It seems that the role of images in our world will never cease to intrigue us, perhaps more so now that we are contemplating machines producing them. Zylinska (2023) has argued that the distinction between «capturing» and «creating» images is blurred, from photogrammetry to computational photography or the intervention of algorithmic systems in their creation, alteration, storage, and distribution.
For some years now, there has been a sort of cyclical crisis surrounding the future of photography and images. In this text, I will attempt to reflect on an idea – by no means new: the processes of reading and interpreting images can generate new metaphors to understand them, but also to read and comprehend our world.
I emphasize that this is not a new idea at all, but I hope that this exercise can help me problematize two things: First, assuming that there are images that do not trigger thought means missing the opportunity to read a part of our sociocultural circumstance. Second, assuming the existence of a low and high culture to access the hermeneutic exercise of images can limit a dimension of our daily experience. How could we explain the validity of a project like Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes if we do not consider the explanatory potential of those images taken by Google?
It is not my goal to defend the endless cascade of repeated images produced by influencers in the complex global-digital apparatus we find in our feeds. Instead, I want to consider using them as documentary material to think more about our world. Chéroux (2014) has suggested identifying the utility of, for example, domestic photography – lacking an artistic language – to think about the limits of aesthetics in the documentary exercise of the everyday. Obvious photos of bodies shaped by plastic surgeries, beautiful, perfect, and consumable, can be an excellent means to understand current imaginaries. Perhaps we need to step back and build another epistemic positioning to read them.
This idea is not entirely original either; I thought of it after watching a TikTok where a young person used a filter that made them look old, with a reggaeton song playing in the background that bordered on the grotesque. The caption of the nano-content read: «play the music my grandfather liked when he was young.»
After the spontaneous and fleeting laughter the micro-celebrity’s video elicited from me, I thought there was something interesting there. It is likely that in 50 or 100 years, someone will try to explain the images and the sociocultural conditions in which they are being produced. Just as we are interested today in the historical development of photography, we will need to organize and make sense of this enormous archive of images.
In one of his recent texts, Becker (2015) reinforces the value of images as examples of representations that society produces of itself. I am particularly interested in highlighting Becker’s attempt at a taxonomy of photographs, where he suggests that we should not be so concerned about the problem of gender but rather understand «what people found useful to understand» (Becker, 2015, p. 215). Becker is not interested in images in terms of what they actually mean because these interpretive frameworks vary over time.
Instead, it is more useful to think about how images are intertwined in a system of meanings that responds to specific spatiotemporal conditions. This assumes that images gain their meaning based on different processes of collective linkage that articulate them to processes of identity, cultural, and subjective production. This is why I think it may be unproductive to assume that the images worth considering are those designed to provoke thought.
Images, at least with the approach I am trying to think about, generate thought to the extent that we use them as a means to understand the world. The trick seems to be in how we develop an epistemic positioning to read them and construct a narrative of, with, or about them. Moreno (2020, 2020) has conducted a series of interesting exercises to think about the articulation of memes to specific situations: from how they help create bonds during a university strike to how we can interpret their remixing as a result of a kind of contamination in Mead’s terms.
I find this approach useful because it forces us to think not only about images but also about people and all the practices they engage in with them: designing them, organizing them, distributing them, selling them, etc. This path also seems close to the reflections of Gómez Cruz (2012) on the idea of a networked image, a digital object that is linked to different sociotechnical networks. Images – although we may perceive them as empty – still display knowledge, concerns, anxieties, and anxieties specific to our time and are an excellent means to reflect on why we inhabit the world in this way.
During his work in Second Life, Boellstorff (2015) suggests that we allow ourselves to study everything that happens in our presence. It is valuable because there we will find tacit knowledge that organizes daily life, power relations, inequalities, etc. I think that this same positioning can serve, at least temporarily, to dismantle the intellectual distancing that distinguishes images that provoke thought and have aesthetic value from others that do not. Images are there, ready to be seen, but also thought.
References
Boellstorff, T. (2015). Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton University Press.
Chéroux, C. (2014). La fotografía vernácula. Ediciones Ve.
Gómez Cruz, E. (2012). De la cultura Kodak a la imagen en red: una etnografía sobre fotografía digital. De la cultura Kodak a la imagen en red. Editorial UOC.
Moreno, A. (2020). Memes, jóvenes y tecnologías para hablar de sí mismos. En Jóvenes entre plataformas sociodigitales Culturas digitales en México. UNAM, p.131-148.
Moreno, A. (2020). Contaminación en y a través de memes de Internet. Revista SOMEPSO. 5(2), 65-90.
Sibilia, P. (2008). La intimidad2015 como espectáculo (Vol. 1). Buenos Aires: Fondo de cultura económica.
Zylinska, J. (2023). The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI. MIT Press.
Iván Flores Obregón 