Dear Hester,

I take the liberty to understand our topic of “Where" in a first step, geographically, locally, and to argue from my practice as a curator. My formatting years fall in the seventies and eighties, and I remember well at the time how often and violently I enervated myself over photography exhibitions. With a few exceptions, they were mostly boring, uninspired and sometimes terribly hung. Do you also remember the endless sequences of photographs in black frames, matted, hung with a bias cut and with a distance of 4-5 cm from the next image like a millipede through the rooms? And as the image-addicted, narrow queue of viewers is jostled along this millipede, with passing prohibited?

The eighties were a bad decade for classic photography. Except for matting, framing and hanging in a single row, neither the exhibition organisers nor the photographer had any ideas. Why was that so? What were the reasons? Central exhibitions in the twenties and thirties (Lissitzky), and even more the otherwise often derided Family-of-Man-Exhibition in the fifties (Steichen), indeed delivered enough illustrative material on how an exhibition can be made more attractive, more exciting, and more substantively more coherent, and more discursive.

I think that photography has become its own wish, its own claim that has proved fatal. In the seventies and eighties, photography changed its status, taking out a new passport, as it were. It was now increasingly at least perceived as art, as art photography, even if former journalistic photography was ennobled by later admission to the museum. It is this change that gave it the tame corset of matting and framing, all of it often somehow cut obliquely. The finally achieved cultural appreciation and its ignorance in exhibiting put formally strict, conservative reins on it for a long time. (I'm not talking about artists who have worked with photography) For admission to the museum, to go from functional to free, purposeless photography, for a while it paid a self-inflicted, heavy price.

Thereafter, i.e. in the nineties, the active photographers discovered mounting on aluminium. What seems clever in the exhibitions by Paul Graham in 1993 or by Astrid Klein 1995 was quickly captured and then repeated endlessly. So long and so intensely until, depending on the camera format, you also could no longer see mounted photographs in sizes of 80x120 cm or 100x150 cm. The exhibition walls were tiled with hard-laminated, photographs offset like tiles in paralysis-induced shock.

I curated my first exhibitions, as Henri Cartier-Bresson, and with him all of “Magnum", began to enlarge their photographs up to three and four times bigger than before, and omitting the context in which they arose, and sometimes even the legends. The photographs once created to order, for a specific purpose, were supposed to thus transform into autonomous works. At that time, as a young curator, I asked myself the question: How can you use photographs to create exhibitions that really make sense, exhibitions that are more exciting than photography in the book? Photography and museum, photography and exhibition space means switching one medium into an another medium, one or more framings into another framing. Sometimes, the photograph (and the institution) is prepared for it, designed for it (in the case of art with photography), sometimes, it is almost set against it, if the exhibition had not been thought of all along in the emergence of the photographs. Imagine industrial photography suddenly in the “White Cube", on the clean, white museum wall. Commissioned photography, formerly often realised nameless, authorless, is then edited and stored by a retouching team. The aim of this photograph was to advertise a brochure for company X, which is to present this new machine. So it was a propaganda photo, as advertising was called at the beginning of the 20th century. With many large magnesium spotlights the factory hall was brightly lit, torn from its gloominess to skillfully cover both the actual origin of the object and the object of the recorded image. And this - nevertheless life photography, factual photography - so-called recorded image was suddenly exhibited in the context of a white cube, in which Gursky and Goldin, Stieglitz and Strand, Weston and Wegmann were otherwise exhibited. How should this photography be read and understood?

The introduction of photography into the museum context poses a number of problems. This transition is usually part of an artistic work, an artistic act, because it is strived for, because of the glowing white space, the effect of distance, of proximity, the framing and the rhythm are considered from the start and co-ordinated with the concept of the work. Then the works and the hanging and the appearance in the space are read as a common, intentional score, as the visible result of an occurred performance of imagery. With resources such as serial, sequential arrangement, addition, the cloud-like grouping, the cluster-type block, the counterpoint, the change of pace and the break, the pictures can be put on the wall, in the room, incorporated into the architecture, images can be sunk therein such that they “swim" or stand out from it.

Quite different, as I said, all the photographs, which were not created for the museum purpose. Journalistic photos are integrated into and function in the dense newspaper and magazine layout, but they are hung on the open, white museum wall, then they “flutter", often seeming helpless, unguided. Journalistic photos, taken in a certain order for a certain journal at a particular time, and published together with a specific language framework - title, text, legends -, often 'stumbled' into the museum without warning. They thus ended up in a completely different context, which was less the narratively, illustratively emphasised as the work, its presence, its openness. In the classical format of 40x50 cm or 50x60 cm, they were strictly arranged in single row, possibly without any text, without contextualization - and were only put upon themselves, i.e., now suddenly exclusively dependent on a possible idle aesthetic power. Thus, the vision, intention and attitude of photojournalists have slipped by, dissolved. Context and information disappeared. Multiple misunderstandings were inevitable.

At the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur Photo Museum), we broke through with the first exhibitions of classical photography, with applied photography tentatively, then with the lines more prominent, introduced showcases, block hangings, met the immense industrial photography in part with large-scale cloud, cluster of photographs. With sensitive issues like Hoffmann and Hitler, we deliberately subdued the aesthetic presentation. Frames yes, but no matting, only photo corners, and actually too many small images in the same frame. For Gilles Peress Farewell to Bosnia, we staged a sarcophagus-like small space in which the images that were mounted on a kind of tarpaulin were hanged claustrophobically tightly together: there was no escape for the viewer either.

The principle of the cluster, the cloud, the airy salon hanging collapsed with the publication of photographic exhibitions in the early nineties. It was the first step to conquer the wall, to involve the space, strictly in Blossfeldt, associatively with Anders Petersen; the work “Candlestick Point" by Lewis Baltz contained within itself, a new thinking, a new approach to the wall. The individual images acted as information frames, one after another, with breaks or failures, gaps in the communication system.

Only now, as the single row was broken through, it was possible to reinstated the single row distinctively for a particular job, attitude, for a subject. It regained its speech, strictly carried out as with Roni Horn’s “You are the weather". Awareness of the framing as signifier was weakly formed in photography for a long time. Gursky made clear, prominent, iconic placements in space. The images were protected, highlighted by the white border and lifted onto the tray by the heavy wooden framing. By contrast, Zoe Leonard moves like a weasel in the exhibition space, creeping along the walls, wanting to disappear in them. Works and wall/space are a single piece, not the wall as a background and the stage and the work as lead singer, as preacher, but rather a new whole, fused into a wall-picture/picture-space.

The exhibition “Trade - Commodities, Communication, and Consciousness", was furnished, equipped with cool office furniture. Art and applied photography began to be shown next to each other or on top of each other. Erosion, mountain erosion brings much debris and dirt and stones and rocks and mud into the valley. For Hans Danuser, it was therefore clear and key that his works of debris flowing into valley fields must be presented lying on the floor. The White Cube found its challenge for the first time with Nan Goldin’s coloured AIDS space, then with Shirana Shahbazi’s picture-space-colour concepts. The exhibition of Ai Weiwei finally conquered the space entirely, the theme of the city circulation in Beijing was simulated by photographic grids fitted directly to the walls. Stefan Burger turn developed a creative confusion with the theme of “exhibiting".

Photography hardly knows now, finally, how it should be shown in exhibitions, in spaces, in 3-D - the exhibitions are now become more exciting worldwide, more dense, more thrilling, more consistently reflected, more contextualised -, the digital dam failure has occurred. Hardly were the exhibitions created more complex in form and content, conquered the spaces, the Internet once again offers and demands total simplicity in dealing with photographs. The striking gesture on the tablet best illustrates the worlds of imagery that unfold in a single row on the Internet, this radical demotion of the complexity of a possible visual narrative on the sequence of individual images. The concretion “Photography here-and-now-in-this-constant-spatial-semantic field", this momentous “Where" thins itself straight back out, violently and repeatedly: it loses not only its ancestral support, but also equally all extremities, all tentacles that finally gave it the opportunity to combine a weakly coded photographic sign with other signs into a legible and understandable network of image information. It now becomes a volatile Baudrillardian sign that, if at all, can take on any meaning anytime. An attractive picture sleeve which can uncontrollably, often cluelessly slip from the context family history and family into advertising, history, nature documentary and even art.

Quo vadis, picture?

Dear Hester,

Thank you for your response. It will be an exciting open-jaw flight. Enough difference in the perspectives, enough mutual interests. That will fit. The term “embodiment” that you introduce sounds like a sound box, like a drum when its pronounced loudly. Physical “feeling” is a central theme for me. These days, I regularly curate at MAST (Manufacture of Arts, Experience and Technology) and so I’m often in Bologna. I soon became almost addicted to running through Bologna's large medieval old town. It is very densely built, its pavements are almost always covered by arcades, outside floors (terrazzo) are used how we know them from interior spaces so that inside and outside seem to merge together, so that I have the feeling of snaking through a body, through the vessels of this big, compact architectural body. It’s an indescribable feeling because it doesn’t nest in my body sparsely, but instead broadly and mushrooming. 

Embodiment and photography however, that sounds at first like fire and water, like a paradox. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ euphoric demand at the start of the history of photography to photograph the world in order to experience it immaterially and then burn it¹ formulated for the first time the idea that photography is an abstraction of the (physical) world, that it became part of the great abstraction process that we humans pushed for, livened up and passed through in the last 200 years. Engine and carriages in one. Since then, we have gone faster and faster down the path from substance to the surface, from material to symbols, from the world to the photograph of the world and found that pictures are today often more central, more formative than lived experiences, as physical reality. In the 20th century, the visual sense has increasingly dominated the other senses, digitalisation finally desensualises (completely) the photographic image itself. The alchemy of photography has disappeared, the image is thrust into the light, so to speak, and has been disembodied. The volume of data remains, shining brightly on the screen, easy to control, to design, to animate and to distribute throughout the world as quick as a flash. 

It really is a paradox to want to embody this photography. But a lot of force and tension is often generated precisely by big contradictions, a kind of superconductive vacuum, in which visual information and visual feelings are successfully shared. At exhibitions, we so far used to have the opportunity to create photography spaces with several different staging means, which the spectator (your second missing term ☺) entered into, and which he explored and experienced intellectually and physically. We can design the spaces to be as hard or soft, as discursive or sensual, as physical or intellectual as possible for the visitor. We all work with the concept of the exhibition as an “open work” (Umberto Eco²) that the audience completes with their active vision and thoughts, but there is no cure for the non-haptic surface of the photograph and, in terms of interaction, our hands are bound as tightly as before. Exhibitions can be 3D films with the option of rewinding, but not games consoles. Exhibitions can still not be animated in such a way that the visitors can relocate the photographs throughout the room and re-group them. For the time being. Let’s see what the developing virtual reality, the Oculus Rift you talk about will bring. It will surely not become more tactile in the original sense - will a complex perception system shuttle the viewer between contemplation and action for this and facilitate, with triggers, a type of contact, a secondary tactility?

In exhibitions, the images, their curators and viewers find themselves in an ideal situation, at least theoretically in an almost optimal situation. A visitor has made a decision to go out, to pay the entry fee and concentrate as he moves, sometimes talking with a friend or partner, through the rooms, through the network of photographs in very different materialisations. On the other hand, a museum, a curator, a photographer, a team of photography experts have set out to put together, after careful consideration, a certain number of photographs on a certain theme, alone or in combination with texts (and several other tools). The intersection between these two intentions, these two paths is the moment of the controlled encounter, which leads to intended, but also uncontrolled experiences, insights and feelings. The “communication” system that can occur here is so good, so perfectly installed that the rare case, this “lucky coincidence” of successful communication, as Jürgen Habermas argued in his “Theory of Communicative Action”³, should actually happen regularly. In the successful case, everything is so well laid out that the photographs and the intentions of the curator, the photographer whisper straight into the viewer’s ear with a horn, that the viewer communicates directly with the photographs’ field of intention. 

But, even in such a perfectly designed communication situation, visitors stay in front of a photograph for an average of 11 seconds, as a 2009 research project at the St. Gallen Art Museum in Switzerland discovered.⁴ Specialists and the uninitiated tackle whole rooms in a similarly short time, crossing them diagonally at a rapid pace. This is sobering and does not bode well for an in-depth understanding. But photography is not just seen in the museum. How then does this communication, this mutual encounter between image and viewer function in all other situations where photography appears? Photography, as we know, is used in every conceivable situation, in every conceivable place on this earth, for every conceivable purpose. Since the explosion of digital photography, one can increasingly describe our actions by: Instead of remembering: photograph. Instead of experiencing: photograph. Instead of thinking: photograph. Instead of knowing: photograph. Instead of talking: photograph. Instead of loving: photograph. Instead of reading: photograph. Exhibition visitors photograph every gallery text, with the intention of reading it at home. And many of them run their public course through any private, public, free or pay media channel and pop up before our eyes, before the viewer, asked and unasked. 

What happens to all these images, I asked at the end of my first letter? Where do they go? Which people understand them, where, for what reason (or why not)? You write: “Where else, if not in the mind of the viewer, where it can become a memory, however inaccurate, fading over time or, when the imprint is strong, lodging itself there as an object of reminiscence and contemplation.” With some museum photographs, yes, with impressive press photographs, likewise, also thanks to the title, text, legend, but otherwise? We are living today through the enchanting myth of the universality of photography. And we link this with the idea that we will understand every picture the same across the world. That sounds good, but it is an ineradicable error, as we know. Jean Mohr and John Berger, for example, at the start of the 80s presented a series of photographs to ten people.⁵ And the result was that none of the individual descriptions of the photographs agreed with any of the others. Photographs make perfect litmus paper, perfect slides for our projections, they are realistic looking Rorschach tests which assume a different meaning depending on the context, depending on the viewer. And because we have never enjoyed an education on and with photography (photography has largely not been taken seriously enough), because we are therefore photographically, visually illiterate, we are today faced with the awkward situation to stand in a world where photographic communication is increasing so rapidly - without understanding anything really, at least not the same as the neighbours next door, as the global neighbours. Photographs trickle over us, like cherry blossom leaves after a storm: looking beautiful, touching, attractive, with a lot of likes - but also compulsorily accompanied by numerous misunderstandings, programmed into the tools of communication. The “Where” of the photograph implies, amazingly strongly, the precondition of an option of “reading” and understanding a photograph, no?

¹ Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859), in: Bernd Stiegler (Ed.): Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie, Stuttgart 2010. p. 26 et. seq.

² Umberto Eco, The open work. Frankfurt am Main, 1962

³ Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. (Volume 1: Reason and the rationalisation of society, Vol. 2: A Critique of Functionalist Reason), Frankfurt am Main 1981

⁴ EMotion – Mapping Museum Experience. Head of the project Prof. Dr. Martin Tröndle, WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production, Zeppelin University of Friedrichshafen. Cited according to http://www.mapping-museum-experience.com

⁵ John Berger, Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling. Munich/Vienna 1984.

Dear Hester,

Thank you for your intense and dense “detour," as you called it. 

On the one hand, I would like to continue poking around with the needle into our previous haystack. Speed and mass stand out quite strongly. These are among the themes and concepts I have addressed in public discussions that have been more or less met with acceptance, or at least a willingness to listen. On the other hand, the banal thesis that we live in a special time today, in reality and virtual-reality, with extraordinary challenges and many unsolved issues – that we live in a precarious time – has been quickly met with surprisingly strong public resistance. 

For example, when asked about the digital revolution and its impact, a public of managers, of leaders gave a slightly aggressive response: “It was no less profound than Gutenberg's revolution with the printing press." It's a counter-argument, like many others that attempt to mitigate, if not to cover up, the explosive nature of the present. 

When it comes to speed and mass, however, we receive an endorsing nod. Speed ​​multiplied by mass and justice and globalization: it’s something we hardly know how to deal with. We are not equipped for it, even if we can develop supercomputer solutions. We are mentally and emotionally incapable of responding to such rapid, voluminous, and complex issues, for which we would have to first perceive the situation, and then analyze, understand, and ultimately agree on a common action. Speed ​​and mass are also central parameters in dealing with photography today. The mass of production and the speed of dissemination, combined with numerous de- and re-contextualizations, both de-materialize and uproot the dataset “photography." The abstraction of abstraction of abstraction results in the alienation of photography and visual communication. 

But I've decided to take an alternate route: into the world of applied photography. After all, we only have four double sessions – four times two letter exchanges – and we are already at the halfway point. In response to the question: “Where?" I would like to offer a meandering reply and ask in return: 1. In the archive. Properly stored, or dusty and damp? 2. Nowhere. Because lost, stolen, or digitized? And I'd like to offer two examples regarding forms of localization and displacement in photography. 

The first is an example from my experience at MAST in Bologna (mast.org), from my work on and with industrial photography. For a century, photography was intensely, elaborately, and in a certain sense perfectly executed. We've only ever seen a fraction of what was produced. Industrial photography is a phenomenon of mass production, but not of mass perception. Business-to-business generates far fewer public images than business-to-consumer. Still, such photographs were often properly stored in archives. 

Then, with the growth of industrial capitalism – in the course of land consolidation, mergers, and sales that have intensified since the 1970s – the visual, and often the written, recorded history of industry and industrialization was thrown away. Into the bin it went, by the ton. New owners showed little interest for the old stories. At the same time, outsourcing was introduced. This had a negative impact on industrial photography, which was especially strong in the machine industry, where large retouching and lithography departments were now shut down. Small-format and amateur photography entered sometimes the field. The quality of the photography, along with the interest for the industrial image, rapidly declined. 

Only recently have we turned critical attention to industrial photography, and noticed how we had essentially suppressed half of the world, half of history – and how the industrial manufacturing world actually offers us valuable information concerning our lives, our thoughts, and our actions. The first attempts to address industry in museums – let's call it the musealization of industry 1.0 – have sparked confrontation with the visual history of industrialization. Gradually a netherworld is becoming illuminated – as long as the photographs of it are still available.

And here’s a second example: Three years ago, an amazing, fabulous book won the History Book Award at the Photography Festival in Arles and at Paris Photo. It bears a seemingly mysterious title: AO1 [COD.19.I.I.43]  A27 [S | COD.23], which is embossed in small, discreet lettering onto a standard plain gray cardboard cover.¹ Further down is the name “Rosângela Rennó". Everything is in italics. There is no additional information, neither on the back cover nor on the spine. Two slabs of thick gray cardboard enclose the large book, 34.5 cm high and 29 cm wide; the spine is made of dark, slightly faded blue canvas. The endpaper reminds me of the pattern on the waxed paper that my mother used to line the kitchen drawers when I was a child.  

The book exudes a kind of “backstage" aura. It makes us feel as if we are participants – with a bit of a time lag – in the archival and inventory of 27 albums from the Pereira Passos/Malta Collection, which is stored in the city archives of Rio de Janeiro. Album covers and the backs of photographs with rudimentary handwritten inventory notes and curt descriptions of the depicted scenes alternate with a series of photographs scattered throughout the book that for the most part seem to describe city life in Rio. Leafing through the book we begin to suspect something that becomes clear upon reading the introduction: this is the story of a robbery. It relates the egregiousness of the gradual or rapid disappearance of many valuable documents from the city archives, including 19 of the 27 albums from the Pereira Passos Collection, which mainly comprises photographs by the city’s official photographer, Augusto Malta, and his sons made during the first half of the 20th century. The theft was first discovered in June, 2006. Most of the boxes were still on the shelves, but their interior revealed numerous signs of vandalism. Photos were cut out and stolen, pages torn, and on a few occasions, book covers that were completely devoid of their contents. Sometimes everything was missing. There were no signs of forcible entry into the rooms. To this day, it remains unclear whether everything was stolen all at once or gradually over an extended period of time. 

The book title, AO1 [COD.19.I.I.43]  A27 [S | COD.23], reflects the classification system for the original inventory of 27 albums. The combination of a simple gray cardboard cover with gilt edging is a playful reminder of the double role of documents in archives. On the one hand, they are simple documents; on the other, they are valuable mementos, small visual monuments to local history and pieces of the puzzle that is collective memory. Should they disappear, gaps are created that can never be closed. This could be compared to the gaps in thinking and remembering that occur during dementia. Three or four years before the publication of this book, Rosângela Rennó addressed a similar case in a similar format: 2005-510117385-5 is a visual report on the aftermath when 751 photographs were stolen from the D. Thereza Christina Maria Collection, a private collection of 23,000 photographs that Emperor D. Pedro II donated to the National Library in 1889 following the proclamation of the Republic of Brazil.² Rennó photographed the backs of the 101 photographs that were recovered. They document the damages and changes made to the photographs, for example the attempt to etch away the library stamp so that the images could be sold more easily. 

In these two archival books, Rosângela Rennó uses her visual material quietly yet precisely, in order address the issue of cultural amnesia and the careless handling of cultural heritage in Brazil. In an interview, Rennó noted how the young country is pressing forward with devouring strength, and that in doing so has deliberately and systematically displaced the order of what has gone before, the memory of the past. Using appropriation to counter forgetting is the driving force behind her work, in which she collects and reworks materials and their stories – to create a visual history of Brazil.

Where and how is something photographed and under what circumstances? Where is something archived and with what intentions, carefully or carelessly? Where is something discarded, stolen, vandalized intentionally, or unintentionally? What happens when a major magazine and newspaper publisher wants to scan its photographs, but of the 7 to 10 million photographs only 5% is selected? 

These are few of the many issues that arise when dealing with photography in archives. How applied photography is dealt with by business, the media, and in archives also reflects our relationship to the production conditions of life, society, the economy, and our production of consumer goods. Often the approach is: We sometimes cover, disguise, drape, paint, and conceal the crooked wall, the aging face, the chipped plaster, the dented car. We like to arrange our world so that its origin, its mechanism, and its operation are no longer visible, so that it appears before us as a perfect shiny box that we can look at and admire. Actions disappear into results, while inconsistencies, shortcomings, and mistakes are concealed, gaps edited away. We like the result, the appearance, the action, the event, and the glamor – and retouch the in-between and the absent, while the undesirable gets swept off into the real or virtual trash bin. Thus our image of the world often consists of performances (personal, professional), of successful acts, of high profile publicity. Meanwhile, gaps – the waiting, the not-done, boredom – and “dirty laundry" – hard labor, poor working conditions, pollution, etc. go unseen or are intentionally hidden. 

This attitude is reinforced by shifting, overlapping traces of memory. Harald Welzer, in a lecture entitled “Pictures in the Mind – Truth and Remembrance" (held in 2006 at the Centre for Photography in Winterthur), said: “The consolidation of an individual memory includes not only what actually happened, but how it was interpreted, and especially how it was communicated. Memory is always the event plus the memory of the memory, and each new recollection of the memory will overwrite the existing engram, meaning the specific neural link that represents the perception, storage, consolidation, and retrieval of past events in the brain. Memory research now provides ample evidence that the brain does not always distinguish between imagined and actual events, and especially that the repeated communication of an event increasingly consolidates the memory, providing it with a higher content of subjective reality. False memories look just and feel just like real ones."³

“Well, where is photography?" In this case, our answer to the question might be: Hopefully in a good archive, a good balance of analog and digital, with attentive labelling, preserved in the best way possible. And labeled, sorted, dated, and inventoried, so that the images cannot escape, not be discarded or stolen, or vanish into an anonymous mass of archival entries. 

During that same symposium with Welzer, Anton Holzer noted that “Catalogs, like archives in general, have the same function that freezers do. They freeze items, hold them securely, so that we can later thaw and reuse them. Catalogs conserve not only things, but also the cultural relationships and hierarchies between things. It is their nature to protect – or in other words, to act ‘conservatively.’  Without freezing there is no archive – and without thawing there is no living visual memory. The memory of the archive is alive and available only when it is associated with the culture outside of the archive, with the present. And when the archive is posed questions that the initial archivists did not – or could not – ask."⁴

Especially given the speed that we are currently experiencing, which is vigorously rattling our brains and blowing our minds, photographs, along with their equally intelligent and preserving storage, can continue to play an important role in retaining the personal, societal, eventful, despite all doubts and problems. Right? But it depends on how interested or lazy we are. If we want to know something, then we’ll pay attention, otherwise we forget, confuse, lose, and despise it.

What do you think, Hester?

¹ Rosângela Rennó: AO1 [COD.19.I.I.43]  A27 [S | COD.23]. Rio de Janeiro 2013.

² Rosângela Rennó: 2005-510117385-5. Rio de Janeiro 2009.

³ Harald Welzer: Lecture abstract for the symposium “Visual Memory," Centre for Photography, Winterthur, 26 June 2006.

⁴ Anton Holzer: Lecture abstract for the symposium “Visual Memory," Centre for Photography, Winterthur, 26 June 2006.

Dear Hester,

1

My brief response to your final question is different fields of experience! :-) Despite globalizing issues and global channels of information, diverse fields of experience, fields of activity and fields of reflection allow the spotlight of interest to cast a slightly different light on things, allow us to continue to see and evaluate things from different perspectives. You are right: From the perspective of a globalized economy, there is no longer an “outside,” no outside the system. That is the painfully deep experience of the last decades. What's more, the field of what was once “noble” art is today nothing more than yet another economic field in which a great deal of money can be made or lost. Yet despite this realization that the filter of the globalized economy, the filter of consumerism, turns everything into a commodity, we don't necessarily have to act accordingly, and there are nevertheless different where's and how’s. The perception of the system should not limit the artist to perceiving his or her own art from a solely monetary perspective. The same holds true for an honest, intensive viewer, experiencer, “user” of art. The dominance and omnipresence of economic factors cannot be allowed to completely determine our existence.

2

My longer response, which hopefully sparks new questions and insights, begins as follows: In the early 1990s, when I pressed ahead with the establishment and opening of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, I was often asked why we were opening up a museum for photography at a time when contemporary art museums were starting to show photography. One of my resolute responses at the time was because the artistic venues are only interested in an infinitesimal fraction of what is photographically produced and either neglect or manifestly reject the remaining 99.9%. Because the field extends beyond artistic photography to include applied photography. Because photography is a medium that—aside from making art—allows us to capture weddings and other memories, colors and contours, stories and histories, and much more. Moreover, with regard to other museums of photography, I often added that the Fotomuseum Winterthur is interested not only in art, author photography, the highlights of photographic history and contemporary photography, but also takes an avid interest in all forms of photography, including industrial photography, police photography, medical photography, fashion photography, still-life photography and the photography of things, etc. And it does so not only from the perspective of a photographic-aesthetic canon, but also out of sociological interest, out of a curiosity about the function of photography within the social context, the connection between the visual and the sociological. 

During the first ten years, we had difficulties making our exhibition concepts appeal to other museums or exhibition venues. As I illustrated in my last blog entry, industrial photographs were and continue to be thrown away by the ton, and it seemed that neither art museums nor museums of photography took any interest in these—in some cases—anonymous industrial photographs (such as in the exhibitions “Industrial Image“ or “Ecstasy of Things”). Even today, many museums of photography pursue a program of author photography, they adhere to the list of important names for each area and show one photographer after the next (and still exhibit the works of far fewer women photographers), but they steer clear of the large, broad, somewhat uncontrolled field of applied photography. During the 2000s, finally a number of themes broached by artists were seized upon and addressed for a while. Thomas Ruff, for example, tackled the area of photography of machines and then press photography. Within photographic circles, vernacular photography managed to generate a bit of hype. In German the term “applied photography” (“Gebrauchsfotografie”) still sounds usable—in English it may have a connotation that I have been unaware of—but what is more important here is that there exists this enormous field of applied photography, of non-artistic photography, and that it is far more comprehensive and can often serve more appropriately as a visual memory archive than photographic works in the field of art will ever intend or be able to do. And that this field still exists when artists and theoreticians have long since turned their gaze to other themes and other interests. 

Perhaps I was not clever enough in formulating my ideas (yet hopefully not quite as colorful and chaotic as a puppet show☺), but I am not referring to the protected gardens, the protected fields, the sanctioned archives filled with exquisite photographs. Rather, I am talking about the 99, the 99.9 percent. In my third blog entry, I spoke of the risks and opportunities of repositories for photographs as part of our visual-historic memory, as a treasure trove and perhaps a documentary trove for future research of the past, with regard to insights into our current and future lives. The problem with this photography actually is that it can generally achieve no commercial value; in fact, its storage and preparation constantly costs money. Not surprisingly, people around the world are gleefully throwing it away, discarding it. When it comes to social recognition, photography has always been a poor cousin and only those images that are perceived within the context of art enjoy a high status and are attributed a financial value.

I set out to designate the private archive, the company archive, the municipal archives, archives of public and private institutions as a central “where” for photography with its own principles, to emphasize its worth and, at the same time, make note of its precarious existence. You have made two key points here: Yes, we cannot collect and preserve everything and, yes, we always have to dispose of some images. And every decision, to retain or discard, creates inequalities, which is unavoidable and usually adheres to not only pragmatic but also ideological principles. But this realization should not keep us from becoming active and nevertheless taking action, right? Your comparison with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault slightly misses the mark, in my opinion, because the photo archive is always directed toward the past, while these gigantic seed archives (commercial and social) are aimed at ensuring our existence in the future. In one respect, however, they resemble each other: photographs in archives serve, among other things, to breathe life into memories, to breathe life into history, which is constantly being rewritten. In that respect, every trip to an archive with an open mind changes our image of the past, just as every blending of a seed bank and the outside world gives reality a good shake-up. 

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The museum and the analog or digital archive are just a fraction of the venues in which photography takes place, is used and collected. The thrilling and limitless, exciting and “dangerous” quality of photography is that, as I've said, it can be used for every imaginable purpose: for monitoring and controlling (police photography), for depicting and educating (medical photography, botanical photography), for contemporary fictionalizing and the creation of experiential worlds at the service of the economy (advertising photography), for molding identities and memories, forging sentiment fields, making gestures that merely affirm one's existence (I'm here), and so forth. All of these “where’s” adhere to both common and unique principles at the same time and, in German, all of these “where’s” (Wo’s in our language) naturally give rise to a range of linguistically related forms to produce the following questions: Where to (wohin)? Where from (woher)? For what purpose (wozu)? From what (wovon)? Whereupon (worauf)? With what (womit)? These questions imply a system of rules, functions and semantic fields that finally conclude, as you correctly wrote, with the monetary “how much?” question. And the cycle, as you have clearly pointed out, has become far larger and faster: “Moreover, the digital copy validates the original work every time it is shared, downloaded, forwarded, tagged, resized, instagrammed, or even stolen, cropped, and used for a meme. Within this economy, going viral is the highest good. To perform such labor - for it takes our time to engage in this manner with photography - the ordinary internet user is called upon. Every time we circulate an image, the original of which is held in public or private possession, we increase its value for the owner, who ‘gets money for nothing and chicks for free’.”

I will allow myself to leave aside the monetary aspect here and, in exchange, conclude by clearly asking once again: And do we know what we're doing here? Is there in addition to a “know that” also a “know how” for the use of photography? To put it another way: There is a central place where I totally miss photography: At everyday schools worldwide, at primary schools, secondary schools, high schools, or whatever each country and system chooses to call them today. On this point I remain astonishingly missionary, as one quickly notices in my introduction to a symposium: “The discussions and debates on ‘visual literacy’ have been in full swing for years now. Umberto Eco pointed out early on that we have entered an era in which visual communication will be at least as important as language, if not more important. His dictum is over 20 years old. In the meantime, we have entered a new visual, connected age and we experience on a daily basis, at work, in the media and in Internet culture how the word is being replaced by the image in such an incredibly powerful way, how language is being displaced by images on a massive scale. However, there is no education on the nature of the image, no teaching of our understanding of images, of visual imagery, of communicating and manipulating with images. We find ourselves in a situation in which we are all consumers but ultimately imagery illiterates. Coming to terms with the structures and functionalities of images thus has an eminently educational aspect. We have to be educated about images and well versed in the language of imagery to be prepared for the communication of the present and the future. The decisive aspect here is not just the reading and understanding of photographs, but rather the realization that photography goes beyond merely documenting events; in fact, it virtually creates them. In a mediatized world, all that is important is what is documented, shown, seen and “talked” about; anything else does not exist, is not there, is absent. Through its imagery, photography creates the world that we intend to remember and will remember. Photography generates the visual notion of our world. Photography has a key influence on our future images of the world and on our courses of action.”¹

It is astonishing that even today hardly anyone bothers to delve into this issue, with the exception of very, very few specialists. When I google “coming to terms with images” / “education in images” / “educating about the image” / “photography and education”, then I hit upon, at best, a recreational workshop or the inverse: educating small children with pictures. But nothing on the question: What is an image? And how do images function? What do they reveal, what do they hide? What do they trigger? How are they structured? Why do they act like chameleons and alter their nature and meaning depending on the context? Why is it so easy to empty them as well as use them for everything else? How are things manipulated with images? And so on. I don't intend to establish a new curriculum here, but merely point out that, aside from specialists, no one really has a profound grasp of how images function, while at the same time every Facebook posting without a picture is barely more than a blip on the radar, in other words, is largely ignored. This is a situation that I think is highly precarious and bizarre. Elementary schools normally always do their best to prepare their schoolchildren—all of us, really—for the most important aspects of life and the world, with lessons in languages, mathematics, physics, etc. But that's still not the case here. The initiative by Eikones in Basel² working together with a high school class to integrate the “image” into the curriculum as a test phase is a rare exception. A gap is opening here that we need to close again as quickly as possible. Don't you agree?

This concludes my entries to this blog. I had the initial, introductory word. You have the last, concluding word. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this intensive, refreshing exchange with you, dear Hester.

Urs Stahel

¹ Introduction to the ASIP conference "Bilderwissen / Décoder l'image" in collaboration with the Camera Arts in Lucerne. http://cameraarts.ch/updates/re-view-symposium-bilderwissen-decoder-limage/

² The Eikones program can be briefly summarized as follows: Iconic Criticism. The Power and Meaning
of Images. https://eikones.ch/eikones/introduction/?L=1