A recent offer
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on imperialism, history, and "Unlearning the Origins of Photography"
The image above documents a fold-out picture spread from a rather large, sumptuous coffee table book about “Ancient Egypt”. It was purchased at a discount at a busy estate sale, which I guess means a third-party business managed a garage sale at a gigantic home.
I remembered this picture spread when I read the two passages below from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Reading them made me think about how photography, especially my earliest childhood encounters and consumption of pictures of the art and artifacts of “Ancient Egypt” and other civilizations, provided so much of the literal and figurative framings and frameworks for understanding the past. And later popular movies. The picture above, of a modestly sized space and the rough stacking of items, is nowhere near how movies like The Mummy have reimagined the vast, treasured halls of a Pharaoh’s just-broken-into-and-about-to-be-ransacked tomb, or something.
“The murder of five thousand Egyptians who struggled against Napoleon’s invasion of their sacred places and the looting of old treasures, which were to be “salvaged” and displayed in Napoleon’s new museum in Paris, is just one example of this. In the imperial histories of new technologies of visualization, both the resistance and the murder of these people are nonexistent, while the depictions of Egypt’s looted treasures, which were rendered in almost photographic detail, establish a benchmark, indicating what photography came to improve. ”
“My proposition, however, is that photography did not initiate a new world; yet, it was built upon and benefitted from imperial looting, divisions, and rights that were operative in the colonization of the world in which photography was assigned the role of documenting, recording, or contemplating what-is-already-there. In order to acknowledge that photography’s origins are in 1492, we have to unlearn the expertise and knowledge that call upon us to account for photography as having its own origins, histories, practices, or futures, and to explore it as part of the imperial world in which we, as scholars, photographers, or curators, operate.”
This particular experience and deployment of photography is not unique, it’s commonplace, and continues to enact and reproduce ideas of desire, sympathy, consensus, and extraction, croping out so much of the terror, power, and violence exercised upon others and their capacities for self-determination.
Azoulay’s article, published in 2018, was in service of her eventual book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, which was published in 2019.
Some extra
My projects, reduced to SEO art statements
In addition to sharing works in progress, I’ve intended to use this blog to remark on the conditions and experiences of my art practice. As the site’s title suggests, this comes in flavors that are sometimes emphatic and joyful, simply declarative, and for sure questioning and doubtful of the entire enterprise.
But it also functions as a kind of notebook and retrieval system for things I’ve seen and read on the internet. For example, the other day I posted a quote from an article I read that I thought was striking and damning, and something I wanted to reflect on. I gave it the title of the person involved, who I thought displayed courage and commitment in sticking to her convictions against a much more powerful man.
I then discovered/watched over the course of the week a spike (for me anyway) in visits to my site, and specifically to that post/quote. Most visitors left immediately, maybe feeling tricked (sorry), but a few stayed to see what else I had cooking (also sorry). This brief experience made me curious about the useful, cynical, aspirational world of Search Engine Optimization. So I watched a short video and read two articles arguing for its merits at getting eyeballs, real ones, but also for getting the attention of the code that scours and ranks sites, mostly Google related.
“I had been my whole life a [search term], and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
I must confess I’m drawn to it at the moment, to SEO as an attractive technological idea that the world is out there, and can be drawn closer, if only I can find the right key words. Maybe it’s because I’m home more, like so many others now, and eager to put my attentions towards a little distraction.
The quote above is a corrupted version of a favorite line of mine from Annie Dillard’s book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (she was a bell). They don’t compare, and it hardly makes sense, but her much better version, and vision, of the world’s outward capacity to furnish us with moments of personal revelation—if only we are present enough to pay attention—was something I could not escape thinking.
I haven’t done this before, and it’s probably not even close to how a pro would do it, but as a little exercise against confinement from the outside world, I spent maybe an hour writing some short sentences—repetitive and full of key words—in order to fill in my SEO forms.
Here are the results, my first collection of SEO artist statements for the projects on my site. I think a person would never see all these statements together in one place, but I guess I wanted to witness this dull summation in its entirety, and with bullet points. I can’t say it was an entirely negative experience, since its syntactic repetitions made me consider possible relationships across projects. At any rate, I’ll try and write a bit more about artist statements, my experience with them and speculations on their futures, in later posts,.
Contemporary black and white art photography project about screens, scrolling, and gravity, using Ai Weiwei's famous Han Dynasty vase drop.
Contemporary color art photography project about travel, memory, and nostalgia in the American West, using old slide film and a projection screen.
Contemporary black and white art macro photography project about anxiety, transforming Apple earbuds into knots, bundles, and packets of information overload.
Contemporary black and white art photography project mixing Dorothea Lange's triangular composition for "Migrant Mother" with Adobe Photoshop's Content Aware Fill.
Contemporary art photography project about control, discipline, hierarchy, and system building, using pictures and text.
Contemporary art photography project about the personal and market terms of success and failure, using resume, cv, bio.
Contemporary art photography project about correct color, white balance, city planning, using Stephen Shore's famous photograph of a Los Angeles intersection.
Contemporary art photography project about limited edition sizes and ideas of scarcity, using color and collage to destroy the same photograph multiple times.
Contemporary color art photography project about US Navy and Filipino ethnic history and labor, using artist portraits and documents from subjects' archives.
Contemporary black and white art photography project about material culture, documentation, and narrative, involving Kodak, Harry Ransom Center, Getty Museum, and Helmut Gernsheim.
Contemporary black and white art photography project about judging the content of images, using histogram data from Robert Frank's famous work, "The Americans".
Contemporary color art photography project about blank, white billboards and the empty landscapes of the American West that amplify and surround them.
Contemporary art and zine project about inclusion, canons of art, structures of knowledge, using an invented index to Susan Sontag's famous book, "On Photography".
Contemporary art photography project about style, structure, and conformity in gallery, museum, and individual art documentation practices for online viewing.
Contemporary black and white art photography and zine project about theory, influence, and citation, using Jeff Wall's famous text "Marks of Indifference".
Contemporary art photography and animated gif project about art, text, and museum didactics, using documentation of John Baldessari's famous "Pure Beauty".
Contemporary black and white art photography project about reading, perspectives, and fragility, using small sculptures for imaginary books.
Contemporary art photography project about travel, landscape, and history in the American West, using Ed Ruscha's famous book "Twentysix Gasoline Stations".
Contemporary art photography project using images of famous stolen paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to make new work.
Contemporary art photography project about the search for beauty and form using reflections on an Apple iPhone to connect to historical ways of looking and experiencing landscape.
Good news: National Museum of the American Latino
“Supporters of a National Museum of the American Latino are the closest they have ever been to gaining a spot on the National Mall.
On Monday, the House passed a bill to establish such a museum within the Smithsonian, delivering a significant victory to a yearslong effort to build an institution devoted to the history and contributions of Latino Americans.”
Jon Rafman: Post-Internet, Post-Revelations
“One of the highest-profile contemporary art museums in the United States has suspended an exhibition by artist Jon Rafman, a rising star in the international art scene whose work appeared last year at the Venice Biennale, after allegations of sexual misconduct appeared online last week.”
via ARTnews
The World Right Now
Mercedes Baptiste Halliday
“No one in power wanted to hold Martin Parr accountable for promoting a racist book, except Mercedes Baptiste Halliday and a couple of her friends. When she did protest, she was almost universally ignored.”
Free PDF download: "Index" (Zine/Insert), 2020
In quarantine and had time to reformat this project into a zine. Thinking about all my teacher friends and our collective need for online schooling this fall. No idea if Susan Sontag’s On Photography is still taught at university, but may be of some utility. Free for anyone.
On Photography does not contain an index. Because of this, I wanted to materialize the index that it certainly did contain.*
Throughout the process of making the work, I was interested in seeing, reading, and feeling my subjectivity with and against the production of an index’s objective-looking structure, and then consider the ways in which it’s final presentation supports, makes legible, and transmits ideas of art canonicity and processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Also, I hope the work is kind of humorous, and hopefully takes advantage of the “see also” self-referencing format of an index to produce an incomplete but self-contained and non-linear reading experience, full of the usual suspects and atrocities contained within the photography and modernity Sontag surveys.
Please visit the Index project page and scroll to the bottom of that page if you’d like a copy for yourself!
*Or, since I’m a photographer, I’ll say develop and reveal the latent image hidden on the surface of the print. :)
["C'mon dad"] ["we pleaded"]
This is so wild. A lot to unpack here, kind of tense/intense actually, but possibly a case for online schooling this fall, courtesy of Microsoft Encarta 95. Check out the fine print to receive a recommendation for some light bedtime reading. From an old issue of National Geographic magazine.
