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I am just taking photographs

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I am just taking photographs

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Content A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
(MASTER OF FINE ARTS)
August 2015
I am Just Taking Photographs
by
Veli-Matti Hoikka
2
Table of Contents
1. Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . 7
3. Research questions, methods and materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
4. What is meant by documentary photography? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
5. What are images?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
6. Technical image archives and documentary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7. Material studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
8. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
9. Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
3
List of Figures
1. Cut. 2009, Collier Anne
2. Woman With Cameras #1. 2012, Collier Anne
3. Changing the shutter speed/Exakta Varex IIa/35 mm film SLR camera/Manufactured
by Ihagee Kamerawerk Steenbergen & Co, Dresden, German Democratic Republic/Body serial
no. 979625 (Production period: 1960–1963)/Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar/50mm f/2.8 lens/Manufac-
tured by VEB Carl Zeiss Jena, Jena,/German Democratic Republic/Serial no. 8034351 (Produc-
tion period: 1967–1970)/Model: Christoph Boland/Studio Thomas Borho, Oberkasseler Str. 39,
Düsseldorf, Germany/June 19, 2012. 2012. Pigmented inkjet print, paper: 24 x 20″ (61 x 50.8
cm), framed: 37 3/8 x 33 3/8″ (94.8 x 84.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist; David Zwirner, New York/
London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. © Christopher Williams
4. Model: 1964 Renault Dauphine-Four, R-1095/Body Type & Seating: 4-dr-sedan–4
to 5 persons/Engine Type: 14/52 Weight: 1397 lbs. Price: $1,495.00 USD (original)/ENGINE
DATA:/Base Four: inline, overhead-valve four-cylinder/Cast iron block and aluminum head. W/
removable cylinder sleeves./Displacement : 51.5 cu. in. (845 oc.)/Bore and Stroke: 2.23 × 3.14 in.
(58 × 80 mm)/Compression ratio: 7.25:1 Brake Horsepower: 32 (SAE) at 4200 rpm/Torque: 50
lbs. at 2000 rpm. Three main bearings. Solid valve lifters./Single downdraft carburetor/CHAS -
SIS DATA:/Wheelbase 89 in. Overall length, 155 in. Height: 57 in./Width: 60 in. Front thread:
49 in. Rear thread: 48 in./Standard Tires: 5.50 × 15./TECHNICAL:/Layout: rear engine, rear
drive. Transmission: four speed manual/Steering: rack and pinion. Suspension (front): independ-
ent coil springs. Suspension (back): independent with swing axles and coil springs. Brakes: front/
rear disc. Body construction: steel unibody./PRODUCTION DATA:/Sales 18,432 sold in U.S. in
1964 (all types)/Manufacturer: Régie Nationale des Usines Renault; Billancourt, France/Distribu-
tor: Renault Inc., New York, NY., U.S.A./Serial number: R-10950059799/Engine Number: Type
670-05 # 191563/California License Plate number: UOU 087/Vehicle ID number: 0059799
4
(For R.R.V.)/Los Angeles, California/January 15, 2000 (No. 6) 2000. Gelatin silver print, paper:
11 x 14” (28 x 35.6 cm); framed: 26 × 30″ (66 × 76.2 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Emilie
L. Wild Fund, 2004.21. Courtesy of the artist; David Zwirner, New York/London; and Galerie
Gisela Capitain, Cologne. © Christopher Williams
5. Richard Mosse, The Enclave (poster image)
6. Tillmans, Wolfgang, Congorde Grid, 1997 TATE
7. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2013
8. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2013
9. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2013
10. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2013
11. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2013
12. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2014
13. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2014
14. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2014
15. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2014
16. Author’s studio practice documentation image, 2015
5
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to recognize and define aspects for the use of an object making
studio practice that not only reproduce a so-called documentary photographic attitude but remain
separate from a practice of sculpture due to their reliance on what constitutes a photographic way
of thinking.
In this paper I trace methods in working with photography, images and the archive to
discover concepts that can bring the driving attitudes of image based practice into the realm of
discrete object making, encounter and interpretation.
6
Foreword
“The law was sharply critical of my behavior: “You were very different when I knew you be -
fore.” “Very different?” “People didn’t make fun of you with impunity. To see you was worth one’s
life. To love you meant death. Men dug pits and buried themselves in them to get out of your
sight. They would say to each other, ‘Has he gone by? Blessed be the earth that
hides us.’” “Were they so afraid of me?” “Fear was not enough for you, nor praise from the
bottom of the heart, nor an upright life, nor humility in the dust. And above all, let no one ques-
tion me. Who even dares to think of me?”
Blanchot is writing of writing, of the act of thinking and existing and how difficult it is to
come in terms with individuality. How to embrace the self as someone who has a duty to the
interpretation of the world and a choice of not having to follow through on that difficult path.
Why has this knowledge, having been so difficult to find, reveal itself as an endless discovery ask -
ing to be continued? We do not know what it is that we think of the things of tomorrow but the
idea of an end of this particular individual in this specific body can overwhelm any more nuanced
thought, this drives the spiralling madness of Blanchot’s story to a conclusion where the individu-
al survives but the work has to become something else: “A story? No. No stories, never again.”
7
Background
In reductionist terms my earlier work being fully the work of a photographer was descrip-
tion. But as in the case of photography the trace of this mechanical process always includes itself
directly in the produced images. It is this technical work with its repeating gestures that allow the
possibility of photographing almost anything as if it was the same, it may even look exactly the
same but the tension of working in the realm of documentary forces a separation of these events
from each other.
For the photographic documentarist, the sought after encounters appear due to and for the
camera: it is a tool that provides a possibility for closeness and anonymity all at once. These few,
and endless other conditions not only precede all actions of a photographic artist but also guaran-
tee that there must have been some, in case there is pictures to show for it.
During the last two years I have gradually suspended my documentary photographic prac-
tice to look at it with more criticality. This paper traces my experiences and findings and attempts
to develop concepts that apply both to photography and other art practices.
8
Research questions, Methods and Materials
The purpose of this paper is to recognize and define aspects in an object making studio
practice that not only reproduce the documentary photographic attitude but as I will try to argue,
remain separate from a practice of sculpture due to their reliance on photographic thinking.
The questions guiding this inquiry are,
- What is documentary photography as an activity?
- What are images outside of what they depict, what are archives?
- How do these two aspects produce a photographic way of thinking for form studies?
What constitutes documentary photography within this paper will be heavily reliant on the
authors experience resulting from practice and its theoretical formulations that are superimposed
onto photographic works by Anne Collier, Wolfgang Tillmans, Christopher Williams and Rich-
ard Mosse.
Images on their own respect are approached acknowledging that a viewer of images in 2015
by default spends significant time on not just looking but also manipulating images [0.1]. This
changes not only the relationship to viewing images but forces upon a reflection of the self as the
other - a maker of alterations in others by contributing to their image. The centrality of images in
this regard is based on the importance that Vilém Flusser’s mechanic history of technical images
places upon this activity.
The segment concerning photographic thinking consists largely of image documentation
and technical notions of the materials and their histories.
9
The theoretical concepts that speak to the core interests of this kind of working are linked
to desires of virtuality, automated images, automated meaning and understandable and observable
instability. Continental dialectical materialism has been guiding some of the imageworks I have
continued to produce and I want to dedicate the last segment to hypothesizing if there is some-
thing practical that can be formulated in this relation for the benefit of myself and you the reader.
10
What Is Meant By Documentary Photography?
The wandering photographer captures the world in images within the traditions of docu -
mentary photography and cinema. After the editing process is completed and images are released
back into the world they may be causally altered from their origin but have, however, an absolute
factual event somewhere in their origin. Those specific rays of light bouncing from something
onto the camera’s light-sensor or silver emulsion have ensured that some information remains
materially real and is not imagined in by the individual.
As Susan Sontag puts it “While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of
resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than
the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject
in a way that no painting can be.”
1
This is not to say that photography does not rely on interpretation but that interpretation
is at most a certain kind of amplification through symmetry of forms, tradition of aesthetics and
skill of framing. Some erasures of details or reductions through performative acts may have oc-
curred and it is possible that even the deconstruction of the apparatus driven practice is itself laid
in front of the camera, like in the works of Anne Collier.
FIG 1
These fully conceptual photograph -
ic practices still produce an image, but have chosen by expanding the narrative of this technical
moment to be that of meaning and have hence minimized its importance in their own still-life
photographs.
1. Susan Sontag, “The Image World” in On Photography (Picador eBook, 2011), 241
11
Figure 1
Figure 2
12
The still life is a peculiar thing, it starts from the removal of time itself in order to address it.
The moment that owes its history to the documentary photograph is now looked at without the
documenting moment. A close neighbor to the still life is just a few feet away, the meditation on
the camera itself: what is it like to grow a third eye in form of a camera? For Anne Collier the
masculine existence is presupposed by wanting not only to gaze upon but to be seen gazing with
the camera. This is criticized in the reworked camera advertisements.
FIG 2
Owning a camera and
looking through it is seen as one of the more desperate identities based on objects like the fet-
ishes with fast cars
FIG 3 & 4
by Christopher Williams’ works. Self-referencing the disinterested
facilitators responsible for looking, the cameras, lenses, shutters and knobs are things to twist. This
historically auxiliary importance in relation to the event being captured is a similar shift as that of
documentation to still life: a stoppage of time around the camera so the shutter loses its agency
and the this suspension of time becomes a mode of thinking.
Figure 3
13
What ever is outside of these conditions of what the camera as an object possibly suggests to
the psyche would then be the thoughts of the photographic artist. In my works the world is ren-
dered as inherently unequal, bleak and full of melancholic beauty that supposedly resurrects itself
from this bleakness by showing that the conditions that govern life are images even before their
capture, which in itself is yet another abstraction where its origin and resolution are one and the
same thing similar to the practices described earlier. The fact that it has been almost impossible
and partly undesired for me to get rid of this aspect is the main argument for the power of pho-
tography. It has a responsibility to its actions, directly linked to the real. This argument is depend -
ent on acknowledging that photography at least used to be the quickest and lightest medium of
thinking outside of language: not a craft nor a material investigation but an automation, the black
box of instantaneous meaning - the first recording drone with its cultural demands.
Figure 4
14
Therefore the criticality of the image itself, not the depicted traditions, conventions, rituals
and embedded desires of photographers labour, is why the photographer is not a formal artist but
a fully political entity. But if this specialness once produced a moral burden and the released im-
ages resulted in some kind of sense of negotiation, the current problems of photography no longer
end with dealing with the act of taking, stealing and (miss) representing actual lives of others, but
are surpassed by the inability of the moment of capture to evoke a unique, out of the ordinary
space for reflection as a given.
This past virtue of photography is dependent on the separation of the world and its picture.
The desire to be seen by the camera was in itself an active social force that the photographer was
called upon to harness, an actual outsider inside a real that does not by default remember itself
and disappears more than gets recorded. Due to the changes in the intensity of photographic
recording this mode of existence is harder and harder to attain and it has consequently pushed
photographers to seek out ever more daring photographic journeys, as if to ensure that the person
with the camera can still influence any life by their rare mechanical cyborg-presence. Unfortu -
nately, as we can see in works like ‘The Enclave’ by Richard Mosse
FIG 5
, it is the aesthetics of the
film itself that are transported to the war-zone, not that the war is brought on view by them as
something to know about. It is as if due to the explosion of digital imagery the whole purpose of
images has become a division into either a private reflection of the self or a discourse on photo -
graphic depictions of material. This fascination of retrograde photographic equipment and optical
representation of materials is bringing the actual image to a position of absolute unimportance on
a never before witnessed scale. What surpasses the suffering and cruelty of war is for the child sol -
diers a mimicry of identity of a warrior in images and for the photography connoisseur a fascina-
tion on the precious film and its dangerous but insured journey across the planet.
15
Figure 5
Figure 6
16
In the photographic realm of the banal everyday, another mode of documentarist photogra-
phy, most explicitly practiced in the 1990’s by the likes of Wolfgang Tillmans a reliance on show-
ing a labour of living in images has held an interest in its absurdity.
FIG 6
It has suggested; What if
a language of images is in fact the way to know the world and looking at someone enact this play
was the weaker counter-argument to most of other visual culture’s desire to produce yet another
tableau. Its minuteness reasserted photography’s power against the visual bombardment of feature
films and news footage by sharing the same view on the banality of the everyday.
The legitimacy of this practice of truthful minuteness has in the contemporary society been
erased by the familiarity with image labour in the private. What constitutes labour for many in
itself is increasingly involving deciphering and editing images and those images as rising from the
everyday are necessarily banal. This increased familiarity with looking and organizing images into
order can no longer be freely existing as art due to the saturation of poorly made copies of not the
image but the moment of capture. For photographic practices like Tillmans’ or to its siblings the
construction of rhizomatic lived narratives through looking alone has been made mandatory for
everyone for it is the one where no scripts or ideas are needed, only observations.
As the masses not only practice image editing on their free time making their relationship
with the camera more and more complex, they eventually also start looking for modes of working
in the photographed images instead of just taking and sharing them. There is a difference here to
a previous album print consumer activity, to which the separation of different stages of materials
(film, negative, print and the album) provided rigid presupposed rituals of remembering a past
instead of building the self in the moment. This broadening of the field of visibility asks the pho -
tographer to find a new route to their practice to retain the agency that they were used of getting
with the camera with any moment. The social excitement of being the one daring to put them -
selves on view by taking out the camera has in itself been fully banalized, no current object like
the camera entices a ritualistic enactment of the separation of the real and the moment of making
a picture of it with similar, momentarily shared experience. The transition from the default option
of performing for the camera is made into the case of becoming the photographer.
17
To summarise, from the problematics of the moment of capture photography has either
started representing purely the most expensive materials and complex image crafts or started to
see itself as just an archivist. For the archivists, whether images and data can be seen as synonyms
is a matter of specificity, eventually the camera itself becomes just a metaphor.
For a photograph to be built as an object like it was a painting or a sculpture makes this
activity similarly no longer photography. Photography was never about the photograph but about
the photographer as the outlier. What is effectively outside of this categorization is any kind of
photographic documentation of an event that holds more in common with performance, theater
or cinema than the activities of the documentary photographer. In the context of this paper the
documentary photographer is nearly synonymous to the snapshot practice at least in its condi-
tions of surprise and mobility if not aesthetics. Staging something for the camera should in every
case take into account the camera as the most important aspect of this recording, not only does it
provide the recording, it takes part in it as Stella Bruzzi puts it concerning cinema verite through
which many performance recordings could be viewed: “Jean Rouch’s suggestion that, in cinéma
vérité, people’s reactions are ‘infinitely more sincere’ on camera than off because ‘they begin to
play a role’ (Levin, 1971:288). Sincerity is thus equated with an acknowledgement of the filming
process, so although ‘a camera’s a camera, an object which you can’t not notice’ (Fielder 1998), a
documentary is inevitably built around its presence – and the concomitant presence of the crew.”
2
2. Stella Bruzzi, “Docusoaps: the documentary as entertainment” in New Documentary: Critical Introduction
(Kindle eBook, 2002), 92
18
What Are Images?
For the purpose of this paper images are not only photographs but anything that in the
Flusserian sense is a technical image i.e. anything that gets drawn on any screen at any point of its
life.
3
Although physical objects can exist entirely without ever becoming images themselves, for
example a photograph of a painting will be interpreted similarly to any other image as the en-
counter with it occurs in the realm of the so called technical image:
“This apparently non-symbolic, objective character of technical images leads whoever looks
at them to see them not as images but as windows. Observers thus do not believe them as they
do their own eyes. Consequently they do not criticize them as images, but as ways of looking at
the world (to the extent that they criticize them at all). Their criticism is not an analysis of their
production but an analysis of the world.”
4
This mistaken analysis of the depicted instead of the mechanical trace is a removal of criti -
cism of the maker. The image-vessel itself having developed an active, functioning window-like
portal to seeing the world results in a situation where all images themselves are seen but not as
proof of an action but as partial segments constituting to an understanding of what ever is asked
of them. Like the ever increasingly speedier graphs being drawn to reflect financial figures or
scientific measurements, all images are in the already applied forefront of being experienced as
discrete independent data chunks containing something of the world and ready for the viewers
preferred assimilation.
3. Vilem Flusser, “The Technical Image” in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion Books, 2000), 14
4. Flusser, 15
19
This suggests a reversal where abstraction is no longer something that requires a criti -
cal inquiry into understanding the factual construction and its implications contributing to a
read meaning of the work but a criticality towards the world itself. Multiple understandings are
formed every second and they will eventually be, if they aren’t already, very problematic from the
standpoint of criticality. What the images give us is an easy way to see in them what is desired
outside of the free contexts of cultural products. Technical images themselves create cultural prod-
ucts and myths leading into interesting discussions regarding the relationship between the mak-
ing and seeing an image and the consequences. In the case of Haruko Abokata
5
the individual is
both constructed and their reputation destroyed by manipulation of an image or how science itself
embraces the mistake and the discussion it produces: A study based on the findings of the BI -
CEP2 telescope suggested a multiverse due to “twisting patterns” seen in the images which then
ended up found to be mere dust
6
.
Conceptual artists have for long seen the potential of minutiae in suggesting larger discours-
es but have always had to assert that what for science is a measurement (valid for varying lengths
of time) was for the artist always false. The post-structuralist critique would not be too bothered
with this and proceed to find the discourse in the wholeness of the event and the interrogation
of rhetorics, this activity is something that seems to have been applied at large and is hence no
longer art.
When reading an image, everything it represents is always already fully there but not neces-
sarily and especially not equally understood. This moment of private interpretation is intensified
by limited availability of the most important images but even more so by how close their depicted
moment is to the moment of ‘now’. The location of ‘now’ in the world of technical images relies
5. John Rasko and Carl Power, What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata, Last
modified on Wednesday 18 February 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/18/haruko-obokata-stap-cells-controversy-scientists-lie
6. Shannon Hall, BICEP2 Was Wrong, But Publicly Sharing the Results Was Right, Last modified January 30, 2015
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/01/30/bicep2-wrong-sharing-results/#.VRS_CVwk_8s
20
on a “reversed vector of signifance”, Flusser writes of the way of thinking applied by the photog-
rapher:
“It is not the world out there that is real, nor is the concept within the camera’s program -
only the photograph is real. The program of the world and the camera are only preconditions for
the image, possibilities to be realized. We are dealing here with a reversal of the vector of sig-
nificance: It is not the significance that is real but the signifier, the information, the symbol, and
this reversal of the vector of significance is characteristic of everything to do with apparatus and
characteristic of the post-industrial world in general.”
7
In the case of technical images, anything drawn on any screen produces the experience of
reading an image. Making anyone who creates one in a sense a photographer. As someone who
merely saw something and passed it along to someone else to whom it is also meaningful and
whose actions it also directs. It could be said that the produced images are just a receipt of any
action but the close symbiosis with the screen suggests that there must be something actually
worth looking at on it for it to be looked at in the first place. It is also to be supposed that there
are obvious discrepancies in the way all images are seen. Similarly as photographers “are in pursuit
of possibilities that are still unexplored in the camera’s program, in pursuit of informative, im-
probable images that have not been seen before.”
8
, so do all the ‘screen-workers’ search for unique
images suitable to their goals. It could be suggested that any looking at any image is no action or
labour of any sorts and we all do it merely to communicate ideological acceptance into power or
enact an unavoidable fetish to deal with our own agency but for the sake of the continuation of
this argument it is necessary to accept that people look at images and images themselves play an
essential and highly problematic role in the way they contribute to society.
7. Flusser, 37
8. Flusser, 37
21
As the collection and storing is not in the centrality of the circulation of images their ‘opera-
tional value’ forms in the delay between their viewings. To start accumulating a formation of what
constitutes a delay it is necessary to make the first link between them and images. To begin, forms
of delay are those segments of time between when an image is formed, when it is understood,
when actions are taken upon that first understanding or the moment when a decision based on
an image returns to the material world to which the original image supposedly has a relationship
with. In this sense the image and operations around it are a separate circulation working to its
own accord nevertheless having distinct points of interaction with material. Instead of advocating
for a structure-superstructure way of perceiving this activity my interests are in imagining these
timely events as directing both the circulation of images and the circulation of matter following
the non-events occurring when confronting images. A desire for an artist would be to consider
how this delay can be investigated in itself for integration, action and critical inquiry into how
these two things happen has been embraced by more rigid, less free forms of culture to which
avant-guard art cannot be demoted to.
In the everyday actuality the work that photographers and many other workers share is
the preparedness of dealing with accumulated data. These signals are encountered as images on
screens, at the same time the work itself, its guiding results and its reassurance of meaning re-
mains in truth only a representation of things thought of, actions committed to and agreements
on something. This is either an organization of shared standards or a realization of collective
desires depending on whether one presupposes the individual or the society as the one (a priori)
responsible.
When given only a representative emphasis, images are a receipt of our social togetherness
in achievement, our necessary and always incomplete simulation of an objective reality. But when
observed as complex entities on their own, as something we only see and utilize in a limited, yet
always expanding way, they themselves are going to receive our curiosity: our desire to not only
find mistakes in them but to envision versions of them that would render the current ones obso -
lete not by perfecting them but by containing them in something that is simpler, more abstract
22
but still recognizable as not have lost anything except some familiarity of use. With this hypoth-
esis, the ever faster calculated speculative images (the stock market, theories of physics, maps,
neutron diagrams, weather simulations, friendship count, libidinal activity tracking products) are
going to have to face similar inquiries of representation that previously were interesting mostly for
images made for art: power.
23
Technical image archives and documentary
A practice of wandering inside an archive of images builds upon the methods of photog-
raphy and it is, as described earlier, eventually producing moments of interpreting images. But
unlike photography or the described scientific or economical practices reliant on or at least con -
tingent upon the creation of unseen images and their consideration as depicting a thing itself,
working with the archive aims to not rely on new images but to present the archive containing
them.
Allan Sekula writes in his essay The Body And The Archive published in October magazine
concerning the early criminal archives:
“Contrary to the commonplace understanding of the “mug shot” as the
very exemplar of a powerful, artless, and whole denotative visual empiricism,
these early instrumental uses of photographic realism were systematised on the
basis of an acute recognition of the inadequacies of limitations of ordinary visual
empiricism.”
9
This limitation of the archive can be circumvented to become the power of it; the ability to
depict structure itself is not in Sekula’s text concerning only those instrumental forms of photog-
raphy attempting to manipulate the photographs direct referent but also give rise to more poetic
forms of working with the archive. According to Sekula, these moments can start to create a
sophisticated dialogue with what directs the archive. The methods of the detective police are re-
9. Allan Sekula, “The Body and The Archive” in October vol. 39 (Winter, 1986), 18
24
imagined in the early works of Walker Evans, though in which he never the less relies on a “poetic
transcendence” to differentiate himself from actual police photographs.
10
Due to the Internet, the absolute disconnect from the referent questions the space for the
poetic and the possibly necessary transcendent relationship with the depicted. The archive is at
the same time diminished by its dismissal of the human interaction and freed by the condition of
the maker to proceed directly into consequences of the already pre-made images. All archives are
effectively like the police archives and many of them expanding uninterrupted continuously.
What Evans deems as poetic transcendence has no longer any direct relationship between
the image and the person manipulating the archive it was taken from. The photographic act may
still mimic the work of an investigator but this mode of finding out consists for example of a
series of political questions translated into search terms and then a scraping of a database. These
artificial events consisting only of the use of software systems are happening inside an archive on
the terms of the archive and reproducing this activity in form is where the poetics are requested to
happen.
The digital structure itself, a construction of syntax based computer code is a form of archi -
tecture. Benjamin Bratton, writing extensively of the experience of sovereignty inside the digital
society describes the operation of a software “stack” as follows:
“… hardware and software stacks such as TCP/IP or OSI provide a modu-
lar architecture for the global internet and allow innovations to be inserted into
complex systems without disrupting embedded technologies. These two network
stacks are comprised of sectional layers (7 layers for OSI, merged to 4 for TCP/
10. Sekula, 59
25
IP) such that each layer performs specific, delimited tasks within a technical
division of labor. In principle, each layer in turn sends and receives information
only between the same layer, or to and from the layer directly above or below it,
or according to established protocols.”
11
What can be taken of this description of what happens in the digital architecture is how
each ‘layer’ has only a limited task, a limited understanding of the whole. In this way, the syntax
is a place where semiotics disappear into predetermined operations. The material representations
of this activity into optico-auditorial experiences for the arts are not similarly free of depiction.
A stack of images showing arrested individuals is not free of its connotations, not in the original
structure of the internet nor especially in the representation of it in the form of actual photo-
graphs. Susan Sontag writes of the photograph:
“Few people in this society share the primitive dread of cameras that
comes from thinking of the photograph as a material part of themselves. But
some trace of the magic remains: for example, in our reluctance to tear up or
throw away the photograph of a loved one, especially of someone dead or far
away. To do so is a ruthless gesture of rejection. ”
12
In order to keep a sense of research and not just jumping into the pure realm of aesthetic
abstraction bound to find its truth somewhere in the depths of history of the Western culture and
11. Benjamin Bratton, On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life: Object, Image, Superimposition, Last modified
on 12/2013, http://www.bratton.info/projects/texts/on-apps-and-elementary-forms-of-interfacial-life/
12. Sontag, 252
26
its fascination with the sublime, this work is again regarding the question of the limited potential
of the photographic method. The internet, once an idea of unlimited equalitarian access to in -
formation is following the same development as the access for documentary photography. Legal
scraping of data itself is already a highly commercialised activity and selling database queries to
the most vibrant social platforms resembles the sell of photographic equipment, with the differ -
ence being that with a camera you get all the images you are able to see whereas in the internet it
is impossible to get any ‘pictures’ of the situation without being able to specifically decide on what
words could produce that set of images. Here image is not limited only to the actual depicting
RGB-images but is more interestingly forming in the realm of metadata based data-visualiza-
tions.
The image is similarly reliant on the programs of the visualization algorithm as images are
reliant to the camera, but instead of finding a picture with geometry, the picture is discovered in a
set of data by methods of statistics relying on a representation of standard deviation.

The myster -
ies of these images are not of as incomplete depictions of the wold but instead dictated by explic-
itly predetermined conditions of specific words that spawned them and the endlessly unreliable
sentences used in the legends to describe the presented statistical images.
These problems of the presentation of the discovered images can be dismissed by the reliance
on statistics where any situation where the sheer accumulation of answers makes it possible to
look for an answer without having to first think of what it is that is necessary to be asked. Like in
probability and statistics, mean and expected value are used synonymously to refer to one measure
of the central tendency either of a probability distribution or of the random variable depicted by
that distribution as a kind of reassurance of the meaningfulness of the posed research question.
Or in reverse, this significant accumulation becomes a kind of tool or an object, from which dif -
ferent hypothesis are drawn depending on what is necessary to be said as only the language that
describes the discovery is something where vague expressions may be necessary.
In the case of images that are formed out of metadata, additional discoveries can always be
started and the original formed image even dismissed as unnecessary. Similarly to photographic
27
practices of exhibiting multiple images tangentially related to each other, the collected lump of
data can be seen to have a certain autonomy of the original desires of the research, not only by
the possibility of positioning multiple new questions but virtually finding a new question in the
answers based on what values of any set of data show accumulative prominence. If the human
observer is prioritized as someone who needs to see something happen, the simple repetition of
symbols in high enough frequency will make it possible for an algorithm to print out some results.
This may suffice as producing meaning and in the post-structuralist sense the interrogation of this
process is a worthy task, even if it can be in the cynical sense likened to the changing of the words
in the legend of a graph. This is not to say that interpretation is not essential, it is to say that mis -
interpretation may even be more essential.
The removal of the humanness from photography by no longer encountering individuals and
taking something of them with the event of capture, changes the concerns of truthful depiction of
individuals into questions of errors in the system responsible of making images. These errors are
resulting from gaps of meaning that is circumvented by re-use. It is this re-use that introduces for
the first time the concept of deferment that this paper is aiming to describe. If the meaning of all
the images floating as electromagnetic waves is never static, how can an object stay relevant if it
itself does not address this flux of interpretation?
28
Material Studies
What follows is selected documentation of research done in material practice in my studio
during the last two years. For the purpose of this paper these visual, or photographic, possibly
eventually sculptural studies preceeded the formulations that are done in this paper in writing.
Figure 7
People arrested in Florida; the ones whose eyes appeared sad were selected to show.
White cars in Los Angeles; stolen, frontally crashed; totalled.
Video projection superimposed with an animated brain CAT scan sequence
Stacked printout of a single brain CAT-Scan
All images scraped of organization, business or police databases that the selected organizations provided to the
public.
29
Figure 8, detail of projection
Figure 9, rearrangement
30
Figure 10, rearrangement
31
Figure 11, rearrangement
32
Figure 12 & 13
RGB images with artifacts due to heat damage on GPU
Figure 14
RGB image of accidental video decompressing error
33
Figure 15
RGB image of a generated video decompressing error
Figure 16
Single frame from a video utilizing pixel tracking algorithm on the same pixels it itself generated
34
Conclusion
This paper has attempted to formulate documentary photography, the image and the archive
to the extent that they contribute to the investigations made in the studio through materials.
How do these aspects then produce a photographic way of thinking is concluded in this
chapter through hypothetical formulations on what constitutes a time dependent way of working
but not especially time dependant artworks. From the five selected investigations in which all the
materials were re-used to create the next formulation some realisations surface:
1. Delay of insight - the way forms resurface with meaning once ideas governing
them become understandable.
2. Deferment - an attitude of continuously postponing the question of meaning
due to the acknowledgement that the forms are not art but copies or schematics.
Considering these two concept from the point of view of the previous chapters governing
images and documentary photography the following linkages can be made:
1. Concerning delay, the photographic meaning meaning is always contingent
on a delay. A delay between the moment that was photographed and any other
moment spent contemplating on the image. This guides the making of all images
and the perception of all images; images like Flusser argues are not only material
traces of now and of a different time but are direct windows to contemplate on
the world itself.
2. Concerning deferment in photography, for the practice of photographing or
‘capturing’ the world a sense of separation of the one observing and the world
without this observation is constant. It is impossible to live simultaneously a life
separate of the need to capture and the life inside the captured images. These
two alternative modes of existence make their imprint on every moment, not
35
just on those where a picture was in fact created, but suggests this separation on
all the possible pictures that could be taken and especially charges those mo-
ments where making a picture is almost like a duty; to average person it is prob-
ably the recording of their offspring’s most moments for a photographer it is the
continuation of the search for an unexpected, yet unseen, way of looking.
Outside of photography, how can anything that results from a ‘making’ or ‘design’ approach
ever be completed if there is no specific moment where an explosion of meaning (like that of a
single photograph) takes place? If no such moment can be recalled it is the resistance to it that
governs all making.
As for deferment, the term is a postponement of a duty, a task like military service in a
society relying on conscription to basically tell the social structure around the individual that the
demands placed on an individual, if not be fully unacceptable, are out of sync with the individual’s
needs. The insistence on either enrolling, paying their debts or any other form of communica -
tion is infringing on the freedom of the specific individual by design. This need for conformity
is embedded in most of our human constructions, the division of them from whether duties or
structures are one and the same is in the crux of this investigation. The approach for arguing for
the need of this question to be looked at is piloted by the sensibilities of a mind to navigate politi-
cal climates, but just like bodies of the pilots are now separated from their vessels, similarly the
separation of the need for a never ending acceptance of deferment has to be separated from the
arguments for it. To do this I propose a almost randomised, tangental approach to what informa-
tion is, how desire relates to discovery and how the idea of being able to dream anything into
existence is not a ride through a human life, but a labour of active dreaming where time between
events cannot and should not be measured.
I find these two themes important for the reasons that they precede any possible making,
they are essential anti-arguments to not have the work of the artists be synonymous to other
activities that aim for discovery by claiming thinking to reside in some relation to the outcome.
The artist is by definition going to say something, focusing on finding and tuning the message
36
itself is an unnecessary doubling of processes where the currently unimaginable discovery may not
be achieved. Concentrating on describing non-making through certain perceived evasiveness is
closer to the actual mode of thinking I am advocating for than a post-modern, post-structuralist
discovery of meaning within the already formulated.
Not only is the separation of the narratives of writers from their characters a sensible given, a
separation of artist from their practices and their practices from their works almost necessary of a
structure to be able to further increase the fruitful criticality of ones own thoughts. The discovery
of more meaning must be taken as an acceptable formulation driving this praxis in action. This re -
liance on doubt is necessary but its relation to trying, experimenting and starting again is peculiar.
As for the actual physical practice in relation to these concepts, I wanted to have feedback
that was universal, planetary and not observer dependent; gravity. This may sound very simplistic
but once you add improvisation, structures encountered in dreams and basically only office ma -
terials it becomes a very fragile combination to which a collapse of the work due to just gravity
is almost unavoidable. Only through this is it possible to write of it, for it has been done and is
proof of this text.
On the other end of this discovery, speaking to a practice where re-starting something is
more essential than its beginning and where an extract of this practice is always by design incom-
plete, I have worked with video pieces and a motion tracking algorithm that theoretically is the
basis of computer vision. I edited different geometric forms and snapshotty videos into seamless
loop structures and pushed them through rendering sequences where the amount of data in the
file exponentially increased on each run - these works, “of nothing”, were technically increasing in
complexity and aesthetically repeating dialectical forms of opposing forces (and then ‘becoming’).
The inevitability of death and the paradox this forms with the ever increasing digital life of the
archive are expanding into different directions: one from existence to non-existence and the other
from manufactured to uncontrollably generated.
For the practice itself the non-static nature of these objects or the incompleteness of the
moving images provided a larger question of deferment. If the works themselves do not finish,
37
how can this not bleed into the overall attitude towards making them? This attitude makes de -
signing or ‘gradually building’ anything almost impossible, for the objects are images of moments
and the videos are not only non-linear in their controlled forms but unstable on the level of digi-
tal archives (most of these works are possibly slightly corrupted files in which the codec is reading
up to 500mb/second bitrates. This becomes not only computationally intensive but also underlines
the limited nature of human perception; most of this data is beyond representation and percep-
tion).
For my sculptural works, the only possible failure is the self-destruction of the art piece.
This possible proof of a fatal mistake may be made apparent by either gravity or an electrical
malfunction but it is in itself interesting and not undesired. The ability to begin again is at its
simplest a reflection of a state of mind, in which the piece becomes an object directly represent -
ing the ability to dream a reality into being, it is as if every future choice would be depending on
this aesthetic, labour for labours sake, task of balancing masses or removing volatility. This type of
approach extends its conditions to the philosophical realms driving the practice itself. Aesthet-
ics decisions, although being the main component driving the action, are an accumulation having
its roots in my case in the aesthetics of what constitutes contemporary individual rituals: silent
private encounter with a book, playing musical instruments, the personal computer terminal and
most importantly the object made for purely reflection; a sculpture.
38
Bibliography
Web resources
Susan Sontag, “The Image World” in On Photography (Picador eBook, 2011), 241
Stella Bruzzi, “Docusoaps: the documentary as entertainment” in New Documentary: Critical
Introduction (Kindle eBook, 2002)
Vilem Flusser, “The Technical Image” in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion Books,
2000)
Allan Sekula, “The Body and The Archive” in October vol. 39 (Winter, 1986)
John Rasko and Carl Power, What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of
Haruko Obokata, Last modified on Wednesday 18 February 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/18/haruko-obokata-stap-cells-controversy-scien-
tists-lie
Shannon Hall, BICEP2 Was Wrong, But Publicly Sharing the Results Was Right, Last modified
January 30, 2015
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/01/30/bicep2-wrong-sharing-results/#.VRS_CVwk_8s
Benjamin Bratton, On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life: Object, Image, Superimposi-
tion, Last modified on 12/2013, http://www.bratton.info/projects/texts/on-apps-and-elementary-
forms-of-interfacial-life/

Abstract (if available)

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to recognize and define aspects for the use of an object making studio practice that not only reproduce a so-called documentary photographic attitude but remain separate from a practice of sculpture due to their reliance on what constitutes a photographic way of thinking. In this paper I trace methods in working with photography, images and the archive to discover concepts that can bring the driving attitudes of image based practice into the realm of discrete object making, encounter and interpretation.

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Creator Hoikka, Veli-Matti (author)

Core Title I am just taking photographs

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 06/17/2015

Defense Date 05/05/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag documentary photography,Flusser,OAI-PMH Harvest,Photography,still-life,technical image

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor White, Charles Harry (committee chair), Hudson, Suzanne P. (committee member), Lockhart, Sharon (committee member)

Creator Email hoikka@usc.edu,velimh@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-570597

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