In the current issue of Art in America (the Photography Issue), they ask a number of historians, curators and artists to say a few words about the medium of photography. In her first sentence, the artist Penelope Umbrico touches upon a critical point that I think is often misunderstood or overlooked about how photographs ‘live’ today:
“Pictures are not still anymore–no longer tied to any particular substrate (or file extension), they’re constantly moving and forever changing.”
While I agree that it’s easier today for a photograph to go from phone to monitor to paper than it was in the past, that doesn’t mean that the photograph has been freed from any specific storage medium or ‘particular substrate’. It just means it’s existing on a lot of different substrates at once, which really, shouldn’t be that surprising seeing as how the photographic process lends itself to making multiple copies. Walter Benjamin hit upon this nearly 80 years ago (think of the Mona Lisa existing as poster, postcard, coffee mug, t-shirt, etc.).

I think the popular misconception is that, with the onset of digital photography and the digital storage of our photographs, they exist in some sort of ether or cloud only to be called up to our monitors or phones when we wish to see them. Unfortunately, photographs are just as tied to a substrate as much as they were the day they were invented. Photographs are information, and even if that information only exists as a memory inside one person’s head, when the brain fails the photograph/memory is gone. So when a photograph is stored on millions of computers world-wide, it does not mean cease to be a physical thing. It’s the series of bits written to the memory of those computers, and if the computers fail, or the electricity goes out, then the photograph is gone. Information will always be tied to particular substrates.

That said, I’m willing to give Umbrico the benefit of the doubt, and focus more on her point about the malleability of the photograph image. The ‘moving and changing’ has significantly ramped up in the past decade, especially now that the number of image changers (people who may or may not know how to use image editing programs, the ease of self-publishing, relaxed attitudes toward appropriation, etc.) has increased exponentially. Joerg Colberg touches on this in his search for a Rineke Dijkstra image. Photographs are transferred and translated like a giant interconnected game of telephone.
Thinking about these issues brings to mind a piece I’ve always wanted to execute, but have never gotten around to organizing it. Here’s the gist: I would deconstruct a photograph down to it’s individual pixels. I would then print out these unique ‘pixels’, each about the size of a business card. Every participant would be given one pixel (one pixel = one person, which would require at the very least ~ 2,000 participants), with instructions to either a.) meet up at a specific place and time with all the other participants in order to reconstruct the image, or b.) photograph their pixel and upload to a site where the image would be reconstructed online. People who didn’t/couldn’t participate would register as ‘dead pixels’. Think of it as 21st century version of Mole & Thomas’ human sculptures or a football fan sign x 1000.

I like projects like this because it makes us confront the physicality of the photograph. By using humans as the particular substrate, it highlights the flaws, errors, and accidents that effect us both. The pixel, whether stored in a human, a piece of paper, or thousands of machines is still an element of our world and susceptible to a whole world of potential influences and mutations.