Forget Photography: The Arts Council and the Disappearance of Independent Photography in Neoliberal Britain.

This paper starts from the perspective that for some time we have been living with photography’s afterlife in which contemporary photography is a ruined territory populated by archaic knowledge practices. The way out of photography explored in this paper is through forgetting the spectral presence of photography in order, on the one hand, to see the new conditions of the image and on the other, to witness the trauma of photography’s several deaths. This is achieved by a trick of adopting the future present from which photographic knowledge practices of collection, exhibition and archiving appear as discontinuous with the present and capable of cold case reinvestigation. The art museum has absorbed photography through a process of modernist purification, continually expunging the hybrids of the contemporary image and hence, paradoxically, admits not a medium capable of examining the present, but photography as heritage. In November 2014, Tate released a press statement announcing its ‘continuing commitment to photography’. Like a guilty secret, the phrase introduces a note of doubt on the very thing it claims to have, a commitment to photography, as if Tate knew there was a whispering campaign which said, ‘Tate has never been committed to photography’. Photography in Britain, under the odd title ‘independent photography’ delineated a category of documentary photography distinct from the commercial and industrial. Independent photography was also considered distinct from photography in contemporary art and was championed and supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain through a photography committee established by Barry Lane. Lane built up considerable influence within Visual Arts at the Arts Council, with an increasing annual budget to support independent photographers and award grants to independent photography and galleries. British independent photography was forged by the consequences of deindustrialisation and the callous support of a Conservative led state, which was resisted by communities and trade unions and led to social strife and displacement. This was the context in which renewed social documentary and community photographic practices emerged, which were disdained by the British art establishment. Barry Lane left the Arts Council in 1995 as a consequence of its decision to dissolve the photography panel, annexing its budget to visual arts on the very argument that there was no longer any distinction between photography and art. Thus, one obstacle to admitting photography to the art museum had been removed.

Forget Photography Chapter 1

Forgetting photography attempts to develop a systematic method for revealing the limits and prescriptions of thinking with photography, which no amount of revisionism of post-photographic theory can get beyond. The world urgently needs to unthink photography and go beyond it in order to understand the present constitution of the image as well as the reality or world it shows. Forgetting photography will require a different way of organizing knowledge about the visual in culture that involves crossing different knowledges of visual culture, technologies, and mediums. It will also involve thinking differently about routine and creative labor and its knowledge practices within the institutions and organization of visual reproduction

ZOMBIE PHOTOGRAPHY: WHAT IS THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE STILL DOING?

This contribution to Still Searching… is based upon the argument of my book, Forget Photography (Goldsmiths Press, 2021). The blog series is an opportunity to share some of the thinking of Forget Photography and hopefully engage in a broader dialogue about the current state of the politics of the image. The central paradox I explore is that, at a moment when photography is being technically replaced by screens, algorithms and data flow, photographic cultures are proliferating like never before. Photography is everywhere, but not as we have known it: for some time it has been an undead, a zombie, in which the established language, thinking, meanings and values of photography now stand as an obstacle to grasping the new condition. I argue that the very term photography is a barrier to understanding the altered state of the default visual image, but understanding the nature of those barriers remains a puzzle. The blog series is haunted by a pervasive problem: which is that the photographic image in computational culture continues to function as a system of universal representation, which underwrites a capitalist social formation. The persistence of a system of representation operating in a non-representational computational mode of reproduction is a paradox, and something I explore further in what transpires in this exchange. Over the course of my contribution, which is structured around three cold cases – investigations into the mortal remains of photography –, I will focus upon what keeps the logic of representation in place, how it intersects with the exhaustion of democratic politics and the inwardness of socialist organisation and how image circulation reinforces hyper-individualism and the pursuit of identity politics

A non-local, Lorentz-invariant, hidden-variable interpretation of relativistic quantum mechanics based on particle trajectories

We demonstrate how to construct a lorentz-invariant, hidden-variable interpretation of relativistic quantum mechanics based on particle trajectories. The covariant theory that we propose employs a multi-time formalism and a lorentz-invariant rule for the coordination of the space-time points on the individual particle trajectories. In this way we show that there is no contradiction between nonlocality and lorentz invariance in quantum mechanics. The approach is illustrated for relativistic bosons, using a simple model to discuss the individual non-locally correlated particle motion which ensues when the wavefunction is entangled. A simple example of measurement is described.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Art museum knowledge and the crisis of representation

This Chapter discusses the relationship between art museum knowledge held in learning departments and that produced by research in the art museum. It is based upon two studies at Tate, Tate Encounters:Britishness and Visual Cultures (2007-2010) and Cultural Value and the Digital (2014

What Is the current fascination with VR on the part of museums and art galleries?

Abstract Over the past two years more and more national and international museums and galleries have teamed up with technology companies to demonstrate how VR applications can be used in the cultural heritage sector. Modigliani’s studio in VR at Tate Britain, The Royal Academy in partnership with HTC Vive demonstrating VR in the ‘From Life’ exhibition, Zaha Hadid’s Architecture in VR at the Serpentine. Matt Collishaw’s reconstruction of Fox Talbot’s first photographic exhibition in VR at Somerset House. I could go on, The National Gallery and The British Museum teaming up with Oculus to provide virtual 3D headset tours, not to forget Google Arts and Culture’s now established Google Art Project partnerships using Google software tools. How are we to assess this growing trend? Is it a potential moment of radical change in the museum, or is it another fleeting fascination? One way of assessing the situation is to ask how the museum has already responded to wider technological environment of networked culture in relationship to its role in maintaining cultural value. This presentation will discuss VR in terms of its claim to be a medium. It is undoubtedly the case that 21st century developments in virtual, augmented and networked computational technologies have profoundly affected social and economic realities. In what appears to be the hyper acceleration of continued technological development it is crucial that we critically question the meaning of such developments for culture and creativity. The presentation covers three related aspects of VR as a proposed medium. Firstly it revisits some of the ideas and difficulties of the work of Marshall McLuhan in thinking about what kind of medium VR is. It situates VR technologies in a longer history of optical technologies of vision in the context of the convergence of and boundaries between art, media and technology. Secondly, it defines some of the current ways in which the terms digital, media, virtual and reality are used in the museum and art context. Finally it touches upon how museums have engaged with and understand the value of digital technology in terms of their future strategy and development. The presentation takes the view that whilst VR devices and software are now more widely available and applicable, the current interest in their use may well be a distraction from a much greater virtual reality that has already taken place in everyday life. The network of networked computers, the World Wide Web, and global positioned connected mobile devices, have and continue to profoundly changing what it is to be human. Whilst current interest from corporate content providers is in testing market appetite for immersive 3D interfaces, VR may very well turn out to be a nostalgic longing for a past imagined future world, rather than portal into a new one

Co-creating in the Networks: A Reply to “What is 21st Century Photography?” [Internet Publication]

In this new essay, writer and researcher Andrew Dewdney responds to Daniel Rubinstein’s essay What is 21st Century Photography? published by The Photographers’ Gallery in July 2015. The new conditions of accelerated capitalism and its computational logic does demand that we un-think photography as it has been known. This requires new research strategies, which go beyond enquiries by single academic knowledge disciplines or the individual practices of photography and art. A transdisciplinary approach to understanding the interface between mathematical and cultural coding is needed in order to engage productively with the flat topology of the computer screen. A complete rethink of the boundaries between art, media, society and technology is needed. Art as photography and photography as art is a busted flush trumped by the Internet and its networks

Photography Remoulded

An extended review of Joanna Zylinska's book Nonhuman Photography. Nonhuman Photography is an invigorating and passionate call to reclaim photography’s essence and to rethink its ontology and is a much needed addition to critical thinking about photography. At a time when the practices of what we still continue to designate under the term photography are folding into new and emergent forms of computational hypermedia, Zylinska offers a way of refocusing on what is specifically photographic. In the context of the convergence of art, media and technology, the book is a riposte to the arguments of postphotography, a contentious rejection of the value of continuing to think of the digital as the currently defining condition of images, as well as a critique of the limits of the humanist tradition of photographic history, theory and teaching