Design Assembly

For the last few months I have been researching the personal photographic archives of others for a project dealing with seriality in photography (both book and web form). As part of my research I discovered a recent editorial piece by Joachim Schmid, ‘Other people’s photographs’, very similar to my concept which forces me to re-think my project.

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November 5th, 2008, Other People's Photographs by Joachim Schmid

Currywurst, Other People's Photographs by Joachim Schmid

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Joachim Schmid is an artist who re-appropriates found and amateur imagery. He has famously used found photographs (street or archive) but has recently adapted his work to incorporate the growing glut of online images. Other people’s photographs is a series of themed self-published books (www.blurb.com) consisting of amateur images collected on the Flickr website. He uses other people’s images as raw materials for his art, justifying this recycling by suggesting that there should be ‘No new photographs until the old ones have been used’. There have been several outspoken reactions from the Flickr community, some shocked at his blatant strategy of re-appropriation, which they see as profiting from others’ efforts, and some respectfully amused. In any case the photographs re-used as such have a new visibility and classification outside of the web.

There is a growing interest in art projects and websites which re-order, re-contextualise and archive images from the web. The images are already in the public domain, so the form of the art pieces concerned with these images form part of a new genre, that of editing as an act of creation and suggests several questions:

Personal images are visible online for viewing and reference, but are they available to be used and published freely, especially for profit, whether commercial or artistic?

Hundreds of photo blogs are giving others people’s photographs a new visibility but does free access also require a moral obligation to credit the authors?

Does a digital image remain the private property of the owner, or is it free to take, in the same way that we could take a picture of a ripped and faded billboard poster?

The website www.as-found.net demonstrates this trend of editing as creation and is very similar to Joachim Schmid’s earlier work, untitled Archiv (hundreds of panels where he pasted vernacular images of particular themes: waterfalls, dine-ins, trees…) or references the even earlier and fascinating work of Gerard Richter Atlas. Here the strategy of archiving is the same but the content is purely jpegs found online. The explanation of the project could lead one to anticipate weak production and lazy research but some of their collections are poetic and beautiful. The founders say about the project: “As-Found is our creative response to the trillions of images available on the Internet. These images, as they have been found, are perfect in our eyes, and we want to showcase them here, giving them a new space in which to be contemplated.  Showing them in the context of this site gives them new value. We often choose images for different qualities than those which were intended to be seen. Therefore the creator is often irrelevant. We think that a found image can match any image produced within the artistic field, in aesthetic, cultural or emotional qualities. Finding is creating”.
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Melanin, Collected by Marc Kremers at www.as-found.net/exhibitions

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In the same vein, Useful Photography magazine #002 (www.kesselskramerpublishing.com) shows successfully images collected in different online auction websites such as eBay. The recontextualisations of amateur or anonymous images therein regain a weight, meaning and visibility through sequencing, editing, presentation. These are processes that I’m using in my personal work though not using images from the internet.
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Useful Photography magazine #002

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Thomas Ruff pushes the limit of use of digital images with his ongoing series Jpegs where he enlarges digital images found online to reveal the pixel and grain which paradoxically deteriorates the understanding of the social and political content of the image. Global events, mass media and clichéd images become empty of meaning like wallpaper or abstract textures.
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This work reflects his understanding of the medium; “I work on the principle that a photo merely reproduces the surface of things and is unable to capture the content.”The maximum loss of resolution or information here reflects what is now sometimes replacing traditional documentary photography both in the press and on the web, it also reiterates the manipulative nature of photography. The project works also as an editing process and the series forms a kind of compendium of contemporary visual culture which takes us back to Schmid and his Other people’s photographs books, which he sees as a “continually expanding encyclopaedic library of digital photography”
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Thomas Ruff, jpeg di01, 2005

Thomas Ruff, jpeg di01, 2005. Installation View

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There is definitely a potential for the internet to provide a new and borderless space for the dissemination of photography outside of traditional spaces such as galleries, books and magazines as well as being a raw material for artistic projects.

These practices aim to restructure, personalise and pause the flow of images that we consume daily, to make use of what infinite webspace has rendered useless, and at the same time reveal our  common interests and obsessive appetite for visual representation and classification.

Links
schmid.wordpress.com
gerhard-richter.com/art/atlas
as-found.net/exhibitions
usefulphotography.com