A Visual Remix

nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/a-visual-remix.html

Teju Cole April 16, 2015

When he visited the Plumbe National Daguerrian Gallery in Manhattan in 1846, Walt
Whitman was astonished. “What a spectacle!” he wrote. “In whichever direction you turn your
peering gaze, you see nought but human faces! There they stretch, from floor to ceiling —
hundreds of them.” In the seven years between the invention of the daguerreotype and
Whitman’s visit to Plumbe’s, the medium had become popular enough to generate an
impressive, and even hectic, stream of images. Now, toward the end of photography’s
second century, that stream has become torrential.

“Take lots of pictures!” is how our friends wish us a good trip, and we oblige them. Nearly one
trillion photographs are taken each year, of everything at which a camera might be pointed:
families, meals, landscapes, cars, toes, cats, toothpaste tubes, skies, traffic lights, atrocities,
doorknobs, waterfalls, an unrestrained gallimaufry that not only indexes the world of visible
things but also adds to its plenty. We are surrounded by just as many depictions of things as
by things themselves.

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 Image

A sequence from “I’m Google,” in which Dina Kelberman juxtaposes images found
online.Credit...Dina Kelberman

The consequences are numerous and complicated: more instantaneous pleasure, more
information and a more cosmopolitan experience of life for huge numbers of people, but also
constant exposure to illusion and an intimate knowledge of fakery. There is a photograph
coming at you every few seconds, and hype is the lingua franca. It has become hard to stand
still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to
do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened
our sense of wonder. We live in inescapable surfeit.

A number of artists are using this abundance as their starting point, setting their own
cameras aside and turning to the horde — collecting and arranging photographs that they
have found online. These artist-collectors, in placing one thing next to another, create a third
thing — and this third thing, like a subatomic particle produced by a collision of two other
particles, carries a charge.

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A decent photograph of the sun looks similar to any other decent photograph of the sun: a
pale circle with a livid red or blue sky around it. There are hundreds of thousands of such
photographs online, and in the daily contest for “likes” they are close to a sure thing: easy to
shoot, fun to look at, a reliable dose of awe. The American artist Penelope Umbrico
downloads such photos of the sun from Flickr — she favors sunsets in particular — and then
crops and prints them, assembling them into an enormous array. A typical installation may
contain 2,500 photographs, organized into a rectangular mural. It is the same sun,
photographed repeatedly in the same way, by a large cast of photographers, few of whom
are individually remarkable as artists and none of whom are credited. But, with Umbrico’s
intervention, the cumulative effect of their images literally dazzles: the sun, the sun, the sun,
the sun, in row upon brilliant row.

Image

Photographs curated by Eric Oglander in his “Craigslist mirrors” project.Credit...Eric Oglander

Optical brilliance is also the key to the American artist Eric Oglander’s “Craigslist mirrors”
project, which is also based on found photographs. His biographical statement is deadpan: “I
search Craigslist for compelling photos of mirrors.” Oglander posts these pictures to his
website, to Instagram and to Tumblr. A surprising number of them are surreal or enjoyably
weird, because of the crazy way a mirror interrupts the logic of whichever visual field it is
placed in, and because of the unexpected things the reflection might include. Photographic
work of this kind — radically dependent on context — can be unsettling for those who take

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“photograph” to have a straightforward meaning: an image made with a camera by a single
author with a particular intention. This is where collector-artists come in: to confirm that
curation and juxtaposition are basic artistic gestures.

The German artist Joachim Schmid, with a gleeful and indefatigable eye, gathers other
people’s photographs and organizes them into photo books. For his trouble, he has been
called a thief and a fraud. Schmid initially used photographs found on the street and at sales,
but more recently he has depended on digital images. His typological projects, like those in
the 96-book series “Other People’s Photographs” (2008-11), are alert to the mystery in
artlessness. They are a mutant form, somewhere between the omnivorous vernacular of
Stephen Shore’s “American Surfaces” and the hypnotic minimalism of Bernd and Hilla
Becher’s water towers. Schmid brings the photographs out of one kind of flow, their image-
life as part of one person’s Flickr account, and into another, at rest among their visual
cognates.

Each book in “Other People’s Photographs” is a document of how amateur digital

photography nudges us toward a common but unpremeditated language of appearances.
Photography is easy now, and cheap, but this does not mean that everything is documented
with the same frequency or that all possibilities are equally explored. As is true of every set
of expressive tools, digital photography creates its own forms of emphasis and registers of
style. Cellphone cameras are great in low light, and so we have many more nocturnal
photos. Most of our tiny cameras are not easy to set on a tripod, and so there is a
correspondingly smaller percentage of soberly symmetrical photographs of monuments; the
dominant aesthetic of the age is hand-held. A camera focused at waist level, as old
Rolleiflexes were, is different from one held between the eyes and the chin, the optimal
placement for a live digital display.

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 Image

Erik Kessels's "24 Hrs of Photos" project, around 350,000 Flickr images printed and piled in a
gallery.Credit...Erik Kessels

All selfies are alike as all daguerreotype portraits were alike: An image can be more
conventionally an example of its genre than a memorable depiction of its subject. A plate of
food, with its four or five items of varying texture corralled into a circle, is similar to countless
other plates of food. But a book full of photographed meals, meals long consumed and
forgotten, is not only poking gentle fun at our obsessive documentation of the quotidian. It is
also marveling at how inexpensive photography has become. Things that would not have
merited a second glance are now unquestioningly, almost automatically, recorded. The doors
of our fridges, glimpses of cleavage, images of our birthday cakes, the setting sun: Cheap
photography makes visible the ways in which we are similar, and have for a long time been
similar. Now we have proof, again, and again, and again.

The Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman approaches the question of similarity in a

different way. She uses Google’s search engines to find photographs, videos and video stills
that she places into a sequence, each successive image subtly distinct from the one
preceding it. Her project, “I’m Google,” shows us the unexpected links that connect a zany
range of inanimate and usually brightly colored objects. Seen one after another, things seem
to be morphing into other things. “I’m Google,” begun in 2011, is ongoing, and already
contains hundreds of transformations. In one recent sequence, an egg yolk became, after a
few variations, a red-hot nickel ball, and then a Ping-Pong ball; the Ping-Pong table on which
the ball rested became a squash court; that, in turn, became the subfloor of a house in which

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radiant heat was being installed. Another sequence transforms, almost magically, plumes of
fire retardant from planes into dust clouds from vehicles speeding through a dune. The effect
is both funny and mesmerizing, revealing how pleasing visual analogies can be, like the slant
rhymes in a poem.

The sheer mass of digital imagery was itself the subject of “24 Hrs of Photos,” a project by
the Dutch artist Erik Kessels (first in 2011, and other times since). Kessels downloaded every
photograph uploaded to Flickr in the course of a single day, about a million in all. He printed
a fraction of them, around 350,000, which he then piled up in massive wavelike heaps in a
gallery. Asked to explain the project, Kessels said: “I visualize the feeling of drowning in
representations of other people’s experiences.” But that’s not art! And yet the emotions that
accompany such an installation — the exasperation, the sense of wonder or inundation, the
glimpses of beauty — are true of art. The shoe fits, maddening as it is.

What are the rights of the original photographers, the “nonartists” whose works have been so
unceremoniously reconfigured? And how can what is found be ordered, or put into a new
disorder, and presented again to give it new resonance? And how long will that resonance
itself last? The real trouble is rarely about whether something counts as art — if the question
comes up, the answer is almost always yes — but whether the art in question is startling,
moving or productively discomfiting. Meeting those criteria is just as difficult for straight
photography as it is for appropriation-based work. After all, images made of found images
are images, too. They join the never-ending cataract of images, what Whitman called the
“immense Phantom concourse,” and they are vulnerable, as all images are, to the dual
threats of banality and oblivion — until someone shows up, says, “Finders keepers,” rethinks
them and, by that rethinking, brings them back to life.

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