Statement

“Darkness renders a person more sensitive to light.”
- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipeligo 1918-56

For photographers, light is a prerequisite to the act of making an image. It stands as one of the basic technical components of photographs; it can both describe, and be described. For some photographers, light becomes the reason for making an image, and becomes in many ways the subject itself. For others, light is secondary to other considerations such as form, content and meaning. But in all cases, its fundamental role can’t be discarded. 

Beginning November 1, 2018, an ordinance passed in Ventura County, California, regulating the use of artificial light during nighttime hours in an attempt to mitigate light pollution. As a part of the growing ‘Dark Sky’ movement, the law intends, in it’s own words, to “Protect and reclaim ability to view the night sky and stars” and achieve “Greater tranquility and maintenance of the rural ambiance.” 

In this work in progress I am exploring - via appropriated text and created imagery - an instance in which light itself leaps from an aesthetic component of image making to a politics of aesthetics. I am interested in the struggle between two competing forms of light, two competing descriptive systems, and the scientific/moralistic duality present in the legal language itself. I am motivated by the questions: Can legislation be considered a story? Can light - or its absence - be considered an instrument of power?

Documentary Matter

In no particular order, un-edited. Language is pulled verbatim from various government ordinances. Images are created/made/captured by me. Many more images are still in need of making.

Questions I’m Considering

What does light, in both adherence and violation of law, look like?
How to visualize: “Luminance Creep” , “Light that trespasses” and “stray light”.
Can light be considered an instrument of power? Can it be shown to represent inequality?
How to avoid Kitch?
Should I be considering ways to develop this idea spatially/materially? If so, why?

Additional Writing

The Real Real: The Shattering of the Photograph and the Reconstruction of Truth. 

Alan Sekula described the documentary function of the photograph as a socially-mediated, negotiable construct. Arguably, this has been the case since photography’s inception. From Roger Fenton’s disputed arrangements of cannon balls in photographs of the Crimean War (1855) to Louis Daguerre’s posed bystanders in the oldest known photograph from Paris (1839), photography has both captured and questioned reality, and in turn truth itself. Recent technological advancements are adding significant degrees of complexity to this ongoing negotiation. Artificial intelligence, specifically Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN’s) and other forms of neural networks have the ability to create photographs (or what appear to be photographs) from an algorithm. And in doing so have further eroded the photograph as a historical representative of truth, shattered documentary norms, and precipitated new modes of establishing reality. 

GAN’s are trained initially with actual photographs, and once fully educated, are able to produce photographs indistinguishable from those made by their human counterparts. A lens is no longer needed. Ditto the camera, ditto the photographer. Though the warning bells are still a faint call in the distance, this tide-shift of technology will precede a tsunami of disorientation.  

“Deepfakes Are Going To Wreak Havoc On Society. We Are Not Prepared,” reads the headline of a recent article in Forbes. “In the months and years ahead,” warns technology critic Rob Toews, “deepfakes threaten to grow from an Internet oddity to a widely destructive political and social force.” Over 70 years ago Walter Benjamin proposed that a lack of authenticity in reproducible art resulted in a politicization of artistic production. He could not have foreseen to what degree the evolution of technology would prove him right.

The power of neural networks are not yet fully understood, yet the products they generate are already available for sale. According to the New York Times, websites such as Generated.Photos allows anyone, anywhere, to purchase a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99 or 1,000 people for $1,000. Other websites give the images away for free. 

Photographs of people are not the only things being created from machine-based artificial intelligence. At thisxdoesnotexist.com, you can create your own artificial world (or social media account) with photographs of cats, dogs, and even rental apartments which do not have a reality-based counterpart. Pre-trained GAN’s exist for such things as ceramics, tennis shoes, and even seashells. For a price, websites such as runwayml.com allow customers to train their own GAN, meaning, in theory, anyone can generate a fake photograph of anything. 

How will GAN technology affect our traditional relationship with the photograph as a refrent of reality? To what degree will fake photographs flood our lives, which are increasingly led in the virtual space of the internet? What happens when seeing is no longer believing? Hal Foster, in the essay Smashed Screens, suggests an “epistemological recalibration” is called for. The “artifice” must be embraced, “but not to demystify or to disrupt the real so much as to make the real real again, which is to say, effective again, felt again, as such.” But how do we make the real “real again”, when AI threatens to undermine our understanding of what is real in the first place? 

Foster sees a shift in the “framing of the real” in the past decade, one which results from the “nihilistic tendencies” of postructuralist theory and postmodern art. It’s critique of authority on ideological grounds was “soon understood to erode the very ability to claim a truth or to posit a reality at all.” This shattering of the real has arguably led to our current post-truth crisis. In this world, nothing and anything is true, just as everything can be false. Fake news and alternative facts are equally embraced and amplified by algorithms and artificial intelligence designed to perpetuate bias. In response, documentary practice is slowly pivoting from the absolutes of deconstruction to the fragile nuance of reconstruction. “This shift”, Foster says, “was a response to the near monopoly, on the part of corporations and governments, over what counts as real in the first instance.” This power allowed for mass censorship to privilege one side over the other, resulting in strands of reality both seen and unseen (or ‘known and unknown’ as Donald Rumsfeld put it.) According to Foster, traumatic, criminal and/or catastrophic events ranging from secret wars and environmental disasters to drone strikes and detention centers “can be partially or totally blocked from view.” Integrity is expensive in this post-truth world, and few in power wish to pay.  

Making ‘the real’ real again therefore requires a new approach to documentary practice. “It becomes imperative, then,” Foster tells us, “to reconstruct these events as cogently as possible by means of media both new and old.” Forensic Architecture is what Eyal Weizman proposes as one possible approach to this problem. Weizman suggests a shift from “individual testimony” aimed at “empathy with victims” to a “process of materialization and mediatization” aimed at a general politics of human rights advocacy. Foster tells us that “such forensic practice salvages, assembles, and sequences fragmentary representations in order both to image and to narrate disputed events; these scripts can then be offered as evidence in courts of law as well as in courts of opinion.” In other words, the photographic image will have to be cast as a part of a wider narrative structure, it’s role as irrefutable evidence is now forever refutable. The tendency of photographs to deceive, whether through objective artifice, or artificial intelligence, should be understood foremost as its defining feature, it’s most basic nature. 

This new understanding of the photograph’s innate nature does not preclude its ability to represent reality. Rather it’s our basic understanding of reality which must shift. Artists such as Harun Faroki, Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen practice a form of Weizman’s Forensic Architecture by assembling the truth through narratives built upon “fragmentary representations” which include photographs and videos. However, as Foster explains, these narrative constructions are “concerned less to expose a given reality behind representation than to reconstruct an occluded reality, or point to an absented one, by means of representation.” 

The real real is not something we should take as granted, as we once did with the truth-value of the photograph. It is not something to be demystified or deconstructed rather instead it must be activated and reconstructed through new documentary approaches, and it’s veracity questioned through our courts of opinion and law. In this light, the photograph, and it’s truth-value, remains a negotiable construct, yet also fundamental to a functioning society. This remains true whether it was made by a camera, or by an algorithm. 

Links: 

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/martha-rosler
https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/21/science/artificial-intelligence-fake-people-faces.html
https://www.faceplusplus.com/v2/pricing/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/05/25/deepfakes-are-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-society-we-are-not-prepared/?sh=1393241f7494
http://runwayml.com
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3170-what-comes-after-farce