Press Dossier

EXHIBITION

FROM HERE ON
POST-PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET AND THE MOBILE TELEPHONE From February 21 to April 13 2013 Cloister, Ring and Laboratory
PRODUCED BY:

IN CONJUCTION WITH:

In the context:

FROM HERE ON
POST-PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET AND THE MOBILE TELEPHONE
CURATED BY: CLMENT CHROUX, JOAN FONTCUBERTA, ERIK KESSELS, MARTIN PARR AND JOACHIM SCHMID ARTISTS: Hans Aarsman, Laia Abril, Laurence Agerter, Roy Arden, Aram Bartholl, Nancy Bean, Viktoria Binschtok, Marco Bohr, Ewoudt Boonstra, Kurt Caviezel, David Crawford, Martin Crawl, Tony Churnside & The Get Out Clause, Constant Dullaart, Leo Gabin, Jon Haddock, Gilbert Hage, Monica Haller, Mishka Henner, Roc Herms, James Howard, Thomas Mailaender, Micheal OConnell a.k.a Mocksim, Jenny Odell, Josh Poehlein, Willem Popelier, Jon Rafman, Doug Rickard, Adrian Sauer, Frank Schallmaier, Andreas Schmidt, Pavel Maria Smejkal, Claudia Sola, Shion Sono, Jens Sundheim, Penelope Umbrico, Corinne Vionnet and Hermann Zschiegner.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------OPPENING: 21 FEBRUARY, 2013 | 19:00 H EXHIBITION: 21 FEBRUARY 13 APRIL Arts Santa Mnica CLOISTER, RING AND LABORATORY

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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The transition from analogue to digital images and the spread of the Internet and mobile telephones has radically changed the world of photography to the point of no return. This new technological potential has some still-budding creative consequences and has modified and questioned key concepts such as those of authorship and original works by multiplying the

possibilities of reproducing and circulating images in an unexpected way. It is a true creative revolution that many artists of the image are exploring worldwide. As a type of manifesto sponsored by the prestigious Rencontres dArles and curated by a topnotch team (formed by Clment Chreux, conservator of Centre Georges Pompidous Photography Department; the artist Joan Fontcuberta; Erik Kessels, the artistic director of KesselsKramer; Martin Parr, a photographer at the Magnum agency and artist Joachim Schmid, all renowned specialists and students of contemporary imagery), Dara endavant is the first big international exhibition that presents the phenomenon of post-photography in all its complexity and diversity. Under the title From here on: post-photography in the age of the Internet and the mobile telephone, this exhibition has been updated at Arts Santa Mnica with new artists.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------CURATED BY: CLMENT CHROUX, JOAN FONTCUBERTA, ERIK KESSELS, MARTIN PARR AND JOACHIM SCHMID

IN CONJUCTION WITH: FUNDACI FOTO COLECTANIA, FILMOTECA DE CATALUNYA, INSTITUT FRANCS BARCELONA AND EMBAJADA DEL REINO DE LOS PASES BAJOS IN THE CONTEXT MOBILE WORLD CAPITAL BARCELONA PRODUCED BY: LES RENCONTRES DARLES AND ARTS SANTA MNICA ORGANIZED BY: ARTS SANTA MNICA MINISTRY OF CULTURE OF THE GOVERNMENT OF CATALONIA

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RELATED ACTIVITIES
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Related exhibitions:
Balcony Space | From February 19 to March 8 2013 - Art Mbil, by Ignacio Uriarte, Juan Lpez and Marina Nez, - Histria de lart sense noms, by Jess Galdn.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Related activities with From here on exhibition (Arts Santa Mnica) and Obra-Collecci. Lartista com a colleccionista (Fundaci Foto Colectania):
DEBATE | FROM HERE ON. 22 February, 2013 | 12.00-14.00 h | Lecture Room Entrada lliure | Aforament limitat Free entrance | Limited places

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------WORKSHOP | INTERNET, ALI BABA AND THE 40 APPROPRIATORS. 23 February, 2013 | From 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. | Foto Colectania Foundation Registration required | Limited places Led by Joan Fontcuberta and Joachim Shmid. A conceptual remix of photography in the digital age Participation fee: 50 . Registration required: Registration period ends February 20. Email: colectania@colectania.es Tel. 93 217 16 26 Maximum 30 participants Organized by: Foto Colectania Foundation and Arts Santa Mnica.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------LECTURE | POSTPHOTOGRAPHY 26 February, 2013 | 19.00h | Lecture Room Free entrance | Limited places Joan Fontcuberta will talk about postphotography and about the changes the medium has faced in the wake of the digital revolution. He is interested in what happens on the outskirts of communication, in the complex relationship between photography and truth.

Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------LECTURE | MOBILE AND ART. A YOUNG BUT INTENSE RELATIONSHIP 27 February, 2013 | At 7 p.m. | Event Hall Free entrance | Limited places Lorea Iglesias is an independent curator and cultural manager specialized in electronic art and new media. During this lecture, she will share her perspective and introduce us to different artistic projects related to mobile communication. Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica

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---------------------------LECTURE | CONSTRUCTIVE POSTPHOTOGRAPHY AND SOME DERIVED WORK 28 February, 2013 | 7 p. m. | Lecture Room Free entrance | Limited places By Jon Uriarte, Laia Abril and Roc Herms Moderator: Joan Fontcuberta What do we mean by postphotography? Is photography over as we have previously understood it? Jon Uriarte will be presenting the work of Roc Herms and Laia Abril. They will join us on a journey through this new photographic landscape, analyzing some of their most relevant work and venturing a glance toward the future to predict some possible postphotographic scenarios yet to come. Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------COMBINED GUIDED TOURS | AT ARTS SANTA MNICA AND FOTO COLECTANIA February-March-April 2013 | Arts Santa Mnica and Foto Colectania Foundation Entrada libre | Aforo limitado Led by Pep Vidal. Guided tours through the exhibitions From here on at Arts Santa Mnica and Work Collection. The Artist as Collector at the Foto Colectania Foundation. February Friday 22 February, 2013 | from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. March Friday 1-8-15-22 March, 2013 | from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday 2-9-16 February, 2013 | from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. | from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. April Friday 5-12 April, 2013 | from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday 6-13 April, 2013 | from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. | from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. This proposal demonstrates the full potential of the new methods of digital creation. We recycle, paste, cut and circulate. We can do whatever we want to these images! All we need is an eye, a camera, a telephone, a computer, a scanner and a point of view. The

technological potential has creative consequences: working has never felt so much like playing! Space is limited: maximum 20 people. In order of arrival. The tour begins at Arts Santa Mnica. La Rambla, 7. Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica and Foto Colectania Foundation

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------WORKSHOP | THE WORLD SEEN FROM MY TELEPHONE 1-8-15 March, 2013 | From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. | Exhibition space Free entrance | Space is limited Street photography workshop using mobile telephones with direct upload to a specially created Facebook page. If Cartier-Bresson were alive today, he would take pictures of street scenes with his mobile phone. Led by Toni Amengual, we invite you to attend a street photography workshop based on using mobile telephones, putting the images into circulation and creating a collaborative piece. Bring your camera-equipped mobile telephone. Day 1. Short introduction to street photography: authors and references and an initial outing to scout out the territory. Day 2. Analysis session: looking at reactions to the Facebook page. Editing material generated during the interim. Second outing. Day 3. Extensive photographic outing. Editing and formatting of the entire experience in a multimedia montage. Space is limited: maximum 15 people. In order of arrival. Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------WORKSHOP. DOUBLE SESSION | REALSPIRATION and A PHOTOGRAPHIC SAFARI THROUGH VIRTUAL WORLDS 10 April, 2013 | From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. | Lecture Room Free entrance | Limited places Laia Abril: Realspiration This workshop, led by Laia Abril, is an invitation to play and work with our self-image (our perception of ourselves) and the circulation of images on the Internet. Bring a mobile phone with a built-in camera or a digital camera. Roc Herms: A photographic safari through virtual worlds Are you ready to come on a photographic safari through virtual jungles? Come along with an experienced Sherpa, Roc Herms, to explore unknown worlds. This safari is appropriate for all audiences: for adventurers who are experienced with travel through virtual worlds and for analogue travellers who are ready to cross into a new frontier. Photography will be an integral part of the entire journey. No vaccinations required! Space is limited: maximum 15 people. In order of arrival.

Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------WORKSHOP | NEW NARRATIVES 14 March, 2013 | From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. | Exhibition space. Free entrance | Limited places

This workshop, led by Pep Vidal, invites us to invent all kinds of stories based on images taken from the Internet. We will explore narratives linked to those found images, which have become part of the public domain. Space is limited: maximum 15 people. In order of arrival. Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------WORKSHOP | CREATIVE DIGITAL TERGIVERSATION March-April, 2013 | Exhibition Space Free entrance | Limited places

March: Thursday 28 March, 2013 | From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. April: Thursday 4 and 11 April, 2013 | From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. This workshop, led by Jon Uriarte, invites us to experience the digital manipulation of reality, using Photoshop and other working methods that offer unexpected approaches to expression and artistic creation. Some familiarity with Photoshop is required. Space is limited: maximum 15 people. In order of arrival. Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica.
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WORKSHOP. DOUBLE SESSION | REALSPIRATION and A PHOTOGRAPHIC SAFARI THROUGH VIRTUAL WORLDS 10 April, 2013 | From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. | Lecture Room Free entrance | Limited places Laia Abril: Realspiration This workshop, led by Laia Abril, is an invitation to play and work with our self-image (our perception of ourselves) and the circulation of images on the Internet. Bring a mobile phone with a built-in camera or a digital camera. Roc Herms: A photographic safari through virtual worlds

Are you ready to come on a photographic safari through virtual jungles? Come along with an experienced Sherpa, Roc Herms, to explore unknown worlds. This safari is appropriate for all audiences: for adventurers who are experienced with travel through virtual worlds and for analogue travellers who are ready to cross into a new frontier. Photography will be an integral part of the entire journey. No vaccinations required! Space is limited: maximum 15 people. In order of arrival. Organized by: Arts Santa Mnica.

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THE EXHIBITION

Cloister | Floor_00

Mishka Henner (United Kingdom, 1976 ) Henner explores the recent status of photography and media in various ways. Photography Is presents more than 3,000 phrases that define what photography is. The result is contradictory and chaotic, frustrating and insightful, it is photography without photographs. Dutch Landscapes is a modern version of an established genre landscapes photographed by satellites and censored by authorities, hiding significant sites including royal palaces, fuel depots and army barracks throughout the country. Bliss presents newsreaders, correspondents and experts frozen in a state of slumber, as captured on various US television news channels. FrederikKazerne, Den Haage, series Dutch Landscapes Fuel Station, Dronrijp, series Dutch Landscapes www.mischka.lockandhenner.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Laurence Agerter (France,1972). Agerters work involves photography, video, installations and publishing. She focuses on giving fresh meaning to existing situations, showing us new ways of seeing. For example: the sing-along. In LaLaLa, Agerter reveals the hidden poetry of karaoke videos by selecting stills that juxtapose image and lyrics in accidentally affecting ways. www.laurenceaegerter.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Doug Rickard (USA, 1968). Back in the 60s and the 70s, when Pop and Photorealism were boosting the status of the vernacular in the United States, photographers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore in colour, and Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in black and white, reused banal amateur photos to inject new spirit into a tired aesthetic. In his book The New American Picture, Doug Rickard pays a special tribute to this regenerative effort by taking Google Street View images as his starting point, showing us how Google Street View makes it possible to rewrite the history of the medium and give us back masterpieces in the best street photography tradition, while introducing a touch of topicality via allusions to the CCTV aesthetic. www.americansuburb.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mocksim (Ireland, 1974). This artist discovered that Brightons database of parking meter fines could be accessed, including photos of the offending cars. He collected these, and blew up some images in order to explore the world of online information. www.mocksim.org --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Corinne Vionnet (Switzerland, 1969). Vionnets work is generally concerned with isolation, a sense of being on the fringes of things. For this exhibition, she about-faces and goes instead to the heart of amateur mainstream photography: tourists snapping landmarks. She collected hundreds of examples of the Eiffel Tower and other favourites shot in precisely the same way, over and over again. Vionnet then composited these clichs to create the ultimate series of landmark photographs, each an unusual, almost painterly picture of an overly familiarly structure captured in an overly familiar way. www.corinnevionnet.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kurt Caviezel (Switzerland, 1964). Caviezel is an armchair photographer who has been collecting images from publicly accessible webcams all over the world. He assembled a comprehensive archive of snapshots produced automatically by thousands of webcams. His collection is classified by recurring patterns, and includes categories for both predictable and surprising images such as Insekten (insects crawling over the cameras lens) or Vgel (birds tails covering part of the frame). www.kurtcaviezel.ch --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Roc Herms (Catalonia/Spain). With Second Life and virtual reality platforms like PlayStation Home, the world has split in two. In it we have total freedom to invent our own personality and choose any lifestyle we want; on screen we can continue our everyday tedium or we can embark on intrepid adventures, We

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can decide which virtual urban tribes we want to subscribe to, and, logically, in this world of possibilities, we can become photographers and choose between creating reports in the style of Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank, or styling portraits like Richard Avedon or Diane Arbus. In his virtual life, Herms is always there, camera at the ready, seeking out stories, characters and decisive moments. In this instalment he presents Joanna Dark, a fashion photographer on the virtual scene who compulsively photographs herself in the thousands of combinations of clothes she has at her disposal. rocherms.com

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Hermann Zschiegner (Austria, 1971). Hermann Zschiegner investigates photography in the age of Google in a number of projects. +walker evans +sherrielevine is a collection of all twenty-six images of Allie Mae Burroughs produced by a Google image search based on the series title as the search parameter. File size, pixel aspect ratio and URL of all images are included as a frame of reference. Only in reading the file names can we identify whether the respective image is by Levine or by Evans. . www.follow-ed.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ewoudt Boonstra (Holland, 1969). Boonstra has created books, films, design, advertising campaigns, online projects, exhibitions and more. When it comes to imagery, the Internet is his source of choice. Boonstra considers it to be the perfect archive, both bottomless and easily accessible. Here, Boonstra presents a trend in Internet photography: pictures in which peoples faces have been completely erased. www.thisisabrowserwindow.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nancy Bean (United Kingdom, 2005) with Christian Allen (United Kingdom, 1984). Christian Allen attaches a camera to the collar of his cat Nancy, which takes photographs as the cat goes about her daily activities. When it comes to capturing images of the everyday, there is an inherent difficulty in avoiding preconceived ideas, but Nancy, with the cat cam on her collar, moves freely through the most unexpected and for a human inaccessible places, and thanks to the cats innate curiosity produces photos that give us an unusual vision of daily life in a suburb of Plymouth, in the south of England.

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Willem Popelier (Holland, 1982). Willem focuses on photographic representations of identity. The portraits in the series Showroom were collected from the hard discs of publicly accessible computers in computer stores. They were made by customers who test the webcams built into modern computers, posing in a seemingly intimate situation and leaving the results of their self-explorations in a public space. www.willempopelier.nl --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jon Rafman (Canada, 1981). Google Street View multiplies our experience of the world by making possible an avalanche of artistic projects rummaging through the singularities, indiscretions, accidents and paradoxes picked up in passing by a nine-eyed camera. Right now the documentary has the choice of two diametrically opposed methods: the directness of street photography and the indirectness of Google Street View screenshots. Montreal artist Jon Rafman falls into the second, new category, with startling discoveries involving both surrealistic scenes and raw accounts of social conflict. www.jonrafman.com, http://9-eies.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pavel Maria Smejkal (Txec Republic, 1957). The Slovak artist Smejkal shows a series he calls Fatescapes. These are iconic images from recent years depicting tragedy, death and war. He has stripped out the main subject and left us with the backdrop. Despite this, the images are nearly all recognizable. www.pavelmaria.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Josh Poehlein (USA, 1985). Any and every event now triggers a mind-bending rush of images but which is the most accurate? Putting the question of choice to one side, Josh Poehlein mixes all the visual material within reach into a multi-sided (Cubist?) document repudiating any unique, special (Futurist?) culmination. His compositions add up to a postphotographic chronicle of crucial world events, with his Modern History series fuelled mainly by Youtube screenshots. www.joshpoehein.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Constant Dullaart (Holland, 1979). Dutch artist Constant Dullaart brings an ironic eye to bear on the resources provided by technology for recording and disseminating visual information. Appropriating images found on the Internet, he tweaks the logos and designs of the most visited sites, like Google and YouTube. Internet is his medium. www.constantdullaart.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Martin Crawl (France, 1967). Martin Crawl is a collector with the eye of an artist. A regular buyer of images on eBay, he sometimes comes up with real treasures. For example, black and white images from the last century, photographed again with a Lego figure on top this so nobody can reproduce the originals. www.martincrawl.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jens Sundheim (Germany, 1970). This German artist worked with Bernhard Reuss and acted as a traveller, posing in five continents and hundreds of locations standing in front of web cams. He then took these from internet posts as a means to create a document of his travels. www.jens-sundheim.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Laia Abril (Catalonia, 1983) Thinspiration is a project of a documentary nature about anorexia, based on the rephotographing of images found on specialized websites and blogs in which adolescents suffering from the disease show off their skeletal bodies. The result is a journey through the nature of obsessive desire and the limits of self-destruction that the Internet allows us to share. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leo Gabin (Belgium). Lieven Deconinck, Robin de Vooght and Gatan Begerem have been members of the Leo Gabin group of artists from the start of the century. Their work questions some of the symptoms of the Internet culture: speed and intensity, fleeting images and eroticism. In From Here On, the trio follow a YouTube trend: endless girls making identical clips of themselves shaking their rumps. The result is amusing, but also leaves viewers wondering why everyone has to copy everyone else.

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David Crawford (USA, 1970). An experimental artist who focused on the Internet for inspiration, Crawford crossed the borders between video, photography and various media. From the start of his career he was concerned with movement and how it relates to the narratives of every day life. For Stopmotion Studies, he captured fractions of a second in the lives of Japanese commuters, transforming theses humdrum moments into hypnotic films. www.stopmotionstudies.net

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Hans Aarsman (Holland, 1951). Aarsman has an on-off relationship with photography, sometimes forsaking the medium entirely. When not making photographs, he writes essays, plays, columns, and gives lectures. All of Aarsmans activities are united by a desire to help us see more critically, revealing the unconscious assumptions behind our behavior. In Photography Against Consumerism, Aarsman highlights our relationship to greed, wondering how much stuff we need, and suggesting ways in which we can experience ownership without actually possessing the object of our desire. www.twitter.com/hansaarsman --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Marco Bohr (Germany, 1978). This German London based artist collected images of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il looking at various objects. These were taken as propaganda photos and anonymously posted on kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com. Marco Bohr, who has written about these pictures on his blog visualcultureblog.com. www.macobo.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jon Haddock (USA, 1960). Jon Haddock takes the scenes of domestic pornography sites, which proliferate on the internet and takes out the action. We are left with quite surreal glances of modern living spaces, which still can hold our attention in a rather eerie way. Bland and compelling at the same time. . www.hitelead.com

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Andreas Schmidt (Germany 1967). Schmidt employs Internet search engines to investigate and reflect upon the present role of photography. The results are published in numerous books. The triptych RGB refers to the three primary colours (red, green and blue) used to represent and display images via electronic devices. The three large scale prints in this series are composites of the first 38 computer screenshots of search results for the words red, green and blue, as delivered by the photo sharing site Flickr. Each print comprises 2,280 individual photographs and corresponding titles. www.andreasschmidt.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Adrian Sauer (Germany, 1976). Adrian Sauer is an example of an artist exploring the tools of his trade. 16.777.216 (or 224) is the number of different colours Adobe Photoshop can generate when handling 8bit RGB images. Sauer has developed software enabling him to create a random spread of all these colours on a panel measuring 4.76 x 1.25 metres. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monica Haller (USA, 1980). This project, co-ordinated by Haller is a book published of the American GI Riley Sharbonnas photos from his time in Afghanistan. Brutally honest, the subjects, all taken on his cameraphone, range from the front line to field hospitals. www.rileiandhisstori.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Frank Schallmaier (Holland, 1977). Schallmaier is photo editor at De Volkskrant, a Dutch broadsheet. A collector in the classic sense, he focuses his attentions on one topic in this case, penises. By asking us to view hundreds of dicks, he confronts us with our personal desires and anxieties concerning this very popular organ. www.volkskrant.nl --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Gilbert Hage (Lebanon, 1966). In 2006, after a fresh outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon, Beirut was swept by a defiant spirit of freedom. In response to the rise of Hezbollah (Party of God), dramatically plunging necklines became visible everywhere a spontaneous political gesture Gilbert Hage set about capturing with the camera on his cell phone. www.gilberthage.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thomas Mailaender (France, 1979). A critical humour characterizes the multimedia work of Thomas Mailaender. Of note among the variety of projects he presents here is Chicken Museum, an installation conceived for the gallinaceous public supremely indifferent to photographs hung on walls which sets to debunk notions of the museum, the work and the public. His other irreverent works selected here are Pricasso, Sponsoring and Extreme Tourism. www.thomasmailaender.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Claudia Sola (Holland, 1974). Sola mixes personal, original material with more general imagery found on the Internet. In this way she places her life in a larger context, showing how her experience relates to wider political and social issues. Being There is a montage taking us through the lives of individuals and nations, touching on everything we hold dear and culminating in an exploration of our origins. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Penelope Umbrico (USA, 1957). Is there still any point in going out to take a photo of a sunset when a single click gives us access to millions of them? The images we add might not be better, but could they at least be different? For Penelope Umbrico the world is already image-saturated, so whats needed is a recycling strategy that injects new life into existing photographs. Umbricos gambit consists in exploring all sorts of situations, accumulating graphic information and then picking out and conceptualising her discoveries. Highlighting todays sheer glut of images automatically involves the opposite as well: it sets us thinking about the images that are lacking. www.penelopeumbrico.net --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shion Sono (Japan, 1961). At several points in his film Love Exposure (2008), the young Japanese director ShionSono parodies the endless voyeurism of developed societies. In Japanese the practice of

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stealing photos of girls underwear in public places is called tosatsu. Is the spread of this kind of voyeurism due to mass-market camera availability? Or was it the rise of voyeurism that brought on the mass phenomenon? Whatever, tosatsu a symptom of the latest image-illness is about to become a new zen discipline.

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Roy Arden (Canada 1957). Arden creates an inventory of vernacular imagery that serves as the source for various artworks. In The World as Will and Representation he animated 28.144 found photographs in a seemingly arbitrary way that follows the simple but striking logic of alphabetical archiving. www.roiarden.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Toni Churnside and The Get Out Clause (United Kingdom, 1978). Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the City of Manchester, decided to make use of the surveillance cameras seen all over British streets. They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in a number of locations around Manchester and proceeded to play to the cameras. Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organizations involved and asked for the footage under the Data Protection Act. www.thegetoutclause.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

James Howard (United Kingdom, 1981). James Howard is a former hacker turned artist. He uses Internet spam as a starting point, and turns those familiar garish images into strange collages. Interested in what he calls the secret Internet, he explores the parts of the World Wide Web most users never consider.

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Altres llocs web seleccionats pels comissaris:

www.volkskrant.nl www.faund.net www.threeframes.net www.everyoneforever.com www.deletedimages.com www.specificthings.com www.jimsbigthings.com www.as-found.net www.abcoop.wordpress.com www.boehmkobayashi.de www.fredfree.com www.follow-ed.com/art www.jgdlewis.com www.goodfornow.net www.travisshaffer.com www.rencontres-arles.com www.fortepan.hu awkwardstockphotos.com

A ms de les obres, i distributs al llarg de lexposici, estaran exposats per poder-se consultar els llibres segents: Olivier Cablat - Enter the pyramid RVB Books, 2012 Luciano Rigolini - Surrogates Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris i Muse de l'Elyse, Lausanne, 2012 Cristina de Middel The Afronauts Autopublicaci, 2012 Anne Sophie Merryman Mrs. Merryman's Collection MACK, 2012 Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin PRIMER Callum Hughes EBOYS Callum Hughes EBABES Natasha Caruana, ONO Here Press 2012 Ron Jude, ALPINE STAR Selfpublished, 2012 Idan Hayosh / Corina Kuenzli, FIRE GUYS, Kodoji Press, 2012 Julian Barn C.E.N.S.U.R.A. Editorial RM, 2011 Daniel Pianetti, Renato Zlli Faund Magazine #9 Faund, 2008 Filip Tydn Sljes 50KR Filiptyden.se, 2009 Francesco Spampinato Experiencing Hypnotism, First Edition, 2009 Ken Habarta Bank Notes autopublication, 2009 Lydia Moyer Bounty Autopublication, 2011 Lydia Moyer Deer Stains Autopublication, 2011 Ludovic Burel Another Picture of Me as Dracula, It Editions, 2007 Ludovic Burel Lobster, It Editions, 2009 Ludovic Burel Waterfall, It Editions, 2008 Luke Wherry, Adam Kipple, Andrew Kipple People of Wallmart, Shop and Awe, Sourcebooks 2010 Miguel Angel Tornero The Random Series / Berliner Trato WAR Jonathan Lewis The End Autopublication, 2011 Katja Stuke Lonely Planet BohmKobayashi Editions, 2009 Fred Free it type my urban tigerish autopublication, 2010 Grgoire Pujade- Lauraine The Significant Savages Editions, 2011 Idan Hayosh, Corina Knzli, Salome Schmuki Jet Master, a visual strategy, Kodoji GmbH, 2009 Jesse Albrecht Objects for deployment Veterans book project by Monica Haller Autopublication, 2011

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First Edition, 2010 Mike Bender, Doug Chernack Awkward Family Photos Three River Press, 2010 Mimi Mollica Bus Stories Autopublication, 2011

Pamela Olson Objects for deployment Veterans book project by Monica Haller Autopublication, 2011

Travis Shaffer I Photograph Therefore I Am , Autopublication, 2010 Travis Shaffer Sorority Skin Tones Autopublication, 2010

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Franois Hbel
Director of the International Photography Festival in Arles

Is this another hoax from Joan Fontcuberta, an attempt to pass off a photography completely at odds with the academic rules for an evolving art? No, its a reality. In order to demonstrate this, select interesting works, filter them through complementary and demanding points of view, Joan opted to surround himself with four curators, all leading authorities, of different nationalities and photographic practices. The Catalan Joan Fontcuberta has greatly expanded the boundaries of illusion made by producing scenes manipulated in the traditional darkroom. The German Joachim Schmid collects discarded photographs and publishes them in assemblages that give them a new reading, far removed from their mostly domestic raison dtre. The Englishman Martin Parr has developed a critical and ironic take on Western consumer society, at the same time producing a series of books and objects printed with photographs. In addition to a very active career as a publicist, the Dutchman Erik Kessels is editor of series of private photographs found on the Internet or in flea markets, which take on a curious second life in public books. Clment Chroux, a conservator at the Pompidou Centre and curator of exhibitions for a number of institutions, is the author of many books on the history of photography and an alumnus of the Ecole Nationale Suprieure de la Photographie in Arles. All of them felt it was necessary to proclaim in a manifesto the advent of a new photographic genre and gain acceptance for regarding it as such. This is the project that, in 2011, took the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles by storm, whose teams coordinated by Pascale Giffard put all of their energy into it. The debate thus opened up, in all its many facets, is bringing greater freedom to photography, expanding its territory and making it even harder to define in an art world that would like to shove it back into boxes, while the Internet is opening up tremendous opportunities for creation and dissemination.

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THE GOLD OFTIME Clment Chroux - Curator

Chroux is a curator at the Pompidou Centre/ MuseNational dArt Moderne. He holds a doctorate in Art History, has published many books, and is the editorof the journal tudes Photographiques. My car is called Picasso. There can be no doubt that a person born into our contemporary world is more likely to hear the name Picasso for the first time in reference to a car than to one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century. What we have here is a sign of the extreme porosity between art and popular culture today. It is also the result of a long game of yo-yo between High and Low that began almost a century ago now. Indeed, we will soon be celebrating the centenary of Marcel Duchamps invention of the ready-made. Since then, the principle of taking an everyday consumer product and introducing it into the sphere of art has flourished. Most of the historical avant-gardes Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, the Situationist International, The Pictures Generation and postmodernism have demonstrated at length the inexhaustible plastic resources of appropriation, to the extent that it has become a medium in its own right. We now use the technique of appropriation in much the same way as an artist of the Quattrocento used the camera obscura, or as a Sunday painter would use watercolour. Everyone now does it: the artists at the centre of media attention, art students, my neighbours and cousins and even the art directors of the major car manufacturers. Water, gas & pictures on every floor. The development of the Internet, the proliferation of search sites and online image sharing Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Google Images, eBay, to name only the best known now allow a degree of access to visual resources that was unimaginable ten years ago. This phenomenon is similar to the installation of piped water and gas in buildings in the big cities in the nineteenth century. We know how the new amenities of modern living radically changed peoples lives, comfort and hygiene. We now have in our homes a supply of images on tap that just as radically disrupts our visual habits. In art history, periods when access to images was facilitated by technological innovation have always been marked by significant progress in the plastic arts. Advances in photomechanical printing processes and the subsequent rise of the illustrated press in the 1910s and 1920s led to the invention of photomontage. Similar upheavals in the field of visual art can be seen with the advent of the popular print in the nineteenth century, the emergence of television in the 1950s and the Internet today. Digital appropriationism. The trivialization of appropriation, on the one hand, and the hyper-accessibility of images on the other, the combination of these two factors is particularly fruitful, creating as it does the conditions for artistic stimulation. And, in effect, since the early years of the new millennium Google Images was launched in 2001, Google Maps in 2004, and Flickr the same year artists have eagerly embraced the new technologies, and every day a few more decide to take advantage of the riches that the Internet has to offer them. In the most uninhibited way, they appropriate what they find on their screens, editing, transforming, moving around and adding to or subtracting from it. What artists once sought in nature, strolling through the city, leafing through magazines or rummaging through boxes at flea markets, they now find on the web. The Internet is a new source of vernacular, a bottomless pit of ideas and wonders. For an ecology of images. Addressing the phenomenon solely in terms of its novelty would do little to make it more intelligible. The works that result from these practices of digital appropriation are not fundamentally new in the Modernist sense of the term: they make no attempt to be either original or revolutionary. That said, however, they take the logics that have been at work in the last few decades much further. What they seek is intensity; they radicalize positions and in so doing begin to push back the boundaries. For example, the artists brought together here all link up with the great movement of desacralization in the early twentieth century, which began to shift the emphasis from the skills of artistic handling towards a celebration of the artists choice. Rather than adding more images to the stock of existing images, they prefer to recycle. They champion the application of a kind of ecological principle to images. This gives the creative process a far more ludic quality that privileges discovery, serendipity and involuntary poetry.

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They also share a desire to render even more obsolete the criteria of evaluation that once served to determine what is art and what is not. The simulated suicide of the author. Another thing that the artists in this exhibition have in common is the ascription of greater value to the figure of the amateur than to that of the author. Their heroes are no longer the technicians, engineers or professionals who possess the know-how, the expertise, and strive for a certain quality, but rather the amateurs or collectors who pursue their passion as a hobby. What we are dealing with here is not the death of the author as Roland Barthes described it in 1968, but rather his simulated suicide. For the appropriationists who work in the age of total digitization, it is not a question of denying their status as author, but rather of playing at or making believe their own death, knowing that this game no longer fools anyone. We can easily see that the problem is posed here in terms not of novelty but intensity. The small change of art. The great movement of digital appropriationism, the cartography of which this exhibition does no more than clumsily sketch the first elements, reveals something essential. We live on seams of images. These deposits have been accumulating over almost two hundred years. Their sedimentation is now increasing exponentially. Like the resources with which our planet is naturally endowed, this energy is both fossil and renewable. It is also of an extraordinary richness. We need only dig a little, and gently sift the water of the stream to see the first nuggets. The gold rush has already begun. The epitaph on Andr Bretons gravestone in the Batignolles cemetery in Paris reads I seek the gold of time. He was among the first to understand that analogue images were an inexhaustible source of wonder and were, for that reason, our greatest asset. His friend Paul luard observed of photographic postcards, of which he was a passionate collector, that they were not art, or at most the small change of art, but that they gave us at times the idea of gold. The artists that have been exploiting, for a good few years now, all the resources of digital technologies have been following this vein. They also act as our pathfinders and point the way to fortune.

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FROM HERE ON: introdutory notes Joan Fontcuberta Curator

Fontcubertas solo shows include the New York MoMA, Chicago Art Institute, Valencia IVAM and BarcelonaLa Virreina Centre de la Imatge. He has published manybooks, mainly on his artistic work but also on thehistory, aesthetics and education of photography. Beginnings. When I was in Paris in late September 2010, Franois Hbel, Director of the International Photography Festival in Arles, invited me to dinner at his house. I had just published the book A travs del espejo [Through the Looking Glass] 1 and I brought him a copy. Whats more, a couple of days earlier I had opened the video installation of the same name at the ngels Barcelona gallery, with twenty projectors strafing the space to create a kaleidoscope effect in which the walls sparkled with over three thousand self-portraits adopted from the Internet, all of them images taken in front of a mirror in which the recording device camera or mobile phone was reflected.2 The proliferation of this new kind of iconic genre on the Internet seemed to me to be an indicator of the interdependence between the staging of identity and new communications platforms engendered by digital technology. After dinner we talked this over at length. As I saw it, quite apart from the fact that these images formed part of the subjects management of their own appearance and in many cases denoted novel ways of visualizing facets of eroticism issues that would be taken up by sociologists and anthropologists we were also confronting a change in the canon with regard to the practice of photography: what had until very recently constituted a marginal production was now becoming mainstream. In the early nineties the boom in the use of digital cameras, scanners and image editing software had initiated a profound transformation in the nature of the medium: this was the first phase of the digital revolution. Structural changes in the types of support, in the transition from analogue to digital image, were complemented by a weakening of the ideological pillars of photography: truth and memory. However, a decade later the Internet had come to stay, and the ease with which dematerialized images propelled us into a new landscape, that of Photography 2.0, and the consolidation of a postphotographic culture. It was a good moment, then, to turn our attention to the life of what we still understood as photography, or what was at least reminiscent of traditionally photographic gestures, in a context dominated by the pre-eminence of the Internet, with its social networks and creative resources and new tools of visual experience such as Google Earth and Google Street View, and also by the profusion of ever cheaper digital cameras and the incorporation of cameras in mobile phones. All of this took us into a global scenario in which the image was becoming ubiquitous. And precisely this ubiquity, this massive production and circulation of images impelled us to reformulate the laws that govern the nature of photography in its different facets: aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, anthropology and so on. Newtonian physics gave us a plausible explanation of how nature behaves, but when we developed the means to venture into deep space or to tinker with subatomic particles, we discovered that there were phenomena that refused to be governed by these laws, so we invented quantum mechanics and Einstein formulated the theory of relativity. It may be that we are now in the early stages of a quantum mechanics of the image. We need a theory that holds good for the nature of photography in this situation of exponential excess that is giving us vertigo. Franois, who had been nodding his head as he listened, cut short my gush of enthusiasm to exclaim: This should be an exhibition for Arles! Perfect, I replied, I know some very well qualified people I could recommend to curate it. No, you dont understand, Franois went on, I want you to curate it! After initially demurring and stammering some improvised excuses, I could see that Franois wasnt going to give in without a fight, and so the conversation then moved on to defining the possible content and the uncertain viability of the project in relatively urgent organizational terms. We agreed that I should mull it over but in fact I had already started to think about people to palm it off on. Two weeks later, feeling calmer and more prepared to meet the challenge not on my own but with the right associates I sent Franois an outline of a team, consisting of a professional curator and museum conservator and four creative photographers, with concerns closely related to the concept of the exhibition, who also had curatorial experience. The first was Clment Chroux, and the photographers were Martin Parr, Erik Kessels, Joachim Schmid and myself. The choice was influenced not only by long-

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standing bonds of camaraderie and complicity in previous adventures but also by the fact that all of us are repositories of understanding of the issue an issue that certainly underpins our own creative work, but with nuances that may be thought of as complementary and therefore enriching within a joint project. We started out, then, from a base solid enough to carry out the research we were eager to undertake, and I want to make it clear that working with this team has been a real treat, not only for the very rewarding personal relationships that were established but also for all that it enabled me to learn. The first necessity was to focus on a field of operations. Some of the fascinating themes we had in mind were perhaps better suited to a separate monograph. I am thinking, for example, of questions of social psychology, such as the permeability between the private and the public, or of philosophy, in relation to the dialectics of the subject in other words, how connectivity affects the deployment of subjectivities. And while it was essential to include reflections on the whole question of the documentary, we also had to bring in their application to specific aspects of photojournalism and social testimony. Unfortunately we had to bypass such phenomena as the emergence of the figure of the citizen-reporter or of platforms for the decentralizing and socializing of information through the connectivity of wireless networks, of which Ushahidi would be a good example; this was obviously an area that called for a very specialized treatment. We chose instead to configure a panoramic overview that would interrogate the images and analyse the present status of photography from a more generic perspective. Now, serious engagements with the contributions photography has made to the realm of thought and sensibility have concentrated above all on the role it has played in the field of art and the media. The vernacular, popular uses of photography have been relegated to the exotica of low culture. What we wanted to bring to light was the emergence of a new category, the digital vernacular, which was bringing about a reconciliation between high and low culture insofar as the compulsive production of photographs was taking the place not of works but of working materials. The images were operating more as records of experience than as representations of the world and as such were becoming part of the world that fostered the subordinated generation of yet more images. More than ever before, images no longer refer to a physical reality but to other images and therefore express ideas rather than events. From Here On thus set out with what we might call a phenomenological approach to attempt the first proactive engagement with the artistic use of this digital vernacular and to summarize the new concepts of the image that it put forward. Clment, who was our house theoretician, prepared a draft list of contents and wrote an introductory text for the original exhibition catalogue, which is also included here. His text lays out the key ideas. That said, I would like to put forward some additional considerations. The Artist as Prescriber. In the era of Homo photographicus, which is what we have all become, characterized by the fact that everyone is both a producer and a consumer of images, where does the value of a photograph lie? We frame a shot through the viewfinder and press the shutter: then a series of invisible automatisms guarantees a plausible picture. Smart cameras are designed for all kinds of stupid user. Electronic routines built into their firmware churn out fairly decent results in default mode, no matter how inexpert the hands and eyes operating them. Naturally, we can aspire to varying degrees of excellence, but nowadays technique [the production of the image] is so easy that it seems to require no effort at all. All of this undermines the orthodox notion of photographic quality. Where, then, does the merit of creating a picture reside? The answer seems simple: in the ability to endow the image with purpose and meaning, to make the picture significant. In short, the merit consists in being able to express a concept, in having something interesting to say and in knowing how to convey it in a photograph. So the first thing we must accept is thatwe can no longer establish a yardstick of quality according to simple categories of good and bad photographs. There are no good or bad photos, there are good and bad uses of photos. The quality depends not on values inherent in the image itself but on the adequacy of its formal characteristics to certain uses. The same image may be inappropriate in one context and in another make a powerful impression on the mind of the spectator. In consequence to dramatize rhetorically the conclusion it could be argued that it doesnt matter where an image comes from or who made it. Whether it was made by an animal or an infant, whether it came from a surveillance camera or a tourist brochure, whether it was found in an archive or swiped off Instagram. We may even have made it ourselves, but even that is not the determining factor. What really counts is the assignation or prescription of meaning in the image we adopt. The most decisive creative value does not consist in making a new image, but in knowing how to manage its function, be it new or old. As a result the authorship, the artistry, lies not in the physical act of production, but in the intellectual act of prescribing the values the image may contain or be receptive to: underlying values or values projected onto it. This act of prescription institutionalizer of the Duchampian pirouette corroborates the formulation of a new model of authorship that celebrates spirit and intelligence over craft and technical skill and, like any innovative proposal, entails risks and creates conflicts. The conflicts arise, of course, when the image is not an orphan and its author claims the right to control the uses to which it is put a question of an ethical and juridical nature, to which I shall return.

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My aim here is to insist on proposing postphotographic creation as an action of ascribing meaning when an image is born or of shifting the location of signification when an image is reincarnated in a new life. When the Kodak company popularized the slogan You press the button, we do the rest, the message was that the user could concentrate on setting a scene and choosing a moment without having to worry about the tedious process of materialization. Nowadays the user still presses the button but we have to ask ourselves, in the present circumstances, who does the rest. Because this rest in other words, its conceptualization has become what really counts. Although there is an intention at the origin of every image, it is always possible to project a second gaze onto it, a critical gaze that re-semanticizes it and modifies its initial status. This second gaze operates, then, with this prescriptive value: it discovers and brings to light factors that would otherwise go unnoticed. It is, in short, this second gaze that seeks to generate discourse where there is an absence of programme. The image is thus transformed: it is created anew and brought to life in a new context, as happened with the objet trouv of the Surrealists. I repeat: the gesture is not new, and has precedents in history; the novelty lies in the overwhelming extent to which this is happening now in the world of images. Adopted Images. The notion of authorship based on individuality and genius retreats in the face of joint projects whose shared authorship is non-hierarchical, before the proliferation of interactive and collective works and, above all, before the conception of the public not as mere passive recipient but as co-author: we might recall here Hans Robert Jausss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception and Paul Ricoeurs Essays in Hermeneutics. The author is reinvented, waiving privileges so as to displace them towards a better utilization of the work by the public. In recent times there have been quite a number of discussions between lawyers and artists. The former represent the guardians of order, the latter the questioners of order. The lawyers argue, predictably, for compliance with laws that enshrine the copyright and intellectual property of the capitalist value of property. In terms of the strict application of the rules currently in force, they are always right. But these discussions tend to be a dialogue of the deaf because the underlying problem is that many artists think that these rules are no longer valid and that the time has come to change them. The background issue is philosophical and political: do we prefer a society based on the principle of ownership or on the principle of sharing? Do we want a new context for culture, one that is freer and more open? But how can this change be achieved without detriment to the legitimate rights and interests of professionals and other actors in the economy of the image? In fact, art simply points out the difficulty, though it often embraces illegality in doing so: the land should be for those that work it, and images, according to Godard, belong not to those that make them but to those who use them. The sheer abundance of images makes appropriation natural so natural and so widespread as to deny it any sense of radical critique and spirit of transgression. It is a spontaneous gesture that we perform without even being aware of it: the images are too close to hand. The icon ecosystem drives us to recycle and remix. But appropriation originally had an overtone of stealing. It may be justified stealing for a good cause, like Robin Hood, but its still stealing: a deliberate crime that implied a lack of certainty about means and ends. However, appropriation simply means that a piece of property passes, without explicit agreement, from one owner to another, and from the artistic point of view what matters is not so much whose hands the image is in but what new context it has been moved to and what new meaning it has gained as a result of this move. The theory of art should be trying, then, to smarten up its act: for example, by switching from appropriation to adoption. Is it possible to adopt an image as one might adopt a child, welcoming it into ones own familial and legal circle? In ancient Rome ad optare meant to choose a child (a particular child, to the exclusion of others): in other words, to extend ones rights to someone who did not have those rights (thus a patrician adopting a plebeian boy would invest him and only him with his patrician rights). Adoption in this sense is the assertion within the family of the superiority of culture (rights) over nature (birth). The message of this assertion would be: Nature has made you in one form or another, but culture can change your condition. At the same time, we can adopt an image the way we adopt an idea an image we have chosen because it has a certain value: intellectual, symbolic, aesthetic, moral, spiritual or political. In this case, rather than giving the image a new legal status we would be prescribing for it a way of life, of thought, in line with what action the image conveys (in the broadest and most flexible sense: the Facebook Like button would be one example). In this kind of adoption we can place ourselves under the authority of the image (for example, Christians adopt the cross, thus placing themselves under its symbolic power) or declare our affiliation to a specific group, identified by its adhesion to an image (for example, wearing a Che Guevara badge is interpreted as adopting a spirit of rebellion). In such cases the adoption is necessarily a public statement: no one adopts the Christian cross or the Che icon in private. Adopting an

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image always amounts to publicly embracing its symbolic value, to declaring an attitude toward others. It is in some sense an official and visible acknowledgment of our reading of that iconic message. In the common denominator of these two senses of adoption we also find the main difference between adoption and appropriation: while appropriation is private, adoption is by definition a form of public declaration. To appropriate means to capture, while to adopt is to declare ones choice. Adopting thus seems to me to be a genuinely postphotographic act: it is a claim to be not an images biological parent but its ideological (that is, prescriptive) guardian. The postphotographer aspires only to being a parent by proxy, watching over the development of the scion, stimulating it and helping it to make its way in the world. The Artwork as Collection. Another of the effects of digital culture is the permeability of artistic demarcations (creators, curators, critics, conservators, collectors, teachers, dealers and so on). Though we may give priority to one type of activity, we tend to diversify, like a one-(wo)man-band, in the same way that most of the software we use makes us familiar with multi-tasking functions. Notable among these overlaps is that of the artist and the collector. Walter Benjamin saw the modern artist as a kind of ragpicker, collecting and selecting odds and ends to give them a new form and a new meaning. In a world characterized by iconic saturation, many artists are inclined to adopt strategies for collecting and serializing images to arrive precisely at what might be called a collection-artwork. Such artists note on the one hand that a large amount of anything is interesting, and on the other that the application of classificatory criteria to the diversity of an archive is another effective way of constructing meaning. In this way the impulse to collect and the structure of the collection take on the nature of a poetics of art. In the time when objects still predominated over images, artists like Arman were already practising the strategy of accumulation. In an essay on Armans work, Umberto Eco described it as a poetics of enumeration or of the catalogue in opposition to a poetics of the finished form. For Eco, the poetics of the catalogue is a characteristic of a time of doubt about the form and nature of the world, as opposed to the poetics of the finished form, typical of moments of certainty about our identity.6 Armans critique of the consumer society and the mass production of objects laid bare a crisis that hypertechnified postindustrial society has only heightened. The inflation of images can be seen as a symptom of a new social and political disorder, perhaps as excrescence of Liquid Modernity (Zygmunt Bauman) and the Capitalism of Fiction (Vicente Verd). Of course, the photographer as collector and recollector is not in itself a novelty: recall, for instance, the artist Hans Peter Feldman. Once again, what is novel is the superabundance with which this is happening today, in the profusion of artists compiling photographs on the basis of certain search terms and going on to impose an order on them according to singular taxonomic categories. The incontinent production of images, so graphically parodied by Erik Kessels in the installation Photography in Abundance, presented at FOAM in November 2011,7 is leading us to absolute chaos; the artists mission ay then also be to re-establish a new order. We have enough elements at our disposal to say that there are catalogues and catalogues: those that tell us the world is repetitive, and those that tell us it is always surprisingly different.8 The entropy of images calls for new ways of categorizing the world: this is equivalent to conceiving the label of a folder in a file, that is, bringing together the diverse in terms of a unifying system, however arbitrary and absurd it may seem. When all is said and done the collectionartwork is an attempt to recover and to deconstruct for postphotographic culture the encyclopaedic spirit of Diderot and DAlembert, as if we were ironically positing the return of a new Enlightenment.9 But all of this raises a paradox. On the Internet there are lots of collections made up of contributions from internauts who voluntarily track down particular types of image. For example, there are several groups that trawl Google Earth in search of shots that capture an airplane passing over the location.10 If the satellites that feed Google Earth with visual information are constantly photographing the surface of the planet, it is reasonable to expect that such shots will occur every so often, but the problem is how to find them. Apparently, however, a lot of people amuse themselves trying to bag shots with a plane in them, and are, I suppose, well pleased when they do: the key, then, is personal satisfaction, the pleasure of discovery, and even lets face it a zen ecstasy like that of those who engage in the art of bird watching. They have assembled a regularly updated database with a total of over 3,000 documents. Does this database constitute a collection-artwork? It is often disconcerting to be without conclusive arguments. Consider the other side of the coin: Mishka Henner is one of the artists featured in From Here On, specifically with the series Dutch Landscapes, which also deploys some rather unusual frames from Google Earth. In fact what Henner does is find and extract views of the Dutch countryside that are off-limits to the public in order to conceal the presence of NATO military installations. The Netherlands being a country that loves design, it is not surprising that the camouflage patterns are none other than remakes of Mondrian and van Doesburgs

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Neoplasticism. Why is it, then, that we have no doubt about including Dutch Landscapes in the category of collection-artwork? Here again it is probably down to the imperative of prescription: the will to discourse, the consciousness of carrying out an art project, the strategies for positioning this project, the contexts of its distribution Indecisive Moments. When Cardinal de Retz said there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment he could not have known that he was providing the theory of photography with one of its most recurrent values. Popularized by Cartier-Bresson, the figure of the photographer as capturer of privileged moments took shape: paradoxically, instantaneity became the cameras great resource for ensuring eternity. The click of the shutter stopped time and solemnized the chosen moment. Postphotography renounces instantaneity of action in favour of the immediacy of the image. The time of photography has swung between transience and duration. Hence the interest of a discovery by researchers from Oregon State University, disclosed in October 2012, of a piece of amber that contains a spider about to attack a wasp. The action took place in the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar during the Early Cretaceous, around a hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs would have roamed the area. This could be considered the first snapshot of history:11 the spider was in the act of pouncing on its prey when a drop of resin suddenly froze the scene. This piece crystallizes the quintessence of the photographic and looks forward to the contribution of Cartier-Bresson. It also ranks as the first example of protophotography, anticipating by millions of years Aristotles description of a camera obscura and the luna cornata of the Arab alchemists. Postphotography today is at the diametrical opposite of this. The regimes of truth have changed: the real is opposed to the virtual, and a factual truth is opposed to an experiential truth. Other registers are also different: memory is opposed to communication, representation is opposed to connectivity. And in terms of time, decisive moments are opposed to indecisive moments. Isabelle Le Minh has ironized about the loss of the epiphanic record in her series Trop tt, trop tard [Too Early, Too Late]. Le Minh here manipulates works by Cartier-Bresson, charismatic and illustrative decisive moments, stripping them of the elements of the action and leaving the bare setting. Then, of course, nothing happens. She shows us not the magic moment that caught the action at its climax, but any of the moments that preceded or succeeded it. The opposition between nothing happening and the climax also exemplifies the gap between the decisive and the indecisive moment. The omnipresence of cameras shooting all the time collapses all moments, without any distinction. A photograph no longer solemnizes an episode in someones life, because everything is photographed: nothing seems to escape the voracity of the cameras. The recording is no longer reserved for the extraordinary, and when the extraordinary does occur because the law of probability so determines, as I said about the airplanes in images on Google Earth it is engulfed by incommensurable magma of the ordinary. In the kingdom of the banal, the extraordinary moment is eclipsed. Philip Schuette has coined the term serendigraphy to describe those photographs that capture a miraculous conjunction of unusual and surprising circumstances both in their combination of the real and in the recording itself: a randomness governed by strict statistical laws (serendipity as a remotely unlikely coincidence). These snapshots are obtained not by an instinct for anticipation and the opportuneness of the click but by knowing how to select: they isolate an image from the massive archive instead of setting apart a slice of time. What comes closest to the decisive moment depends now not on the eye but on the patience of the sifting and the intelligence of the search strategy. More or less, as other sections. The Photographic Book Boom. The digital image is probably most at home on the screen. The Net offers powerful resources for creation, but even more for dissemination, rendering obsolete those traditional institutional spaces of art, the museums and galleries, which retain much of their prestige but cannot compete with the torrents of energy and creativity that sweep through the Internet. It is interesting to note, therefore, that the current of this on-screen existence is resisted by flowering of the photographic book, both in electronic format and as physical object. A first explanation of this can be found in its great virtues as a support for collectionartworks, but there are other reasons, such as widespread access to IT tools (design and layout software is increasingly easy to use), digital printing and, above all, the POD system (print on demand), which gives an extraordinary degree of versatility and autonomy. The younger generations of photographers in particular are making the most of these advantages in carrying out their projects, which are often selfpublished, this being the best way to create and disseminate their work. Added to this cocktail of technological innovations are a number of alternative conceptual and strategic approaches with which to operate effectively outside of the established system. Creative artists can now control the entire process of production and distribution of their work, and in their self-sufficiency are no longer subject to the

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authority of intermediaries such as museums, curators, publishers, galleries and critics: more than ever before, they have direct access to the public thereby mitigating the power of the institutions and the art establishment. The force of this explosion has heightened interest in the history of the photographic book and a new appreciation of its value, especially in the case of the photographic book that goes beyond being a mere repository of iconic information (the book as catalogue) to function as a work in itself (the artists book). The photobook as artists book aims to deconstruct the rigidity of conventional standards and explore utopian options in relation to its principles of functionality and economy. Underlying the dialectics and reconciliations of form and content and the experiments with narrative and graphic techniques is dissatisfaction with the limitations of commercial mass production. It is hardly surprising, then, that the photobook as a structured form of visual thought should have become the tactical travelling companion of postphotography. Epilogue. To reprise the words I began with, the proliferation of cheap cameras, digital devices, the Internet and the social networks have brought us to a situation of excess and access unlimited, immediate and cost-free to images of all kinds. In most cases these are banal mass-consumption images to which a new generation of photographers is attempting to respond critically, aiming not at a life in images but a pedagogy of survival that will saved from being swallowed up by the iconic tsunami. Acting on the image thus implies a gesture of ideological signification that goes beyond the realm of art to engage new forms of cultural and political activism. The premises here challenge the management of the current bulimia and consequent bloated surfeit of images. The other side of this surfeit is that it also forces us to reflect on the missing images, on the significant absences: images that have never existed, images that once existed but are no longer available, images that have confronted all-butinsurmountable obstacles to exist, images that our collective memory has not retained, images that have been banned or censored in any case, excess and access continue to set the agenda of postphotographic visual culture To curate an exhibition is to propose provisional truths and provoke debate. Quite clearly we do not yet have sufficient critical perspective or accumulated depth to ensure the maturity of the results. We have gone to artists studios to collect works while they were still warm. We are well aware of the temerity of this and the risks it entails. The temerity may help us avoid what happens in so many museums: they make us yawn. And we assume the risks in view of the urgent need to reveal the still foggy outlines of the landscape we will find ourselves in from here on.

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-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Introduction to press : Opening: Exhibition opened from:: 20 February at 12.30 h 21 February at 19.00 h February 21 to April 13 2013

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