile of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., 1989); Debra Hess Norris and Jennifer Jae Gutierrez, eds., Issues in the Conservation of Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2010); and Steffen Siegel, ed., First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017), which includes a touching 1834 letter from Talbot’s sister-in-law Laura Mundy, who wrote to him, “I had grieved over the gradual disappearance of those [prints] you gave me in the summer” (22). See also Vered Maimon, Singular Images, Failed Copies: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Early Photograph (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 22. The discussion here is one small slice of a much greater conversation about digital preservation and access in the face of rapid technological change and designed obsolescence, where media formats are rapidly replaced and quickly become unreadable (one must think only as far back as Super 8 film and floppy disks to grasp the problem). For an in-depth analysis of the substantial challenges in preservation currently faced by cultural institutions that must grapple with digital and online content, see Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 23. Paglen, The Last Pictures, 17–18. 24. Paglen, The Last Pictures, 17–18. The artist details the extensive discussion that went into the selection of images. 25. Paglen, The Last Pictures, 15. 26. Steichen’s exhibition, in particular, has been the subject of extensive discussion and critique, and many have pointed out the complexities of any claims to a unified vision. See, to start, Eric Sandeen’s Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), as well as analysis by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Abigail SolomonGodeau, Christopher Phillips, and Blake Stimson. 27. The Evidence archive is at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. It includes Mandel and Sultan’s correspondence with corporations and institutions, as well as their NEA grant material. 28. Forth was dean of the California College of Arts and Crafts at the time. 29. Robert F. Forth, “The Circumstantial and the Evident,” in Evidence, Mandel and Sultan (Greenbrae, CA: Clatworthy Colorvues, 1977), unpaginated.

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pa r t i v. r e v i s e d f ou n dat ion s 1. Jessica S. McDonald, the current curator of photography at the Ransom Center, where the plate is held, details the background of this title in her lively and informative essay “A Sensational Story: Helmut Gernsheim and ‘The World’s First Photograph,’ ” in Photography and Its Origins, ed. Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón (New York: Routledge, 2015), 20. McDonald has undertaken an extensive review of the plate over the past few years, with a particular eye to the language around its current presentation, resulting in these changes to its title and date. I am grateful to have spoken with McDonald about this experience and set of decisions. See also Jessica S. McDonald, “Introducing ‘The Niépce Heliograph,’ ” Ransom Center Magazine, August 20, 2019, https://sites.utexas.edu /ransomcentermagazine/2019/08/20/introducing-the-niepce-heliograph. 2. McDonald describes the plate as bearing “a barely discernible image of an unremarkable pastoral scene” (“A Sensational Story,” 21). 3. I am grateful to McDonald for talking through all of these fascinating iterations with me and sharing her extensive work on this remarkable object and its reproductions. 4. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). 5. McDonald, “A Sensational Story,” 24. 6. McDonald, “A Sensational Story,” 24. 7. McDonald, “A Sensational Story,” 24. 8. Larry J. Schaaf, “Brief Historical Sketch,” in the 1989 anniversary facsimile of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., 1989), unpaginated. 9. I would like to thank Thierry Gervais and all the participants of the 2015 FOCUS:AZ convening of photo historians, curators, and nonprofit professionals, who collectively facilitated and enabled such a rich and generative exchange of ideas. 10. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 128. 11. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 132. 12. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 132. 13. McDonald, “A Sensational Story,” 24. In 2006, the director of the Société française de photographie, Paul-Louis Roubert, reproduced the 1925 reproduc-

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tion and a more recent, yet undated, one, writing only in the captions that the later image is “dans son état actuel, fortement altéré” (in its current state, seriously deteriorated), 20. 14. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, 202. 15. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, 202. 16. The Société française de photographie did not elaborate in response to my query.

c oda 1. The series occupied one section of the exhibition Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal, curated by Julia Dolan and Sara Krajewski at the Portland Art Museum (October 12, 2019–January 12, 2020). 2. Nico Wheadon, “Hank Willis Thomas: Black Archival Memory and Its Conceits,” Brooklyn Rail, May 1, 2018, https://brooklynrail.org/2018/05/artseen /Hank-Willis-Thomas-Black-Archival-Memory-Its-Conceits. I would also like to thank Helen Banach, in Hank Willis Thomas’s studio, for her gracious help with these images. 3. Julia Dolan, “Depending on Where You Stand Determines What You See: Hank Willis Thomas’s Viewing Strategies,” in Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal (New York: Aperture, 2019), exhibition catalog, 172–79. 4. Kate Palmer Albers, “On Experiential Value & Digital Materiality” Circulation|Exchange: Moving Images in Contemporary Art, July 13, 2016, http:// circulationexchange.org/articles/digital_materiality.html. 5. In her essay in the exhibition catalog, the art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis points to the artist’s attention to gesture and, specifically, to the gesture of protest. See Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, “The Cut: The Conceptual Work of Hank Willis Thomas,” in Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal (New York: Aperture, 2019), exhibition catalog, 27–33.

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il lust r at ions



1. Robert Heinecken, archive material, c. 1973 2



2. Phil Chang, Cache, Active, 2012 18



3. Matthew Buckingham, Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes,



4. Matthew Buckingham, Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes,

2001 31 2001, installation view 32

5. Robert Heinecken, Untitled, from the series Vanishing Photographs, 1973 37



6. Robert Heinecken, The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography,” 1978 43



7. Robert Heinecken, detail of The S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography,” 1978 47

8–10. Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 52–53

11. Oscar Muñoz, Aliento (Breath), 1995–2002 61



12. Oscar Muñoz, El testigo (The Witness), 2011, installation view 63



13. Oscar Muñoz, El testigo (The Witness), 2011, detail 64



14. Source image for Oscar Muñoz’s El testigo (The Witness), 2011 65



15. Cassils, Becoming an Image, Performance Still No. 4, National Theater Studio, SPILL Festival, London, 2013 69

153



16. Cassils, Becoming an Image, Performance Still No. 3, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Historic Casting Hall, 2016 72



17. Trevor Paglen, Machine Readable Hito, 2017 76

18–22. Screenshots from Astronaut.io, captured July 30, 2019 84–85 23–24. Zachary Norman, 41.05°N, 124.15°W, Trinidad Head, California, image progression stills from Endangered Data, 2017 94–95

25. Trevor Paglen, The Last Picture Artifact, 2013 97



26. Trevor Paglen, The Last Picture Mosaic, 2012 100

27–28. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, images from Evidence, 1977 102–103

29. Helmut Gernsheim, [Untitled heliograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce; reproduced by P. B. Watt at Kodak Research Laboratories, Harrow; heavily retouched by Helmut Gernsheim], 1952 112



30. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Untitled “point de vue,” 1827 113



31. Louis Daguerre, Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités, 1837 116



32. Louis Daguerre, Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités, 1837 117

33–34. Hank Willis Thomas, Public Enemy (Black and Gold), 2018 124–125

154

Illustrations

In dex

Afterimage, 33, 34, 140n2 Agfa, 139n41 Agüera y Arcas, Blaise, 73 Albright, Jonathan, 86–87, 147n7 algorithm, 83, 87, 94; embedding of biases in, 72–74, 77, 88–89 Algorithms of Oppression (Noble), 74 Aliento (Breath) (Muñoz), 60–62, 61fig. Aperture, 140n2 Archer, Frederick Scott, 20 archive, 5–7, 27, 70, 74, 90, 116, 135n16; dAigitization of, 66, 98, 140n41; ephemeral apps as argument against, 5–6, 91. See also Evidence; Last Pictures; Retroreflective; Vanishing Photographs artificial intelligence (AI), 73–75, 92, 146n54; YouTube’s use of, 87, 148n9 Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). See S. S. Copyright Project Artist’s Studio (Daguerre). See Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités Astronaut.io, 81–86, 87, 89–90; as authorless, 89, 146n2; designers of,

155

85, 146n2, 147n5; screenshots, 84fig., 85fig.; YouTube compared with, 12, 83–85, 87 As Yet Untitled (Dean), 67–68 authorship, 2, 89, 131n1, 144n42, 146n2 automated vision, 89. See also computer vision Azoulay, Ariella, 58–59, 61 Bajorek, Jennifer, 6–7 Barthes, Roland, 28, 60, 62, 142n28, 149n26 Batchen, Geoffrey, 112–13, 118–19, 138n30 Bear, Jordan, 29–30, 138n30 Becoming an Image (Cassils), 68–72, 89, 143n48; authorship and collaboration, 70–71, 144nn40–41; stills, 69fig., 72fig. Benjamin, Ruha, 144n48 Black Lives Matter, 123, 126 Bridle, James, 88–89, 148nn11–12 British Journal of Photography, 33 Browne, Simone, 74

Buckingham, Matthew: Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes, 30–33, 31fig., 32fig.; The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa in the Year 502,002 C.E., 138n36 Buolamwini, Joy, 76–77 Burning with Desire (Batchen), 112–13, 118–19, 138n30 Cache, Active (Chang), 17–18, 18fig., 27–29, 30, 38, 135n1; before-and-after photographs, 30; market and, 135n4; monochrome state, 17–18, 27–28 Cailleux, Alphonse de, 118, 119 camera: flash, 69, 122–23, 124; Kodak Hawkeye Instamatic R4, 53; large format, 49–50; Polaroid, 44–45; as sensor, 93 Cassils, 12, 104, 144n43, 144n54; Monumental, 143n49. See also Becoming an Image Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, 14n045, 36, 131n1, 149n27 Chang, Phil. See Cache, Active Charles, Don Hogan, 123 Christian, Peter Happel, 148n20 Citizen Ex (Bridle), 88, 148n11 cloud, 66, 86, 98 Coleman, A.D., 50 “Collecting the Photograph,” 33, 34 “Color Photographs: Must They Always Fade?,” 34, 38, 140n2 computer vision, 20, 75, 76, 87; embedding of biases in, 72–75, 90, 145n51; lack of nuance in, 75–76; as a term, 144n46 Crawford, Kate, 77, 86 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 109, 110; daguerreotype, 7–9, 20, 134n11; night album, 9, 17. See also Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités

156

data: encryption, 94; machine-readable, 75–77, 91; metadata, 87, 92, 146n2; retrieval, 67, 87; sets, 92, 93, 145n51; storage, 67, 87, 90, 132n5 Davy, Sir Humphrey, 29–30 Dean, Max, 67–68 disappearance, 5–6, 90–92; of canonical photographs, 13, 115–19, 149n21; as inherent to photography, 24, 26, 105. See also Astronaut.io; Cache, Active; fading; Food for the Spirit; Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes; Vanishing Photographs Dolan, Julia, 123 Doyle, Jennifer, 69 drones, 88, 99 duration, 2, 4–7, 12, 17. See also Aliento; Fading Committee Elahi, Hasan, 147n6 El testigo (The Witness) (Muñoz), 62–65, 63fig., 64fig., 143n31; source image, 63–64, 65fig., 143n32 Endangered Data (Norman), 12, 93–96, 99; progression stills, 94fig., 95fig. environment, crisis of. See Endangered Data; Last Pictures ephemerality: intentional, 1–2, 5, 26, 67–68, 89; value of, 11, 27, 83, 89, 125–26, 138n29 event, photography as, 4, 58, 61; in Cache, Active, 28, 30; in night album, 9, 10 Evidence (Mandel and Sultan), 101–5, 102fig., 103fig.; archives, 149n27; essay, 104, 149n28 Exposure, 140n2 facial recognition, 74–77, 145n51, 146n54 fading, 7, 13, 26, 33–34, 137n24. See also disappearance; Evidence; Fading

Index

Committee; S. S. Copyright Project; Vanishing Photographs Fading Committee, Royal Photographic Society, 11, 18–25, 33, 38, 136–37n24, 137n25 fake news, 86, 87, 89 Fenton, Roger, 24–25 Filo, John, 64 First Exposures (Siegel), 8, 134n11 Food for the Spirit (Piper), 12, 50–60, 52fig., 53fig.; camera used for, 53, 141n14; exhibitions of, 51, 58, 141n13; Kant and, 51, 54–56, 57; photographs, 53, 55, 58–59, 142n17 Forth, Robert F., 104, 149n28 Frizot, Michel, 114 Ganter, Brian, 142n27 gender, 51, 57, 73–74, 92, 146n54; as binary, 72, 75–76; nonbinary/ nonconforming, 70, 146n54; trans, 68–69, 70, 143n39 Gernsheim, Alison, 110, 115 Gernsheim, Helmut, 110–12, 112fig., 114–15, 118 Getty Conservation Institute, 111, 113 Google, 73, 74, 111; Arts & Culture, 145n51 Hardwich, T. Frederick, 23–24, 29 Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, 109, 110–11, 113 Heinecken, Robert. See S. S. Copyright Project; Vanishing Photographs Herschel, Sir John, 19, 24 How Not to Be Seen (Steyerl), 147n6 Hubert, Alphonse Eugène, 9–10, 17 Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes (Buckingham), 30–33, 31fig., 32fig.

157

Instagram, 5, 86–87 Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités (Daguerre): 13, 115, 117–19, 117fig.; 1925 reproduction, 116fig., 119, 150–51n13 Intersectional Internet (Noble and Tynes), 74 invisibility, 57, 59, 76–77, 99; future, 4, 12, 18, 92–96, 98; powerlessness and, 145n49. See also unseen images iPhone, 75, 98, 124, 145n50 Journal of the Photographic Society, 19, 21–23, 136n11 Jurgenson, Nathan, 83, 127, 133n7 Kant, Immanuel, 51, 54, 55–56, 57 Khan, Nora N., 81 Knight, Christopher, 42, 140–41n5 Kodak, 53, 139n41. See also Untitled “point de vue” Krementz, Jill, 42, 48, 140n3, 141n12 Krims, Les, 1–2, 36, 131n1 Last Pictures (Paglen), 96–101, 97fig.; images comprising, 99–101, 100fig., 149n24 latency, 4, 28, 62, 66, 95–96 machine learning, 73, 75–77 Machine Readable Hito (Paglen), 75–76, 76fig. Mandel, Mike. See Evidence Manjoo, Farhad, 6 McDonald, Jessica S., 110–11, 114, 119, 150nn1–1 Mercer, Kobena, 55–57 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 34 Michaels, Walter Benn, 18, 27 Microsoft Cognitive Services, 75, 145n52 Morgan, Barbara, 140n2

Index

Moten, Fred, 57 Muñoz, José Esteban, 134–35n16 Muñoz, Oscar, 12, 59–60. See also Aliento; El testigo Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 34, 141n14; Family of Man, 101, 149n26. See also S. S. Copyright Project Nearly a Million Sunsets (Christian), 148n20 Newhall, Beaumont, 114, 119, 140n2 Newhall, Nancy, 140n2 New York Times, 123 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 24, 109. See also Untitled “point de vue” Noble, Safiya Umoja, 74 Norman, Zachary. See Endangered Data One Archives, 70, 144n40 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 100 Paglen, Trevor, 12, 91–92; training sets, 92, 146n54. See also Last Pictures; Machine Readable Hito Pencil of Nature (Talbot), 115–16, 119 performance: night album as, 9–10; still photographs and, 135n4, 144n43. See also Becoming an Image; Cache, Active; Food for the Spirit permanence: early rhetoric surrounding, 7–8, 11, 20, 26; elusive quest for, 11, 20–21, 24, 29; value and, 3, 4, 20, 26 Pew Research Center, 133n6, 147n7 Photographic Society of London, 25 photography/photographs: before-andafter, 30, 138n35; chemical foundations of, 21, 23, 27, 35–36, 45, 50, 51; collecting, 30, 33–34, 98, 132n2, 139n41; color, 33–34, 139–40n41; digital, 6, 67; documentary, 103–4,

158

146n2; emergent discourse on, 7–8, 19, 134n11; as evidentiary, 29, 104–5; “first photograph,” 109–10, 112; instant, 44, 46–50; “live” photography, 67–68, 69; market, 27, 120, 131–32n2, 135n4, 142n17; preservation of, 26–27, 33, 34, 36, 138n29, 139n41; public announcement of, 7–8, 11, 26, 134n11 physiognomy, 75, 145n53 “Physiognomy’s New Clothes” (Agüera y Arcas), 73–74 Pinson, Stephen, 8, 119 Piper, Adrian. See Food for the Spirit Polaroid, 44–45 portrait, 145n51, 146n54. See also Aliento; Food for the Spirit; S. S. Copyright Project Potonniée, Georges, 119 Price, Charles Lake, 26–27, 33, 36 privacy, 6, 68, 74, 89, 132n5, 145n51, 147n6 race and racism, 73–74, 92, 122–23, 144n48; privileging of whiteness, 57, 74, 76–77, 145n51. See also Food for the Spirit; Retroreflective Replication Committee, Whitney Museum, 33, 139n38 reproduction. See Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités; Untitled “point de vue” Respini, Eva, 35, 42 Retroreflective (Thomas), 121–23, 126, 151n1, 151n5; Public Enemy (Black and Gold), 122–23, 124fig., 125fig. Roca, José, 65 Roubert, Paul-Louis, 150–51n13 Royal Photographic Society. See Fading Committee Rubinstein, Daniel, 87, 146n4, 147n8

Index

Sagan, Carl, 100–101 Schaaf, Larry, 115–16 Siegel, Steffen, 8, 134n11 Snapchat, 5, 127–28, 132n5; academic discussions of, 5, 133n7; author’s experiences with, 109, 132–33n6; popularity of, 5–6, 132n5 social media, 85–87, 92, 122, 126; popularity of, 5, 20; selfies, 145n51; tagging, 75, 87, 147n8. See also Instagram; Snapchat Société française de photographie, 117, 119, 150n13 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 139n38 “Something Is Wrong on the Internet” (Bridle), 88–89 Sontag, Susan. See S. S. Copyright Project S. S. Copyright Project: “On Photography” (Heinecken), 12, 41–50, 43fig., 47fig.; instant prints, 42, 44–45, 46–48, 49–50; Sontag’s author photo, 42, 48, 50, 140n3, 141n12; Sontag’s text, 41–43, 50; two versions (AIC and MoMA), 43fig., 46–50, 47fig., 140–41n5, 141n12; Zone system and, 12, 50, 51 Steichen, Edward, 101, 149n26 Steyerl, Hito: How Not to Be Seen, 147n6; Machine Readable Hito, 75–76, 76fig. Still Life (Daguerre). See Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités Sultan, Larry. See Evidence surveillance, 20, 74, 88, 99 Szarkowski, John, 45, 141n10 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 23, 98, 110, 148–49n21; Pencil of Nature, 115–16, 119

159

temporality, 5, 7, 46, 55, 67, 91, 124. See also event, photography as; Fading Committee Thomas, Hank Willis. See Retroreflective Thompson, James, 85, 146n2, 147n5 “Toward a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence” (Khan), 81 Tracking Transience (Elahi), 147n6 Tynes, Brendesha M., 74 Uelsmann, Jerry, 1–2, 36, 131n1 unseen images, 4, 59, 81, 97, 99, 109 Untitled “point de vue” (Niépce), 13, 109–14, 113fig., 119, 150nn1–2; as “first photograph,” 109–10, 112, 118; 1952 Kodak reproduction, 110–14, 112fig., 117, 118; 2002 reproduction, 111, 113, 117, 118 Vason, Manuel, 69fig., 144n41 value, 125–26; economic, 27, 30, 59, 138n29; institutional systems of, 3, 10, 27, 134n16; permanence and, 3, 4, 20, 26 vanishing. See disappearance Vanishing Photographs (Heinecken), 1–4, 10, 17, 34–38, 37fig.; as archival material, 1, 2fig., 11, 36, 140n45; authorship, 1–2, 36, 131n1; exhibition of, 36–37; paraphotography, 34–35, 38 View from the Window at Le Gras (Niépce). See Untitled “point de vue” visibility: in Cache, Active, 18, 27–28; conditions of, 10, 58, 126; racial and social dimensions of, 51, 57, 68, 74, 76–77, 145n49; trans and nonbinary, 69–72, 146n54. See also invisibility

Index

Warren, Lynn, 50 Wedgewood, Josiah, 30 Wheadon, Nico, 122 White, Minor, 140n2 Whitney Museum of American Art, 33, 139n38 Wong, Andrew, 85, 146n2, 147n2

160

YouTube, 87–88, 148n9, 148n12; Astronaut.io compared with, 12, 83–85, 87; automated content on, 87–88, 148n9 Zone System, 12, 50, 51

Index

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