A QUESTION OF CODING 

Manifestations of individuality have been part of artistic production since time immemorial. The About Me theme has also become entrenched in its timelessness. Is this, after all, not universal material?

“What will you use to create your work?” asked painter Jan Zrzavý in the spring of 1920. “Your own life,” he answered himself, “as there is nought else you can know and nought else that you have”. And the telling message, which seems to offer itself as a motto, continues: “From your love and your joy, from your pain and suffering you will create your work, making the word into a body.”¹ 

Jan Zrzavý is among the artists whose paintings saturated one image-generating model on the basis of what has become known as artificial intelligence. And the prompts seem to confirm the sovereign position of terms; of words. Resurfacing again and again in our culture is the claim made long before the high-flown preamble of “At the beginning was the Word…”² 

(Communication theorist Vilém Flusser considered the history of textual coding and iconoclastic assaults across civilisations across a range of five millennia.³)

The cited introduction of the New Testament has received countless rebuttals. As we give up on any semblance of comprehensiveness, let us remind ourselves of the simplified yet amply shared position on the linguistic dependence of all knowledge. Is it not an unfounded echo of the scholastic disputation on universals, especially on the relationship between essence and phenomena, that is, between the general and the unique? After all, halo effects as well as more complex judgements such as antipathy and sympathy make do without a vocabulary. And not only in children.

We are, simply put, agents in a multilaterally coded culture.⁴ Consciously or unwittingly, approvingly or polemically.

NOTHING PERSONAL?

Even a cursory recapitulation of 20th-century photography⁵ reveals a dominance of images whose importance was, to a large extent, predetermined by their aim – to depict their subject matter. This should come as no surprise, seeing as this is also true of the most frequent use of the medium.

19th-century positivism has been contested but its influence remains with us. Even when photographs were not taken spontaneously, daguerreotypes still seemed like mirrors with a memory. They were classed as derivative phenomena, and photographs themselves, after all, are still often overlooked in favour of their subjects.

Do they represent mere reflections, then, or themselves, too?

This question also applies to the oldest technical images, even if the most celebrated inventors of photography would loathe to admit it. Let us select from their commentaries at least the heading of William Henry Fox Talbot’s speech given to the Royal Society in London in 1839: Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil.⁶ 

GOODBYE, CRUEL WORLD! 

Hippolyte Bayard also experimented with the potential of photography. He supposedly exposed his statuette, Les enfants qui s’aiment (The children who love each other) thirty times. And if the shots can be varied and the images of the subject are therefore not always the same, then photography is capable of actualising artistic intention.

Thanks to Hippolyte Bayard, a diversity of approaches to photography has come to fruition since the very inception of the medium. He conceived an October 1840 communiqué as an ironic description of auto-portraiture: “The corpse on the front belongs to Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the procedure whose marvellous results you have just seen, or are about to see. As far as I know, this ingenious and tireless researcher has been busy perfecting his invention for some three years now. […] The government, which had given far too much to Mr. Daguerre, said it could do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch drowned. Oh, the fickleness of human affairs! Artists, scholars, and newspapers have been preoccupied with him for a long time, and now that he has been lying in the morgue for several days, no one has yet recognised or claimed him. Gentlemen and ladies, let us move on, lest your sense of smell be affected, for the gentleman’s head and hands are beginning to rot, as you may notice.”⁷ 

STRUCTURES OF DEFAMILIARISATION

Regardless of Bayard’s research and other breakthroughs, the following opinion gradually gained traction: in the field of photography, there can be no thought of the autonomy of works achieved with the sovereign means of the classical arts. But even as the most frequent form of shooting is directness, so realism, too, demands a touch of personality.

A significant part of every communication, stylisation, is programmed by the photographer through their selection of optics and other means. If they have a tendency towards peculiarity, towards defamiliarisation, then they emphasise form, at the very least the layout of the composition and their work with colour and tonality, light and shadow… This should bring us, on the one hand, to stay for a while with the signifying structures of the work, and on the other to appreciate the artist’s creative vision. And if we are not primarily attracted by aesthetic satisfaction but rather by the factual elements in these shots, the framing still meets us halfway. The impulses in content invite us to reflect on the reason for the author’s restraint. An example of a satisfying guideline are Nadar’s memoirs, in which he repeatedly mentions a feeling for restraint: “It was necessary for photography to immediately rid itself of all its ballast and imposed disguises and show itself in its true light, without masks and veils, just like the truth.”⁸ 

Even so, every representation is something unprecedented. And if it contributes to reality, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, it cannot be considered an inert effect.

Incidentally: when Eugène Disdéri miniaturised positives, thus making them cheaper and unleashing a mania for cartes de visite (visiting cards) that destroyed portraiture done in a serious manner, Nadar waxed ironic about this genre: he used the possibilities of multiple partial exposure of the negative plate to create what he called a rotary self-portrait, which saw him turn his back to the camera. We also know how Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot wished to be seen. Their colleagues made benevolent records of their confident poses. The longest surviving self-portrait seems to be a daguerreotype by Robert Cornelius, an American chemist of Dutch origin.⁹ 

Are we not once against being faced with the same problem? That is: to what extent is what we see influenced by what we think we know, and what we so like describing in words?

FOCUS OF INSPIRATION

Can we end with how images look? The development of contemporary styles is guided by assumptions that we should investigate further, discovering different information than that offered up by the works themselves. And this despite the fact that we can ask if this process does not ignite a greater interest in what seems hidden, thus bringing up questions about, let us say, creative motivation.

Psychological investigations, however, could hardly make do without terminologically based tools… 

In the field under discussion, magazines are the medium in which impulses travel. Magazines establish archives for future generations, editors look for contemporary trends in order to retroactively create the spirit of the times and its ideas. (Ideally, this also includes historiographical periodicals.)

As part of a fundamental orientation in the volatile situation of a world we generally tend to relate to, the Fotograf Magazine explores a highly personal theme: About Me. Preparations involved discussions about the transformations of photo diaries, visual autobiographies or auto-fictions, that is, the strategies of modelling images of one’s own self with a series of entries on both common and unusual days. Options included the diversity of manifestations of a right to personal integrity and mental equanimity, that is, the existential relation between the individual and broader communities, even if this relation is sometimes an imagined one. 

Hence the masking of real isolation through activity on social media.

Therapeutic expectations seem to be the subject of debate more frequently than the works themselves can fulfil them. See, at the very least, the ratio between authentic attempts at a self-portrait as a true tool and expression of self-knowledge versus the common selfie.

A COUNTERWEIGHT TO MATTER

Searching for foundations for various polarities of photography is nothing new but the importance of authorship rises along with how much it will play the part of a counterweight to the virtuality of artificial intelligence. Not only do AI’s generative forms dilute the contributions of individuals into mere material for further processing – in the interests of efficiency, they have also taken on a broad range of illustrative functions. But does this not give us more reason to resist innovations in all fields where it pays off to adhere to the established principles of technical images and the use of the original media?

We are constantly demanding information that is not made up, not manipulated – from medicine and crime to many other fields, including journalism and military photography. Alas… 

And as for the purity of the personal message? Artistic expression is naturally guided by the motivation of the creative individuals, and the creations then attest to the processing of the motifs employed. Internal and external sources need not be in conflict: impulses and visions always operate within the boundaries of internal and factual inspirations… Their interpenetration makes unambiguous interpretations of works impossible, to say nothing of reaching universally valid conclusions.

Nevertheless, is authorship now not more important than ever?

Text: Josef Moucha

Image captions

1 | Hippolyte Bayard, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840, Société française de photographie, Paris
2 | Robert Cornelius, untitled (self-portrait), 1839, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
3 | Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, 1844, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, N. Y