Territory, the Humanities
and the Digital Divide
in Photography

Being: New Photography 2018
Museum of Modern Art, New York
18.03.18 – 19.08.18

Joint Second Prize
Entry in Chinese

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

After the New Photography exhibition series was suspended in 2014, Quentin Bajac, the new Chief Curator of the Photography Department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, made qualitative changes to the series, which had been running for thirty years. He headed the curation of Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, which directly referenced the new issues that photography faces in the era of internet and digital technologies. Even so, this qualitative change seems not to have continued; despite the major technological innovations in art, the twenty-fifth edition of New Photography, which takes ‘Being’ as its theme, attempts to return to the humanities. ‘At a time when questions about the rights, responsibilities, and dangers inherent in being represented – and in representing others – are being debated around the world, the works in Being call attention to assumptions about how individuals are depicted and perceived.’¹ In essence, exhibition curator Lucy Gallun has once again engaged with stereotypical Greenbergian characteristics of the media.

Since Walker Evans, the ‘lyric documentary’ has become a classic of American photography, through the support of an interpretative community, a group of informed observers sharing similar critical values and methods. The idea that this is a form of classicism is clearly at the core of this exhibition. Matthew Connors made several trips to North Korea to photograph individuals living in a society with a strong collective consciousness. These fourteen carefully arranged images question the friction between the concept of a nation shaped by the media and its individual citizens. Through a two-channel video and six photographs from her Deep Springs series, Sam Contis probes Deep Springs College, a liberal arts college located deep in the desert, which had until very recently been an all-male preserve. Portraits of young men and details of their bodies are juxtaposed with the natural landscape around the college and archival photographs, in an attempt to present the influence that this environment has had on the temperaments of these men. Joanna Piotrowska’s five works from two different series attempt to capture intimate and estranged relationships within the family. All the people and objects in the images are carefully arranged to present a subjective impression of tropical humidity, stickiness and exhaustion as a metaphor for the gentleness and antagonism that underpin the sense of intimacy.

These photographers, intentionally or unintentionally, emphasise the idiosyncrasies of the photographic medium. While not negating the documentary aspect, they incorporate the lyrical element in order to give their work more complex dimensions. For example, they infuse intense subjective emotion into the viewing of subjects such as North Korea, Deep Springs College and the family, and stress the editing and sequencing of the images to construct a distinctive artistic expression. The works of Connors, Contis and Piotrowska are presented in the same exhibition space, a powerful claim on this territory made by the dominant interpretative community of the American photography world. Sadly, the excessive elaboration of the idiosyncrasies of the photographic medium take the exhibition further from the spirit of the humanities in our times.

Photographic technology divides history in two; then digital technology divides the history of photography in two. How are people considered people? One of the elements most deeply influencing the current definition and understanding of people is digital technology. However, there is only one work in the exhibition that directly addresses this subject. Yazan Khalili’s Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind is a 7½-minute video, presented in a window on a computer screen. The window in the centre of the screen calls to mind the facial recognition function employed by smartphones to take portraits; at the same time a series of still photographs of masks from distant antiquity, photographed using this same recognition function, is gradually revealed. In an adjacent text box, someone types a text relating the masks, ancestors, photography and facial recognition to each other.

In colonial history, photography was once a tool that Westerners, coming from a place of technological strength, would use to objectify ‘Others’ they considered technologically weaker. Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương’s work The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold ( 2016 ) constructs a microcosm of the individual immigrants’ experiences within American mainstream ideology. Philippines-born Stephanie Syjuco’s black and white series, Cargo Cults, revives nineteenth-century ethnographic portrait photography. Obviously, the development of digital technologies has not removed these injustices, because what is more eye-catching than the work of Khalili is his identity as a Palestinian born in Syria. These two war-torn places have given the contemporary art world endless fodder for discussion: the technologically strong group is still searching for novelty among the technologically weak. As Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford have observed, today’s Big Data has created a new ‘digital divide’ between those with Big Data and those without.² In the logic of information capital, there exists an opposition between the exploiters and the exploited.

In the first half of the twentieth century, technology brought the light of modernisation. After the Second World War, technology was often criticised as a tool in the arms race. The early twenty-first century witnessed another shift, and technological optimism rose again. Art, history, literature and other humanities disciplines embarked upon large-scale digitisation projects, which gave birth to the Digital Humanities. Today, any important work of art can be found online in a digital version, whether picture, video or even multimedia. But when we begin viewing, researching and consuming digital files, can the data monopolised by a very small number of technologically strong institutions be equivalent to the works themselves and the human value they embody? Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette and David Golumbia sharply criticise the Digital Humanities as ‘neoliberal tools’.³ They believe that the worthless digitisation projects of the Digital Humanities ignore the essential values and research methods of the humanities. We have already internalised the notion that technological impotence can be faulted at every turn in a ‘one-dimensional society’ as articulated by Herbert Marcuse.

If the previous edition of the exhibition fell into the trap of technological solipsism, then choosing for this one the title Being, which firmly defends the lyric documentary, avoids issues that still require deep research. Undoubtedly, conservative curatorial strategies such as these intensify the binary opposition between technology and the humanities: you trust the one you always trusted and distrust the one you always distrusted. The rhetoric of helpless introspection and pallid breakthroughs dominates the creation and interpretation of photography, highlighting the fact that reflections on technology are necessary if photography is to be restored to the human spirit. Photography has always been deeply entwined with the humanities, society and the natural sciences: the focus on people is essential for photography and, indeed, any technological development.

1. Museum of Modern Art press release, ‘MoMA’s Celebrated New Photography Series Returns on March 18, Exploring Ideas of Personhood and Representation in Contemporary Photography’ <http: //press.moma.org/wp-content/files_mf/expandedrelease_newphoto2018_final78.pdf>.

2. Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford, ‘Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon’, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 15, no. 5 ( 2012 ), pp. 662 – 79.

3. Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette and David Golumbia, ‘Neoliberal Tools
( and Archives ): A Political History of Digital Humanities’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 May 2016 <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/>.