[Fall 2021]

A Photographic Mapping of the Twenty­First Century
by Julie Martin

As far back as the 1990s, American literary critic Fredric Jameson was noting that the world is non-narrative and unrepresentable.¹ Drawing an analogy with the urban planner Kevin Lynch’s book The Image in the City, Jameson showed that because we, as urban dwellers, are incapable of situating our- selves in and mapping our own city, we are unable to visualize and therefore conceive of the globalized social space. To over- come our alienation, in Jameson’s opinion, we would have to reconquer the space, which we would do through the aesthetic of “cognitive mapping.” A “new political art”² would reveal this world that is hidden from our view by allowing us to grasp its agency and connections, rendering global processes accessible to our senses and experience. In a capitalist era that fosters the development of fluid commodities such as services, information, and data, this strategy seems even more necessary and urgent. Although the task is laborious, it constitutes, of course, a horizon toward which to reach rather than a program to undertake in the strictest sense.

It is this ambitious program that the exhibition Civilization takes on.³ The intention, in effect, is to suggest a vision of the early twenty-first century through a selection of works by more than a hundred photographers produced over the last twenty years. Crowds in motion, clustered highway inter- changes, urban spaces saturated with housing, streets invaded by advertising of all types, cookie-cutter luxury hotels, over- populated refugee camps, networks of intertwined cables, and mysterious sites of technological experimentation are some of the subjects that visitors see in the exhibition. Although not all the photographers who took these shots claim to have a documentary approach, all of their images deliver representations of contemporary phenomena or events. More specifically, they offer a glimpse of the movements that run through to- day’s world: interrelations, invisible flows, influences, mobility of goods and human beings, and more. By freezing these movements, which are too rapid, big, or evanescent to be directly visible, these still images try to make them perceptible.

With the goal of rationalizing this buzzing confusion, or at least making it temporarily intelligible, the exhibition curators, William A. Ewing and Holly Roussell, organized the material in eight sections. The first, “Hive,” explores the currents of human activity in constantly densifying human environments. “Alonetogether” present individuals, groups, and their relationships, which seem to be increasingly modelled by digital technologies. “Flow” reveals the movements of people, goods, and ideas across Earth’s surface. In “Persuasion,” the mechanisms of political and advertising propaganda are examined; “Control” brings to light different forms of authority – political, religious, law enforcement, and so on – and their impacts. In “Rupture,” the curators evoke the conflicts shaking the planet, as well as the failures of our “civilization,” the concept taken as the exhibition’s title. Industrial and luxury purveyors of leisure – such as cruise ships and amusement parks – and their ecologically and ethically disastrous effects are the subject of “Escape.” The last part, titled “Next,” takes a dystopian view of the supposed or real influence of the latest technologies.

Resonating with these themes, the exhibition reveals the photographers’ aesthetic treatment of their images. Indeed, most favour a degree of “readability” but simultaneously turn to clearly stated visual tactics that visually reformulate or reinforce the themes covered. Graininess and blur are banished in favour of sharpness, bright colours, and large dimensions that precisely reconstruct details and prompt a sense of clarity and obviousness. Another notable effect is the saturation engendered through tight framings on identically reiterated motifs. One example is the representation of a swarming surface of bodies in the crowd photographed by Cyril Porchet. The space is filled with the rhythmic repetition of silhouettes of workers wearing identical clothing on a production line at a food plant in Edward Burtynsky’s Manufacturing #17. A tightened frame on similar motifs evokes the density of cities for Michael Wolf, the invasion of the visual space by advertising for Sato Shintaro, and the profligate accumulation of containers on docks for Alex MacLean.

In Work, work, work, Wang Qingsong features a work space in which all the employees wear the same striped shirts, reminiscent of a prison camp. To make perceptible the number of flights in the form of a swarm of airplanes, Mike Kelley superimposes several photographs of planes taking off at the Zurich airport. Aside from multiples, many of the shots transcribe the notion of flow by long exposures that reconstruct, in a continuous line, the many trajectories of vehicles. In the section “Control,” a number of images are difficult for neophytes – that is, no doubt, most viewers – to identify, as they give a formal sense of the opacity of the systems shown, whether it is an architectural space that is both luminous and aseptic whose function cannot be discerned in KDK’s sf.D-2 or a strange chart that, its title informs us, is a high-angle view of an airport terminal photographed by Jeffrey Milstein. In fact, the aerial view is omnipresent in the images in the exhibition. It seems to re-establish the subjects in their totality in an almost cartographic form that makes perception of the whole possible. The theoretician of visual cultures Nicholas Mirzoeff turned to the concept of visuality to designate the interlacing of vision and power. He drew the term from the writings of the military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz, who, in 1832, described how, the battlefield having grown too large, visualization had become the prerogative of the commander. In 1840, the historian Thomas Carlyle broadened this principle to all particular configurations of vision and power in which visuality evolves into a tactic of control. In Mirzoeff’s view, these systems have now culminated in military-industrial surveillance complexes. Thus, the high-angle view offered by many of the photographs presented in the exhibition seems to comment on particularly impenetrable authoritarian systems and to provide viewers with a positioning that enables them to gain mastery, however humble and temporary it may be, over the visible.

One might have reservations about the general visual effect engendered by the selection of images that show only global phenomena to the detriment of multiple forms of discreet resistance, local and confidential initiatives, unassuming forms of organization that are not covered by the media. This absence, in reality, reveals the current regime of the visible. Beyond an accounting of contemporary phenomena in the world, the exhibition builds an accounting of existing visual forms to try to allow the contemporary world to be comprehended. It also shows how globalization deals with the visible by ordering what is seen and what is not.

It is in effect the scale of civilization as a whole that the exhibition targets – that is, the planetary dimension of human experiences. Its ambition, in this sense, is analogous to that of The Family of Man, the celebrated exhibition organized by Edward Steichen in 1955, as many of the texts accompanying the event remind us, by presenting the common characteristics of diverse contemporary societies. The Family of Man claimed to paint a portrait of humanity, emphasizing that all people belong to a single family. Steichen wanted to demonstrate the universality of human life, but also the formidable capacity of photographs to report on this shared condition. Roland Barthes denounced this very universalism in his Mythol­­ogies, published in 1957. And Allan Sekula demonstrated, in The Traffic in Photographs, that the universalization of photography was supposed to stand in for the universalism of thought. By affirming the transparency and impartiality of photography, The Family of Man was swept up in the hegemony of capitalist thought.

Avoiding this trap is no doubt an accomplishment of Civilization. The curators do not renounce the idea of a human community, but they respect its disparities, above all, by taking care to select photographers of diverse genders, nationalities, and generations, who provide looks at the global Northern and Southern territories where they live and practise daily. Above all, their pictures make visible the mechanisms of power (hidden in The Family of Man) that shape our world. Although other themes certainly would have been possible and the placement of certain photographs in sections might seem interchangeable, it is a project that does not claim to be infallible or categorical but, on the contrary, offers itself as a proposal that is valid under the current circumstances. The optimism of The Family of Man, the unique and unified human family as a conciliatory concept in the aftermath of the Holocaust, thus yields to a reflection on civilization that notes its limitations, its pitfalls, and the great issues that we face today and must confront collectively.    Translated by Käthe Roth

 

¹ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

² Ibid.

³ Civilization – The Way We Live Now!, Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Marseille, May 19 to August 15, 2021. The exhibition previously toured to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2018, the Ullens Center for Contem­po­­­­­rary Art in Beijing and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2019, and the Auckland Art Gallery in 2020.

⁴ Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Enfin on se re­­garde! Pour un droit de regard,” in Politiques visuelles, ed. Gil Bartholeyns (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2016), 31–43.

⁵ Jean-François Chougnet, “Préface,” in Civiliza­tion, Quelle époque !, ed. William A. Ewing and Holly Roussell (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021), 14

⁶ In fact, this is proposed in the catalogue.

 

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Julie Martin is a professor associated with LLA-CRÉATIS (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès) and LESA (Université Aix-Marseille). She researches documentary art approaches in the era of fluid images and the connections between art and politics. She is the author of “Du médium au média, les pratiques documentaires artistiques face au net,” published in Ligeia Dossiers sur l’art (2020), and, with Sara Alonso Gómez, of “Contre-visualités : tactiques artistiques contemporaines à l’ère des nouveaux médias,” published in Nouveaux médias : mythes et expérimentations dans les arts (2021). She is also an art critic, exhibition curator, and co-director of L’espace de diffusion artistique trois_a (Toulouse).

 

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 118 – Exhibiting Photography ]