The numbers leave no doubt: around 5,000 photographs by some 100 photographers, collected over the past 20 years. In other words, a superficial count of 50 photographs per photographer. Clearly, the Fondation A Stichting has not at all been looking for jewels, for showpieces, like so many other photographic collections, choosing rather to focus on the ways of seeing, ways of thinking and stances toward the world that they embody. Collecting is seen, in fact, as a means to cultural mediation, promoting photography and with it our ability to see and to understand the world, highlighting the visual as a way of thinking and experiencing, while at the same time providing crucial, long-term support to photographers and their projects. It may well be that the Fondation A Stichting is unique in this respect – I myself know of no other collection that operates on the same basis.

So composed, the foundation’s collection also testifies to another important truth: while it recognizes that a single photograph can be beautiful, even great, it also knows that it says surprisingly little about the world. Ten people looking at ten photographs see ten by ten – a hundred – different worlds. Only through a precise, structured, conceptual approach can photographs serve to create a visual language that can be read, understood and used to communicate by all – even in a matter so supposedly simple as documenting the world. The foundation’s collection thus introduces us to a generation of conceptual documentary photographers whose structural approach offers us important insights into the world, nature and society, and into the lives of individual human beings and other living creatures. Through the photographs that have finally become images, step by step.

What exactly does this mean? Until the early 1960s, pictures, whether paintings or photographs, came in the singular. For centuries, paintings were icons or, later, iconic representations, symbolisations often expressive of the social status of their owners. They hung alone, almost erratically, on the wall, and for a long time were accessible only through empathy, attunement, immersive engagement. The heavy frames contributed significantly to their heft, the gravitational pull of their weight of meaning. But around 1960 came a big break, a double break . . . a multiple break, indeed. On the one hand, the heavy picture frame was broken, prised away, and the painting freed from its bourgeois limits. The image began to decompress, as it were, to expand, easing itself into the surrounding space. But it also began to move, and to move about, first in happenings, then in performance pieces. At the same time, there was a change in the viewer’s experience. Emotional engagement with the image increasingly gave way to discursive investigation, to analytical understanding. The Sixties and Seventies of the twentieth century were the decades of structuralism, of conceptual, linguistic and semiotic analysis: of the world, of society, of systems – and also of the image. The "linguistic turn" was the watchword of the day. With it came the structural analysis of all visual creations and an unprecedented linguistification of art.

As a result, the single picture – the single painting, the single photograph – rapidly became obsolete. The call was now to "speak", to form sentences: to create a block, a network, a grid, a cloud, a narrative of multiple pictorial or representational elements that on the one hand more closely reflected the complexity of the real, and on the other facilitated an understanding of the images themselves and so of the underlying reality. This conception of the world, of reality and its apprehension through images, is that of conceptual documentary photography. Concept and document, otherwise more or less inimical, are here yoked together to yield a powerful, photographic understanding of the world and its systems, becoming the twin pillars of their apprehension through images. 

There was, however, a further step that photography did not take for quite some time, even then long remaining greatly hesitant: the step towards the image, towards the realisation that we increasingly live in a world in which the image – as Jean Baudrillard argued, among others – takes precedence over reality, a world in which image drives reality and not vice versa. Photography, with its traditional concept of truth and its ontology of representation continued to insist on the idea of a world truly and genuinely reflected in the negative, and so for a long time remained loyal to the idea of the (honest, genuine, indexical) photographic representation and came only late to the "image", to the glamour, and thus the dominance and power, of the image. An interesting example, in this respect, is the astonishing transmogrification represented by Lewis Baltz’s “Sites of Technology” trilogy of 1989: Ronde de Nuit, Politics of Bacteria and Docile Bodies. Having made a great name for himself with his conceptual documentary photography, his pin-sharp black and white photographs on socially significant themes being characterized by their precisely placed geometric fields, he now abruptly and permanently switched from representation to image, a shift multiply evident in these oversized – 12-metre-long and 2-metre-high – panoramas with their grainy and sometimes slightly blurred colour images. In them, Baltz suddenly becomes a Baudrillard, no doubt about it. The photographer becomes image-maker and truthful representation gives way to cinema, to visual seduction. Billboards with social insights were created.

Perhaps the conceptual documentary photographers are the last generation of photographers, of artists making use of photography, to have maintained the old claim. For have we not daily become more aware of grasping the void, seeking in vain to apprehend spaces that can no longer be grasped, understood through our senses; more aware of how quickly and how irresistibly all reference to reality is dissolving, leaving us to make our way amid a stream of free-floating images? Artificial intelligence only takes the whole process several notches further, and as that becomes ever more pervasive, deeper-going and inescapable, confusion, bewilderment and vertigo are guaranteed, even though truth was once its aim.

In German Wikipedia one finds this definition: “Positivism is a school of philosophy that insists that insights laying claim to the character of knowledge be limited to the interpretation of ‘positive’, i.e. actual, sensuously perceptible and verifiable findings." Every time I read or think about positivism, as I do here, I immediately feel that I’m also thinking about photography. Photography seems to me to be the almost monstrous technological embodiment of this idea of knowledge. In the nineteenth century, then, photography was exciting, stirring, revolutionary even. By the end of the twentieth, however, it had become tranquilizing, even sedative in its effect. For with its seemingly “verifiable findings” it claimed that the world was still real: tangible, “sensuously perceptible” and so knowable and understandable, despite reflection on reality having increasingly taught us otherwise. Over the past twenty to thirty years, new technologies, digitalisation and the intensification of capitalism have accelerated the world, changing its so radically that we find ourselves paralysed, as if on a rollercoaster, our senses queasy, unable even to represent to ourselves the motions of quantum physics, never mind grasp them in detail. The visible now suddenly seems to be as far removed from the true as it was before the Enlightenment, before the Gutenberg Bible.

The Fondation A Stichting, this unique project initiated, promoted and (jointly) run by Astrid Ullens, is well on its way to becoming an impressive monument to the visual culture that could still rely on the visible.