Known and Strange Things Read online

  In linguistic terms, “touching” is not uncomplicated. Earlier eras used it to mean “concerning,” and this sense is present secondarily in Renaldi’s title: it is a book concerning strangers and their interactions with each other. But the word is now also a euphemism for various forms of inappropriate contact: “touching children” is a crime, and “touching oneself” is not a subject for polite company. On the positive side of the ledger, we might think of the many stories of the healing touch: the power of the laying on of hands is a trope common to many religions. And science assents: monkeys that are touched and held in infancy do better, healthwise, than those that are deprived of maternal touch. Research on humans indicates that hugs release therapeutic endorphins and serotonin, increasing one’s sense of well-being.

  The portraits in Renaldi’s book are situated in this terrain of taboos and consolation. In the silence between his subjects, there’s a charge. How do we feel when we see two men of different sartorial instincts being tender with each other? What about a black man in hip-hop clothes getting up close and personal with a white woman in a wedding dress? We can quickly get past some of these—we prefer to believe that such unseemly bias is in other people, not in us. But why does the unease remain when we view an image like the one that shows Nathan, a policeman in full uniform, standing behind and embracing Robyn, a young woman in a tank top and short-shorts? How old is she? What is that look on her face? Is it apprehension, or is that just the way her face is? Why is this image even less comfortable to look at than the one of Lee and Lindsay, the nudists, who stand in a similar pose to that of Nathan and Robyn, and between whom there’s an even greater age gap? There is also a cumulative effect of seeing the several pictures here in which people of different races touch or hold each other. The racial division in the United States remains stark, with most of the population practicing some form of “separate but equal.” It is impossible to look at Renaldi’s photographs without being a little sad at how rare it is to see, on the streets, in the diners, in the parks and public places of this country, some version of the invented narratives they illustrate. Their photographic fiction is a reminder of how shoddy reality can be in comparison to the imagination.

  But Touching Strangers, even when it alerts us to society’s hypocrisies, also does something more basic and more subtle: it brings us a reconsideration of the fundamental mystery of touch. Of the five traditional senses, touch is the only one that is reflexive: one can look without being seen, and hear without being heard, but to touch is to be touched. It is a sense that goes both ways: the sensitivity of one’s skin responds to and is responded to by the sensitivity of other people’s skin. This perhaps is why so many of these pictures project an air of gentleness, compassion, friendship, or care. There is something irreducible about the effect of touching another human being, or witnessing such contact. We see the results on the faces of the subjects of these photographs. The images play with the illusion of straightforwardness and testimony, and at the same time find their ways to precisely those values. Between the moment when a stranger is approached on the street and the moment when a print is made, some transformative magic takes place.

  Renaldi’s work is patient, done with a large-format camera, slow in the making, dependent on the cooperation of strangers. And yet, because these are strangers out in public, the element of unpredictability is ever present. Renaldi has shepherded chance and intuition into something both luminous and unreassuring. His photographs, once seen, are hard to put out of mind. The stories they evoke have a depth echoing beyond the brief encounters that occasioned them. A photograph is nothing but surface, but there are ineffable truths in the way things look; how things seem can be more startling than how they are. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

  Finders Keepers

  WHEN HE VISITED the Plumbe National Daguerrian Gallery in Manhattan in 1846, Walt Whitman was astonished. “What a spectacle!” he wrote. “In whichever direction you turn your peering gaze, you see nought but human faces! There they stretch, from floor to ceiling—hundreds of them.” In the seven years between the invention of the daguerreotype and Whitman’s visit to Plumbe’s, the medium had become popular enough to generate an impressive, and even hectic, stream of images. Now, toward the end of photography’s second century, that stream has become torrential.

  “Take lots of pictures!” is how our friends wish us a good trip, and we oblige them. Nearly one trillion photographs are taken each year, of everything at which a camera might be pointed: families, meals, landscapes, cars, toes, cats, toothpaste tubes, skies, traffic lights, atrocities, doorknobs, waterfalls, an unrestrained gallimaufry that not only indexes the world of visible things but also adds to its plenty. We are surrounded by just as many depictions of things as by things themselves.

  The consequences are numerous and complicated: more instantaneous pleasure, more information, and a more cosmopolitan experience of life for huge numbers of people, but also constant exposure to illusion and an intimate knowledge of fakery. There is a photograph coming at you every few seconds, and hype is the lingua franca. It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder. We live in inescapable surfeit.

  A number of artists are using this abundance as their starting point, setting their own cameras aside and turning to the horde—collecting and arranging photographs that they have found online. These artist-collectors, in placing one thing next to another, create a third thing—and this third thing, like a subatomic particle produced by a collision of two other particles, carries a charge.

  A decent photograph of the sun looks similar to any other decent photograph of the sun: a pale circle with a livid red or blue sky around it. There are hundreds of thousands of such photographs online, and in the daily contest for “likes” they are close to a sure thing: easy to shoot, fun to look at, a reliable dose of awe. The American artist Penelope Umbrico downloads such photos of the sun from Flickr—she favors sunsets in particular—and then crops and prints them, assembling them into an enormous array. A typical installation may contain 2,500 photographs, organized into a rectangular mural. It is the same sun, photographed repeatedly in the same way, by a large cast of photographers, few of whom are individually remarkable as artists and none of whom are credited. But, with Umbrico’s intervention, the cumulative effect of their images literally dazzles: the sun, the sun, the sun, the sun, in row upon brilliant row.

  Optical brilliance is also the key to the American artist Eric Oglander’s Craigslist Mirrors project, which is also based on found photographs. His biographical statement is deadpan: “I search Craigslist for compelling photos of mirrors.” Oglander posts these pictures to his website, to Instagram, and to Tumblr. A surprising number of them are surreal or enjoyably weird, because of the crazy way a mirror interrupts the logic of whichever visual field it is placed in, and because of the unexpected things the reflection might include. Photographic work of this kind—radically dependent on context—can be unsettling for those who take “photograph” to have a straightforward meaning: an image made with a camera by a single author with a particular intention. This is where collector-artists come in: to confirm that curation and juxtaposition are basic artistic gestures.

  The German artist Joachim Schmid, with a gleeful and indefatigable eye, gathers other people’s photographs and organizes them into photo books. For his trouble, he has been called a thief and a fraud. Schmid initially used photographs found on the street and at sales, but more recently he has depended on digital images. His typological projects, like those in the ninety-six-book series Other People’s Photographs (2008–2011), are alert to the mystery in artlessness. They are a mutant form, somewhere between the omnivorous vernacular of Stephen Shore’s American Surface
s and the hypnotic minimalism of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s water towers. Schmid brings the photographs out of one kind of flow, their image-life as part of one person’s Flickr account, and into another, at rest among their visual cognates.

  Each book in Other People’s Photographs is a document of how amateur digital photography nudges us toward a common but unpremeditated language of appearances. Photography is easy now, and cheap, but this does not mean that everything is documented with the same frequency or that all possibilities are equally explored. As is true of every set of expressive tools, digital photography creates its own forms of emphasis and registers of style. Cellphone cameras are great in low light, and so we have many more nocturnal photos. Most of our tiny cameras are not easy to set on a tripod, and so there is a correspondingly smaller percentage of soberly symmetrical photographs of monuments; the dominant aesthetic of the age is handheld. A camera focused at waist level, as old Rolleiflexes were, is different from one held between the eyes and the chin, the optimal placement for a live digital display.

  All selfies are alike as all daguerreotype portraits were alike: an image can be more conventionally an example of its genre than a memorable depiction of its subject. A plate of food, with its four or five items of varying texture corralled into a circle, is similar to countless other plates of food. But a book full of photographed meals, meals long consumed and forgotten, is not only poking gentle fun at our obsessive documentation of the quotidian. It is also marveling at how inexpensive photography has become. Things that would not have merited a second glance are now unquestioningly, almost automatically, recorded. The doors of our fridges, glimpses of cleavage, images of our birthday cakes, the setting sun: cheap photography makes visible the ways in which we are similar, and have for a long time been similar. Now we have proof, again, and again, and again.

  The sheer mass of digital imagery was itself the subject of 24 Hrs of Photos, a project by the Dutch artist Erik Kessels (first in 2011, and other times since). Kessels downloaded every photograph uploaded to Flickr in the course of a single day, about a million in all. He printed a fraction of them, around 350,000, which he then piled up in massive wavelike heaps in a gallery. Asked to explain the project, Kessels said: “I visualize the feeling of drowning in representations of other people’s experiences.” But that’s not art! And yet the emotions that accompany such an installation—the exasperation, the sense of wonder or inundation, the glimpses of beauty—are true of art. The shoe fits, maddening as it is.

  What are the rights of the original photographers, the “nonartists” whose works have been so unceremoniously reconfigured? And how can what is found be ordered, or put into a new disorder, and presented again to give it new resonance? And how long will that resonance itself last? The real trouble is rarely about whether something counts as art—if the question comes up, the answer is almost always yes—but whether the art in question is startling, moving, or productively discomfiting. Meeting those criteria is just as difficult for straight photography as it is for appropriation-based work. After all, images made of found images are images, too. They join the never-ending cataract of images, what Whitman called the “immense Phantom concourse,” and they are vulnerable, as all images are, to the dual threats of banality and oblivion—until someone shows up, says “Finders keepers,” rethinks them, and, by that rethinking, brings them back to life.

  Google’s Macchia

  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT they are up to. They just run around taking pictures of things.” Her commitment was to ideas, or perhaps to something even more abstract than ideas. We were at a party. She was an avant-garde photographer. Photography, in her view, lived neither in the camera nor in the printed photograph, but in a more nebulous zone. Then came another round of cocktails, and she swirled away.

  A dozen years from now we will enter photography’s third century. We seem to be in the moment of its fullest bloom and diversity. More people than ever take photographs, and more photos than ever are being made. Geniuses, recognized or otherwise, stalk the earth. But the art is also in its moment of crisis. There’s never been so much photography on view, and most of it is bad. There is curatorial uncertainty. The kinds of images celebrated by one set of institutions, say the Pulitzer Prize or the World Press Photo, are considered irrelevant and retrograde by the standards of another set of institutions, say the Deutsche Börse Prize or MoMA. Then there are those institutions that are able to contend with photography only in a nostalgic way. The scholarship of photography reflects these confusions.

  This in part is a question of what presents itself as art, and what it attempts to say to its society. If photography is among the necessary forms of response to this present, photojournalism of the kind that wins awards seems increasingly inadequate to the task. A photograph of a funeral in the Middle East, a series on an austerity rally, a book of portraits of musicians: such images are important, but they rarely raise new questions. What, photographically speaking, addresses this new time, this age of clandestine assassination, torture, oppressive policing, economic immiseration, proliferating apartheids, and war without end? Or brings new light to the old questions of love, death, loneliness, beauty, and mystery? A number of photographers, only some of whom “run around taking pictures of things,” make nonjournalistic responses to our current situation.

  Among these are the various artists who have appropriated Google Maps’ Street View and Google Earth, extending the practice of found imagery and the readymade to the images discovered on the computer screen. These Google-based photographic practices are forms of countersurveillance, and in part what they do is show that a photography of ideas can accommodate different kinds of images. There are images that torment visibility, and there are images that use clarity in an ambiguous way. The “neutral” and panoptic eye of Google itself becomes the camera, and, under these conditions, the photographer’s task becomes curatorial.

  Among the most interesting photographers who use Google in their work are Doug Rickard, Mishka Henner, Aaron Hobson, and Michael Wolf. Rickard’s A New American Picture is a look at the collapse of certain cities: Detroit, Memphis, Oakland. The gaunt sun-stunned figures in these streets inhabit noonday nightmares, captured both by Google’s car-mounted camera and by the brutal reality of American capitalism. Henner uses Google Earth to look at pixelated images of secret, usually military, locations in the Netherlands; it is a bracing update of the Dutch landscape tradition. In another project, made using Google Street View and titled No Man’s Land, he finds images of sex workers standing on the roadside in rural Italian locations, most of them alone, and most in broad daylight. The images are painful, poignant, but the real surprise is that there were so many to be found. Aaron Hobson, meanwhile, stitches together a number of screenshots to create ethereal panoramic photographs of unpeopled places, photos in their own way as desolate as Henner’s, but more conventionally beautiful. And Michael Wolf curates vignettes out of Street View by zooming in to find little visual poems (walking legs, high heels, people interacting with street signs) or thematic conceits (such as a series on people giving the finger to the Google camera).

  Rickard, Henner, Hobson, and Wolf are not alone in their creative refashioning or subversion of Google Maps and Google Earth. Other artists are doing it, too, as are amateurs with the hours to spare and the desire to trawl for hours through virtual space in search of the inadvertent, the alluring, the bad, and the sad. Such conceptual artistic practices are only a tiny part of the use of Google. But the new forms of photography opened up by Google are indexical: they say something about what the company is up to, about its weird power, and about how we might elude its intentions.

  Google is incessantly productive and very enthusiastic about itself. The company’s bright-eyed but curiously unreassuring motto is “Don’t Be Evil.” In The New Digital Age, the recent book by executive chairman Eric Schmidt and the director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, we find the following words: “The best thing anyone can do to improve the qu
ality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity.” This might almost read as a Panglossian parody of technological optimism, were it not so earnestly meant. And so, Google grows, it makes new things, it makes the world more interesting, though not always to the good. Under the guidance of its founders and of guru-like software engineers like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, it brings abstractions and a whole new level of automation into computer science, and helps sustain our current age of frenzied information collection, massive computation, and feral capitalism.

  Google tried to do everything. It proved itself the deepest and fastest of the search engines. It stomped the competition in email. It made a decent showing in image hosting, and a good one in chat. It stumbled on social, but utterly owned maps. It swallowed libraries whole and sent tremors across the copyright laws. It knows where you are right now, and what you’re doing, and what you’ll probably do next. It added an indelible, funny, loose-limbed, and exact verb into the vocabulary: to google. No one “bings” or “yahoos” anything. And it finishes your sen…

  All of a sudden, one day, a few years ago, there was Google Image Search. Words typed into the search box could deliver pages of images arrayed in a grid. I remember the first time I saw this, and what I felt: fear. I knew then that the monster had taken over. I confessed it, too. “I’m afraid of Google,” I said recently to an employee of the company. “I’m not afraid of Google,” he replied. “Google has a committee that meets over privacy issues before we release any product. I’m afraid of Facebook, of what Facebook can do with what Google has found. We are in a new age of cyberbullying.” I agreed with him about Facebook, but remained unreassured about Google. The Google privacy committee had given the thumbs-up to predictive text of all kinds, to data mining, and to the collection of location information. It had conciliatory relationships with bad governments at home and abroad, governments that might demand strategic pieces of stored information, or call for the heads of dissidents.