Photography Off the Scale – Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image

The publication is a continuation of an eponymous conference held at FAMU in Prague, where both the editors – Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka – teach. As a whole, the publication convincingly demonstrates that the issues of quantity and scale were not (and are not) something external to photography, instead representing an inherent and constitutive aspect of the medium. What’s more, their importance increases considerably with the current political, technological, and environmental changes.

Although most of the contributions set photography in layered contexts and urgently connect it to the interlinked challenges of today, almost all relate in some way to artistic practice. If today’s “mass photography” defies established approaches, the book – somewhat unwittingly – presents an incomplete and unordered overview of artistic strategies that allow us to grasp this photographic excess. What is demanded from art here are the typical means of making strange, which is shown to be a prerequisite for both critical distance and critical identification. Artistic methods offer converters that allow navigation across various scales, and, by extension, disparate registers of reality. With regards to the “quantitative” scope of the publication, the individual contributions focus less on the representative nature of photography and more on its material, processual and pragmatic aspects, as well as the art works presented in the book. In some cases, the artworks selected seem a little illustrative – not necessarily a bad thing, particularly as the entire publication is in dialogue with various forms of how photography is instrumentalized.

As we discover repeatedly in the publication, photography is often connected today to metaphors of floods or abysses and the corresponding feelings of overload and vertigo. Some artistic strategies are almost therapeutic in suggesting the possibility of adapting to an environment saturated with images. Others follow the shift from the instrumental to the infrastructural image, in which the metaphor of machine vision collapses. In place of considerations of how apparatuses adopt the human capacity of perception, we must learn to adopt the machines’ ways of seeing, perhaps even with the help of the selected art projects.

Motifs and themes recur across the individual texts – their variations represent perhaps the greatest strength of the anthology. The tension between the individual approaches convinces the reader on the urgency of the problems at hand whilst also urging them to adopt a position themselves. A number of questions come up. What is human and what is inhuman about contemporary photography and its scales? How is the character of photography as an index of the world or as a universal language constructed? Can we still meaningfully think about the uniqueness of photographic images today, or are we to follow a much broader infrastructural and affective operation of which these images are a part? Is the banality of contemporary photographic production harmful, and if so, how do we resist it?

In this respect, we must particularly praise the conversation, conducted via correspondence, between photographer Joan Fontcuberta and historian of photography Geoffrey Batchen, which concludes the publication. Their dialogue offers a welcome step beyond the confines of overworked conference papers, whose format begs the question whether contemporary academic production isn’t also off the scale, or, on the contrary, whether it might not fit certain scales almost too well.

Text: Vojtěch Märc