Why photograph when every picture has already been made?
By: Colin Pantall
Tags: Photography, Issues, Photojournalism, Photos, Skills

In the age of smartphones and social media, there is the idea that all pictures look alike. The algorithms make them look alike. Tourist sites make backdrops designed for social media, restaurants cook food that looks great on Instagram, and people experience every aspect of life through the images that they make. The image overwhelms the experience until it becomes the experience and reality ceases to exist. All you’re left with is an Instagram feed for your memories.

Selfies and streaming at Corvin’s Castle, Romania © Colin Pantall

The same idea applies to photojournalism and documentary. People make pictures of war that look like pictures of war, famine and starvation are reduced to clichés of crying children (because that’s what raises money), and images of migration rely on polarised tales of good and evil that owe more to Disney screenplays than the nuanced realities of a complex world.

The question throughout this entire series of articles is how can you escape these dilemmas and be original when everything has been done? How can you tell a story that has been told before? How can you make pictures when, as Max Pinckers says later in this article, all the pictures have already been made?

It’s a problem that is not new. And these questions are not new. It’s a problem that, for photography, has its roots in the advent of rise of mass circulation illustrated newspapers and magazines in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Ur-Leica, the first Leica 35mm camera prototype, 1914

An Argus Camera — Argus produced the first affordable 35mm cameras in 1936 / Public Domain

The rise of mass circulation magazines corresponded with the invention of the 35mm camera, and the increasing ease with which images could be quickly and easily made, developed and printed on a mass basis.

With these changes came new ways of being and seeing and, during the extreme political age of extremes of the 1920s and 1930s, new ways of using information. Magazines like Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (which in 1901 was one of the first publications to run photographs on its inner pages), National Geographic, Picture Post, Time and Life Magazine had circulations in the millions. There was an understanding that photographs could expand people’s horizons and show them the world. And also that photographs could change things, could influence people, could be used to manipulate and control.

Martin Munkácsi for Time magazine, Volume 27 Issue 7, February 17, 1936. The cover shows Hitler’s propagandist and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl / Public Domain

The mass-produced nature of images was even more apparent at showing the energy and dynamism of the world. The first staff photographer hired by Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung was Martin Munkácsi, who worked in sports and photojournalism. His image of children playing on the beach inspired Henri Cartier-Bresson. His images of women running on the beach led to him being hired by Alexey Brodovich to work for Harper’s and Queen to revolutionise fashion photography.

In other words, photography was loosened up. The energy of the 35mm camera spread into other formats; art, fashion, travel, documentary and photojournalism began to overlap. If you look from a distance of time, there was a great photographic promiscuity. From the fictional documentary of Ed van der Elsken’s ‘Love on the Left Bank’ to Eikoh Hosoe’s surreal portraiture of Yukio Mishima, there was a mixing of genre, voice and subject matter. Staged photography, fictionalised photography, surreal photography all overlapped and merged and was published in mass circulation magazines.

It was a golden age of photography. Except, of course, it wasn’t a golden age. That is to romanticise affairs. Photographs were still made to serve narratives of power, and sentimental stories and predictable images were still the staple diet of the press.

Even in the 1920s, critics like Siegfried Kracauer were commenting on the redundancy of photography.

“The daily papers are illustrating their texts more and more, and what would a magazine be without pictures? The striking proof of photography’s extraordinary validity today is provided above all by the increase in the number of illustrated newspapers.” “The aim of the illustrated newspapers is the complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus; they record the spatial outlines of people, conditions, and events from every possible perspective.” “Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding.”

Photographs don’t help with our understanding of the world then. Even 90 years ago, the flood of images was seen as a barrier to understanding, with the ownership of newspapers and their political ends part of that barrier. According to this rather bleak world view of photography, to have your pictures published in the mainstream media is to allow your images to be used as photo-washing for the underlying political and economic interests of the publication’s owners. You don’t just sell your pictures, you also sell yourself and everything you stand for.

The idea was repeated in different form by Walter Benjamin who had an ambivalent view that “..the camera is, on the one hand, the epitome of the destructive, consumptive, political economy of capitalism.”

On the other hand, according to Benjamin, photography is “the first truly revolutionary means of production,” something that can be used to revolutionise art and transform society. So there’s a love-hate relationship to photography depending on exactly how it is used, where it is used, and who is using it.

It’s an idea that was roughly replicated by Marshall McCluhan and his idea of the medium becoming the message, Jean Baudrillard and the lost realities of the simulacrum, and by Guy Debord and the idea of the spectacle where “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” and “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” All these ideas in their different ways point to a world where photography has lost meaning and is understood only through the means by which it is shown.

In a contemporary version you can see this in the fragmentary ebbs and flows of Instagram, or the temporary flashes of excitement when an image goes viral, is meme-d and follows a pattern of viewing, engagement and disinterest that becomes the basis for commentary rather than the events of the picture itself.

You can see it in the idea of the ‘good image’ and the fetishisation of cameras, arbitrary generic generalisations like ‘documentary style’ is black and white, and rules like Robert Capa’s classic example of “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

In a more contemporary version, Ivars Gravlejs’ book Useful Advice for Photographers. It’s a tongue-in-cheek book of advice on how to photograph which shows the basic clichés of what makes a good photograph.

© Ivars Gravlejs

‘A lot of people think that for a good picture it is enough to buy an expensive camera and then success will be guaranteed,’ reads Gravlejs’ deadpan introductory blurb. ‘But ­without careful studying and many years of practice a good picture is ­possible to make only by accident. Once you decide to photograph, think carefully about what you want to ­picture, do not forget about the composition and lighting, do not get upset, relax and concentrate on the subject.’

It’s a book of pairs of images, the good and the bad. But because Gravlejs is an artist, all the pictures are bad. Part of the riddle of the book is finding the times when the bad photographs (the blurred, out-of-focus, burnt-out, purple, mis-aligned images) have become the good ones and they become a new convention of what makes ‘good’. What is truly bad in Gravlejs’ polarised oppositional pairs is the rigour of rule-based ways of thinking.

© Ivars Gravlejs

Gravlejs’ book is a handbook for how to make your pictures be good pictures that look like everybody else’s. It’s poking fun, but it is also about how the making of images (and the teaching of how to make images) is a production-line process that links to some of the ideas mentioned by Benjamin, Baudrillard and others. (Allan Sekula’s Art School is a Factory also touches on this idea.)

© Ivars Gravlejs

How can you counter this idea of the image becoming part of a regulated aesthetic and a commodified market? One solution is to start to make pictures in a different style. This is what happened in Japan where photographers like Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira began pushing the aesthetic niceties of photography to its limits in the 1960s.

The photographs they made were the practical example of making what Gravlejs ironically labels ‘bad’ photographs. They’re blurry, grainy and lack tonal range. They’re off kilter and sometimes we don’t even know what we’re seeing. They go against the conventional idea of what a ‘good’ photograph is.

Nakahira expressed his ideas in his book, For a Language to Come. This is a book of black-and-white images that show Tokyo as a post-apocalyptic nightmare of a city where light burns like fire, where underpasses and tunnels and power cables mark out the inhumanity of Tokyo, a city where post-war modernisation and fast-paced development have come at the expense of humanity and caring.

That’s the images. Nakahira also used the book to express his ideas on the semiotic possibilities of photography and his idea that that photography “consists only in clarifying the fact that material things are things.”

Writing in 1973, Nakahira notes the closure of Life Magazine and the fact that photography has been surpassed by “television and other media”. “But to be more precise,” he continues, “the photographic method like that of Life, a form of communication where the reporter as the spokesperson of the masses unilaterally conveys true reality to the masses, has disintegrated as far as photography is concerned.” Nakahira believed that possibilities of the photographic image had been exhausted, that you cannot express anything photographically external to the dominant capitalist media culture.

It’s another bleak world view in which to hold a camera, to make a picture, is an exercise in self-serving futility. Photography, according to this view, has nothing to say, nothing to give.

The question is if photography has exhausted itself, how can you say anything meaningful with it that goes beyond stylistic or generic tropes that serve cycles of mass consumption and the continuing destruction of the earth and its planet.

Perhaps one way is to use different generic forms to convey a message, to take images outside the visual comfort zones they are associated with. This is what Patrick Willocq did with the How we Survived series for Save the Children featured in an earlier post.

Star shine, moon glow from Water Life collection © Aida Muluneh commissioned by WaterAid and supported by H&M Foundation

It’s also what Aida Muluneh did in her Water Life project for Water Aid. Here she used her fine art work to “..advocate for something I’ve seen many times while travelling through Ethiopia.”

“The collection of images is a representation of the different issues that women face as it relates to the transportation of water, and how it impacts education, how it impacts society…. What I’m presenting for people to really think about is how is it that across the world and even across Africa that the access to water is still a challenging issue that we have to navigate through. I’ve chosen to do the collection in the Danakli Depression in the Afar region. How do people survive in this very dry terrain. There’s nothing in sight.”

So the image above connects to the barriers and taboos experienced by menstruating women and their need to collect water, and the image below to the physical labour of carrying jerry cans filled with water across a baking landscape.

Star shine, moon glow from Water Life collection © Aida Muluneh commissioned by WaterAid and supported by H&M Foundation

And so her images combine a saturated colour palate of reds, blues and the yellows of the jerry cans women use to carry water. “My work focuses on body painting,” says Muluneh.

“I find great value in these traditional cultures… It’s basically taking elements from the traditional and bringing it to the present and having this futuristic reinterpretation or reimagining it in another universe. But it’s also a way to redefine the character and present it with dignity and having this specific strength and pride and you see that straight through the eyes… It’s a different way of presenting an issue that for me is quite clear.”

Star shine, moon glow from Water Life collection © Aida Muluneh commissioned by WaterAid and supported by H&M Foundation

These images are bright, brash, uplifting, but also have a serious underlying message that connects to Water Aid’s goal: to provide access to clean drinking water to all people of the world. They are also images that stand in stark contrast to Water Aid’s traditional use of images that can be uplifting, but clichéd and stilted in their visual language.

This idea that we need new visual strategies that recognise the fact that everything has been photographed is one that is embraced in the work of Belgian photographer Max Pinckers. But rather than rejecting the idea that there are limits to our photographic voice, he embraces that idea and integrates it into his work.

© Max Pinckers, The Fourth Wall

His project The Fourth Wall features images from India made by staging images that recreate participants’ favourite scenes from Hindi Cinema. It’s a project that recognises the impossibility of saying something visually new about India while referencing the visual ways in which the idea of India have been created.

A couple restages how they used to send forbidden love letters across the rooftops in the village they were forced to flee from © Max Pinckers from ‘Will They Sing Like Raindrops’

Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty looks at caste and religion-based violence inflicted on couples from different castes and religions. But again, he recreates scenes from the past and references the fact that the images are being made through visible use of flash, props and assistants.

Max Pinckers and Dries Depoorter’s Trophy Camera

Central to Pinckers’ way of working is the idea that “every photograph has already been made.”

That’s not a reason to despair. Instead it’s an impetus to do it again, do it differently, and recognise what has been done before and how we can escape clichés and stereotypes in the photographs we make today.

In photojournalism, Pinckers’ Trophy Camera (made in partnership with Dries Depoorter) exemplifies this idea that ‘good’ photography is based on previous ‘successful’ images and that these images are already in our heads. (You can read more about this in a previous Witness article.)

“Trophy Camera was made in 2017 and the first intention was to make a camera that was trained on photojournalism in general — where you could scan the environment and it would choose itself when it had a good picture — a good picture where it had good composition and it fitted the tropes that you could find in photojournalism in general. You have formal and aesthetic repeating elements — for example, one formal example I’ve noticed is a framing of a scene where you have in the foreground a child or a young man and behind him is a scene that represents this kind of mental landscape. You can see it a lot–the cover of Telex Iran by Gilles Peress is another. But there are so many. I started by going through the Magnum Archive when I was there and almost every photographer had made one of those pictures.” These are tropes. Looking through a window or a frame in a frame are other examples. Then you have subject tropes like the grieving mother, the pieta, the wounded person in the rubble, or children being victimised — these are very recognisable subjects for images that become iconic photographs. So there is an idea that you can train an algorithm to recognise the patterns from the images you input. We took every World Press Photo Winner from 1958 and we fed that into an AI learning programme. There are fifty images and it started recognising elements that were present in every image. The computer gives labels to the images it analysed. It’s a system of labelling. If you give the computer a picture of a man holding a gun then it will assign a set of labels to that picture depending on what it recognises. So if you give it an image it has never seen before it will assign labels to it based on previous world press photo winners, and based on how many of those labels correspond it will give it a rating. So people and adult are the two highest rated labels for world press photo winners so if you give it a picture without a person in it, it won’t give you a very good score (and you probably won’t win a world press photo). That’s how it works technically. It’s tongue in cheek, there’s humour in it, but there are also interesting ideas.”

The Trophy Camera was put on show in an exhibition where visitors would try to take a ‘good’ picture in the traditions of photojournalism.

A visitor restages an iconic image and gets over 90% approval good rating from the Trophy Camera © Max Pinckers and Dries Depoorter

“One of the most fascinating, unexpected results of it is the performances people would do for the camera in the exhibition; they’d lie on the floor, they’d pretend to be dead, they carry each other around the room, they replicate famous photographs like the Saturday Night Fever one and all of a sudden this thing is created where people are performing their own notion of what a World Press Photo winning photo should look like.”

So it’s the idea of the repeated clichéd image. (If you’re really interested in this, go through the work of Larry Burrows and Philip Jones Griffiths in Vietnam, or Sebastiao Salgado and James Nachtwey in Rwanda. You’ll find near identical images.) For Pinckers, this idea of the clichéd image is something we can’t—and shouldn’t—really escape from.

“A lot of people resist these stereotypes, but I think it’s interesting to embrace them, recognise their existence and while doing that maybe do something original as well. That’s where the friction comes,” he says.

According to Pinckers, we also need to embrace and recognise the repeated patterns of images because smartphone apps and social media are accelerating the replication of images and the idea of what a ‘good’ image is.

“Most phone pictures are augmented in some kind of way and you’re seeing the image analysis apps being used a lot for things like Instagram. They judge your pictures and tell you what will do well on Instagram. Facial recognition and machine technology is how we will deal with reality. The 21st century is the photographic century; everybody’s taking pictures, there are so many images, and if you add the computer vision on top of that it’s going to become a very interesting new area for photography. What that will be I have no idea.”

This augmentation is apparent in the algorithms used to make smartphone images, algorithms that are aligned to making phone pictures that look like pictures that will get lots of likes on Instagram (but that also replicate already apparent power structures in judging what is likable or recognisable).

Image from Max Pinckers not getting a high score on EverydayPixel © Max Pinckers

There are apps, like EveryPixel, that will use machine learning to identify what is in your picture, and will also judge how ‘awesome’ your pictures are.

Dorothea Lang’s Migrant Mother (Creative Commons) also not doing too well on EveryPixel

There might be some bugs in the EveryPixel algorithms © Colin Pantall

Filtering apps will process your images for colour, contrast and everything else that is expected of them, while this colourise app will colourise black-and-white images using machine learning, but also using a colour palette that is limited and desaturated to create a nostalgic hand-tinted effect.

All of these indicate the changes in how we see images. They are no longer iconic, but are part of a wider image flow.

“There’s also the idea of photography as liquidity,” says Pinckers.

“We no longer see photographs as cultural objects that are there, but as something that is constantly flowing and changing and that is a very different way of looking at photography; as something liquid rather than something steady. When people write about photography, the photograph is always seen as this steady object that exists out there in the world, but now that’s totally changed. It’s no longer an iconic image, it’s a viral image. People say that picture went viral and that’s a difference in the way it’s perceived. I actually just wrote something about the Alan Kurdi picture — you had many different versions of the same image. Aidan White analysed the three main versions of that picture. You have the version of the boy lying alone on the beach, you have the version with the coast guard standing next to the boy writing in a booklet, and finally you have the most widely used version where the coast guard is carrying the body. On the front pages of newspapers you had a mixture of images being used in different ways and he started to analyse the meanings of those different pictures and what they were meant to convey to the viewer; if they showed the boy alone, they were looking for maximum sentimental attachment to the victim. If they wanted to show the barbaric disregard of authorities to the situation, they would show the one where the guy is writing in the book, but if they wanted to show the humanity and care in the situation they would show the pieta like image with the guy carrying the boy. You have the same subject, but still the media can push their agendas by using different versions of the same thing and getting their ideology across to their readership.”

Pinckers isn’t really sure how you can get around the problem of the lack of originality in photography and the ways in which photography repeats itself and pulls the viewer into patterns of seeing that are already embedded in a broader collective photographic consciousness.

One of Pinckers’ solutions is simply to recognise how images are made, and so reveal the generic tricks by which they are manufactured. Then you tell the story, but you also reveal the roots of the story. And that in a way is what every photographer is doing in this series of posts, looking for ways to tell the story in a different way, to go beyond the clichés, polarities and tropes that make photography repetitive and redundant.

So all the photographs may have been made already, but that’s no reason not to take more. Just take them better, tell the story better, and understand where your pictures come from and where they will end up and who will be seeing them. Because that’s part of the story too. The story doesn’t begin with the image and it doesn’t end with the image.