From Magical to Experimental Thinking

Magic and Automaticity

The recurring problem with our photographs is what Vilém Flusser and David Levi Strauss have described as their magical properties: the images’ appearance without obvious coaxing from a human operator. Photography’s mechanical operations, reinforced for most of its history by an ever-accelerating automaticity, has led to claims that photographs access unmediated reality. They are produced without our interfering subjectivities, and are objective by default. One subtly askew understanding fosters another: an apparently objective image becomes evidentiary, and by being evidentiary, is said to be real. It is really quite a leap. Magic, we might say, is the disappearance of method. It renders invisible how we identify, construct or enframe that which we claim to observe, and makes natural what is re-presented. In photography, this is the forgetting of the complexity of the camera as an object constructed, tuned and refined, and subsequently put to work. If such a description is apparently arduous or dull, this is exactly where magic comes into play – it is a concealment or short-cutting, actuality including a necessary uncertainty and absence of solidity, itself also a cause for its rapid dismissal by those without patience. Stripped of this layered operation, images become rapidly authoritative, and are mistaken for reality itself. Such magic transforms plausible attributes – that the photograph is measurable, and constitutive of a form of truth – into a kind of generalised objective truth-making- machine, which in the name of convenience overlooks complex conditions of production, and decisions made out of view. A consequence of magical thinking around the photograph is that much of what is fictional appears to become true, and the true is in turn fictionalised. A study of this phenomenon, I would argue, might nevertheless provide us with an entry towards a deepened realisation of what the photograph can be.

A photograph is indeed measurable, but those who have the tools to use it for this purpose are seemingly few: scientists and engineers, chemists and programmers have access to what Flusser would call the photographic ‘programme’¹ and Bernard Stiegler calls ‘technics’:² a comprehension of how the technical image is made and visually structured, optically, chemically, mechanically, or electronically; and second, the capacity to engineer, and therefore construct, measure and modify the functioning of a photographic apparatus or ‘dispositif’. This, as might already be clear, is vastly different from photography as it is used in general: for the most part, we use cameras as pre-programmed devices which make decisions for us on an array of automatic settings. Such automaticity is framed societally as a positive, as a freedom from work. These devices then function according to parameters set by both hardware and software as part of their programming: a camera attached to a smartphone operates within the constraints of that device – memory, power, and its size as an object, but also the values of those organisations that produce and make available those devices; a professional DSLR meets the needs of the advertising and news industry and also passionate ‘amateurs’, all of whom acquire a device privileging quality and speed in return at a much greater cost, though this device too defaults to automatic and semi-automatic modes with certain ideas of the image, high resolution, focus, and sharpness being not at all removed from conventions about what and how to photograph, technical automation here quickly becoming an interpretative and analytical automation. Each device reflects the assumed or prompted desires of its users, whilst it also configures worlds of possible images. This is why Flusser reminds us repeatedly that photography is an industrial and also post-industrial process. Without acknowledging such foundational contexts, we lack the tools to repurpose these devices, and instead use them as designed, producing pictorial, narrative, high definition, and seamless images, even if our subjects are dematerialised, non-narrative, low-fi or composite.

The ultimate magic of the photograph is the system of automatic and unconscious belief which arises from the assumption of the camera’s objectivity, which sets into motion a series of discrete contortions to maintain its premise. Firstly, the photographer becomes disembodied: the documentary photographer leaves no visible trace of themselves in the image, even though they have handled the camera, having directed the lens at the subject and pressed the camera shutter: the image is ceremonially uncropped, and little postproduction is applied to the image after its taking (or at least, this is asserted – contrast and saturation can be adjusted, colour casts altered and one frame chosen over another, though these are rarely presented as decisions or modifications). These adjustments are accepted insofar as they enable the photograph to maintain the appearance of direct representation. Such processes are ritualistic – from the photojournalistic claim to be uncropped, to the social media claim of ‘no filter’ – and they maintain a strong artificial duality that separates objective image and subjective camera operator. This bypasses the programming of the camera and its necessary functioning by human hands (and at its other extreme, also constructs the image of the hyper-subjectivised artist- photographer, where all images swim in relativity, as if they used a different apparatus, or existed in a different universe). Peculiarly, the camera also begins a kind of disappearance: the objectivity of the photograph requires what Gilbert Simondon in 1958 called the banishment of technical objects (such as cameras) “into a structureless world of things that have no signification but only a use, a utility function”³ which he noted led to a separation where the technical object, because it has no other space, becomes ‘sacred’ – understood by some and admired for complexity and refined, and unquestioningly adopted by others. We talk about the camera as an objective device, but analyse it only insofar as it is different to ourselves as humans. We neither observe nor describe it in any more detail. Perhaps correspondingly, the construction of a system of belief, which we might posit begins with a kind of photographic ‘education’, is rarely a critical training but the reproduction of conventional operations with the photographic process. It is missing both the camera and its human operator and the relationship they have to each other.

If we return to how an image is made, and if we attempt to see it as if for the first time, we might note the abstractions of its process: the apparent ease with which a photograph is produced belies the many operations that take place to make its resulting image visible. Once we ask how this device – new to us at this moment – happens to work, we would be astonished by the number of operations – metering, focusing, shutter function and sensor, storage, transmission, and technology of the screen – which a device from our pocket contains. (It is indeed miraculous – all the more disheartening when we compare it to its actual use). But we are hardly interested. We consciously ignore the complexity of the apparatus in return for its ease. This is the very condition of many technical objects – across industrialisation and, in photography, the commercial expansion of photographic media: the image is constructed by an apparatus that has been continuously and laboriously refined, which, through its evolution, has constructed numerous convenient shortcuts – automatisation and programming – that enable us to use it with little or no prior knowledge. The latest of these developments have focused
primarily (though not exclusively) upon circuits of distribution⁴. Here, broadcasting is default – on of the first options available for any image on a smartphone is the ‘share’ button, which seems to suggest that an image must, as quickly as it is produced, be propelled out into the world, mostly through some of the preselected channels my device has proposed, which are largely those of social media (I currently have a Huawei phone, and so my device prominently encourages me to post images to the Chinese social platform WeChat). This is the ‘program’ that Flusser described, which subtly encourages our ever more frequent documentation, a massification of imagery generously enabled by the need not to think about how the camera operates. The program of photography constructs ease: from as early as Eastman Kodak and ‘you press the button, we do the rest’, we trade ease and abstraction for mechanical knowledge and the capacity to program or intervene. Incidentally, this is often concurrent with the rhetorical flourish that proclaims such photography ‘democratic’.

Today, a camera can be held in the hand and operated with only the fingertips: such functioning is made for us, though its anticipation of our needs have some remarkable effects. Perhaps the most interesting feature, which has appeared intermittently on digital camera models since the mid-2000s, is that of ‘pre-capture’, sometimes known also as ‘pre-recording’: in pre-capture, the camera appears to predict the moment of the shutter’s pressing, recording a sequence of images before the photographer has completed the decision to make an image. In a number of models, this is semi-hidden: it functions as a recovery system, when decisive moments are missed, or only appears when images are being reviewed. Pre-capture functions not on prediction, but on a programmed operation which constructs a process of image- making that the camera operator is unaware of: either the half-press of the shutter (also used to focus the lens and meter the scene), or even in the moment when the camera is switched on. Pre-capture images are quickly erased if they are not called upon, describing a parallel world of photographic operations. Such a parallel is at first the difference between the operations of the human operator and the apparatus, which are interconnected but not in sync. To give an example, the camera starts recording without signalling that it does so: the artificially articulated sound of a shutter in a digital camera, a sound that was introduced to reassure the digital camera operator that their photograph had indeed been made, does not sound when pre- capture functions. But similarly, we understand pre-capture’s function in two distinct ways: for one audience, it is convenient and also magical – the camera predicts and catches the moment, even if I do not; whilst, for another audience, it is evidence of a camera’s many layers of programming, such that the camera is in fact operating according to new and unexamined cues, such as switching on (as an example of an ‘always-on’ device), or in the moment of a shutter’s half-press (a shift in signification from the act of focusing or framing to already recording). Such a split separates what Flusser would call the functionary, the automatic user of the camera, who, to all intents and purposes appears to follow its instructions or limits, from the curious photographer, who continually tests what is possible, learning and unlearning the apparatuses’ way of working.

Pre-capture describes what the philosopher Yuk Hui calls ‘Tertiary Protention’: a term used by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl to describe the mind’s capacity to anticipate, project and sense what is to come. Protention precedes the moment of ‘impression’ – our sensory experience of the present – and ‘retention’, our memory’s recall, recollection or replay. We accept impression and retention quite readily, though we might have usually overlooked the protensive, in part because our cultural commons have placed a premium on the historical and the act of remembering, and disregarded the balance of vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and vita activa (active life). Protention, Husserl notes, is as significant as memory, with an active analysis, prediction, and imagining, which show that the mind is continually modelling and shaping the encounter that is to come.

Both protention and retention, anticipation and memory, have, Husserl, notes, two layers: the specific, and the overarching. Husserl describes how music can be remembered by individual notes but also by overall composition, and can be anticipated in the same way (consider the experience of listening to music for the first time and sense that it is about to break into a chorus or guitar solo; consider also how we can observe, before it is complete, music’s compositional arc). Imagine predicting that someone was about to jump over a puddle, or photographing red balls thrown into the air against a blue sky, so that they might form a triangle: those are protensive (a moment of the leap and the awareness of its completion, the anticipation of a shape to come, and its challenge or likely failure).

After the image we seem to view this moment only as a single event, a decisive moment or the snap of the shutter. Perhaps this is understandable – we start with what we can remember. A third layer to Husserl’s account of memory was identified by Bernard Stiegler in his book ‘Technics and Time 1’ (1998). Stiegler notes that we use devices (objects which are outside of the body) to aid our recall: from the map or written account to the photograph, we cede to objects which extend our capacitie to remember. Technics, or the use of tools and apparatuses, Stiegler notes, are largely invisible modifications of our sense of time: objects are quickly rendered distant because they are externalised, or made historical by the apparent concretisation of their presence as an image or account. Our perception is unquestionably sped up: quickly frozen, as if to be acquired, we cease to notice an object’s continuity in the world once it has been photographed, and fail to note how we have prepared ourselves for that encounter. These are, for Stiegler, extensions of the human through technics: this process of aided recall, which Stiegler calls ‘Tertiary Retention’, is much of our technical world, and won’t be surprising in our specific encounters with photography, where the image is regularly put to work as an aid to individual and collective memory. But Hui, Stiegler’s former student, proposes something further: he notes the equal importance of protention to retention, and the balance that Husserl constructs around the moment of impression or encounter, in protention and retention. With this in mind, he sees in the technical, but especially the digital object, a quality of the protensive: coffee machines which brew in preparation for our time of waking, fridges which order foodstuffs before we run out (calculating that we want the same again), and cameras which take photographs before we have decided to make choices. It is here that we can begin to venture a hypothesis: that the photographic has as much to do with what is to come as it does with the past.

What this hopefully allows us to give shape to are two interconnected realisations: that the technological functioning of an apparatus, such as the camera, is a factor in how we see and act in the world (and cannot be brushed away in favour of the seamless appearance of a world without them); and that the functioning of our devices includes a predictive and anticipatory function – the automated operations of what have perhaps begun to displace our own protensive capacities, our own imagination, prediction and desires.

Take, for example, the photographs of Swiss artist Jules Spinatsch. In a process he has called Semi-Automatic Photography, Spinatsch uses a VR drive – an attachable motor drive used to create Virtual Reality panoramas – to construct visually complex scenes of charged sites. The central logic of the VR drive image, which the camera defaults towards – is to produce a seamless panorama to construct an immersive experience. It does so not by constructing a sensor or receiving surface which is long enough to hold the resulting image, but by producing many individual images, algorithmically trimming and combining the resulting images into one continuous whole according to a structured recombination procedure (image stabilisation or anti-shake operations for moving image on DSLRs and Phones operate in a very similar way, albeit in time rather than space, cropping away the edges of the image at the sides as needed so that the video appears to hold still in the centre of the frame). Spinatsch, however, purposefully defies the pristine composite image, retaining the hard edges of each individual frame. In fact, he shows that abutting images can be very different, partly because the VR drive produces its images in sequential vertical bands, with the result that horizontal sequences have wider gaps of time in-between, with potential for changes in light and subject matter – Spinatsch lets the camera automatically focus and re-adapt in each frame, so that within adjacent frames focus and exposure can vary substantially, thereby forcing one automaticity to problematise another.

For the purposes of our analysis here, it should be sufficient to state that Spinatsch identifies how the camera is intended to function, and shows us instead how it operates, the appearance of functioning here being at a remove from operations within the black box of the apparatus. He seeks a creative and critical potentiality in going against the camera’s operating system; drawing our attention to what the camera does when it operates, which is to propose an image containing hundreds of different moments in time – leaving its final splicing incomplete. Whilst this produces a scene that we can still comprehend if we take the time to do so, it is an image that would, to all intents and purposes, usually be described as either a technical malfunction, or an interventionary glitch. In fact, it is neither: whilst Spinatsch’s gesture might be perceived as a stopping or interrupting of the device, it is no more the switching of automatic functions to shift their emphases (halting the stitching together of disparate images, whilst keeping the automatic focus of the camera switched on, where it would usually, for this procedure, be switched off). In fact, it is a realist image (in the Brechtian sense of the term), showing both the world and the image’s conditions of production. In which way is this image protensive? As a predictive image: the photographic process sets in motion. Spinatsch anticipates, but neither assumes control, nor takes a falsely neutral position as an observer.

The Image and Its Agencies

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At this point, we might note the paradox of our belief in the photographic image, our attempts to sustain or perform and declare its objectivity, and the intensive programming of the photographic apparatus, which requires our hacking or reprogramming to make itself visible. This makes our most urgent frontier not the image and its question of truth, but the space of intervention and the visibilities of the images layering. This is an unspoken and yet contested site. We rapidly dismiss images that are modified and multi-dimensional, and decry them as manipulated or not real: for many images, this manipulation – this moulding by the hands – is enough to be disregarded. But perhaps we can ask some counterintuitive questions: why are these images claimed to be ‘false’? What shapes our dismissal? Why are we averse to the evidence of human presence? We can also ask questions regarding our critical tools: why do we focus upon an image’s manipulation? Or its staged- ness? We have already noted that all images are adjusted – to conform to a certain conception of photography. And we have also observed that the photographic apparatus enframes, anticipates, and programs, prompting many of the things we choose to photograph. It is the problem of photography’s naturalism and our construction of a seamless and disembodied illusion that is the pictorial, which offers arguably better subjects for our enquiries. Is the reality of photography not its mediation and its modes of mediating? Could our critique be, in fact, not that an image is manipulated, but that this manipulation is covered or placed in the shadows?

At the beginning of this essay, I stated that those who have the tools to measure the photograph seem to be few: those who comprehend the structuring of the technical image, and those with the capacity to engineer, or modify the apparatus. I suggested that scientists, chemists, engineers, and programmers are amongst those we readily accept as possessing such understanding. Yet we fall into a trap if we stop here, at the threshold of clearly demarcated technical or specialist knowledge. We rapidly disempower ourselves as producers and, at the same time, place technical knowledge at the margins of the social when it is, in fact, at its very centre. This is the very problem which motivated Simondon’s comparatively early analysis of technical objects, but surely gives rise to any concern with the technical, from Shoshana Zuboff’s ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ (2019), which describes the deep embeddedness of technical systems in daily life, to Hui’s ‘On The Existence of Digital Objects’ (2016), with its concern for understanding individuation in a mass-produced and data driven culture. Those who comprehend how the image operates and creates structures can be many, just as those who possess the capacity to modify the apparatus could equally be many too. This is marked by, but must also go beyond, what Douglas Rushkoff has described as the ultimatum in ‘Program or be Programmed’ (2010), beginning with the necessity to possess tools to counterbalance or resist the templates and workflows of digital systems that are ultimately also systems of power, but also to develop alternative models, different methods of analysis, which allow us to survey the choices available to us when technical objects present their honed and ultimately reinforcing and reproductive logics.

Photographers can replace the automaticity of our contemporary practices with enquiry. When Flusser distinguished the photographer from the functionary (as a category to describe those who take photographs without any reflection), he described an open-ended curiosity, a simultaneously critical and ludic practice which dismantles assumption, the unspoken and the automatic. More recently, in the context of undoing our deeply embedded colonial structures of power, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has proposed ‘unlearning’ as a tool to uncover the information, knowledge and views of cultures, people and knowledge that are already around us⁵. They are joined in a process of disassembly. For a moment, I will maintain my interest in the scientist as a model, not because science is objective or without flaws, but the very opposite; scientific method seeks a process of testing in order to encounter error and mistake, to acknowledge and account for subjectivities, describe their effects, and to operate with those in mind. In this vein, science is also a method of continual revision, correction and modification, something which the historiography of photography readily occludes. Writing on the overlooked significance of experimentation, accident and error in the early history of photography, the Art Historian Peter Geimer has noted that “the genesis of photography appears not only as the success story of photographic representations, but equally as a long history of instances of discoloration, bleaching and destruction”.⁶ Scientific knowledge is stable only insofar as it is the most compelling current model, with the most persuasive account to date (the expectation is that theories will be eventually replaced or disproved). It is valuable not as dogma, but as a discursive field that extends beyond the ‘I’ of the atomised self. This does not cast science into a broad pool of relativism, as it recognises a process that can be at once subjective and worth unpacking, and rigorously tested so as to be collectively adopted beyond the instantaneity of fact, or the rush for all knowledge or authority. If we apply something like its method to photography, which I would suggest is the model of the photograph as an experiment, we might obtain surprising results: if we can approach photography not with the impossible proposition of its objectivity or truth, but with an account of its method and how it approaches its own comprehension of the world, we access not only a greater fidelity, but also a greater degree of agency in how we use photography to see and negotiate the world around us.

When Yuk Hui describes how our technologies increasingly anticipate for us, he draws us towards a realisation that has been absent from much photographic literature to date: a discussion of our agency. And more than this, he also invokes photography’s often unspoken relationship to futurity – anticipation, speculation, and projection. Our descriptions of photography are almost entirely rooted in the past, in what Barthes would construct as an ontology of the ‘that has been’. So pervasive is photography’s assumed hold on the past that discussions of photography rarely, if ever, even venture into the present. Only Tina M. Campt’s groundbreaking ‘Listening to Images’ (2017) broaches futurity in the context of the photographic image thus far, noting that image not only constructs relationships of (gendered and racialised) power, but possesses the capacity for a forming that she describes through tense as both linguistic and temporal positionality. She writes that futurity is “the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now – as imperative rather than subjunctive – as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present”.⁷ Campt notes that the individual construction of versions of our future selves are structured in the photographs that we produce – she observes, for example, in the studio photographs of recently disembarked migrants, a formality and posture that is not the formality and power of the passport photo, but a version of a future and aspired self, positively represented and made visible. Their initial similarity belies a subtle structural difference that can be opened by close, attentive viewing. Our images are not just records, they are a bringing into being, always a photographic becoming. The futurity of the photograph is not just in what we anticipate, but in the image we make for a future encounter and the record that we construct in the world.

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Images that anticipate or modify their contents could be easily described as fictions, but here a fiction/reality dualism is again revealed as problematic, constitutive of an unspoken conservative impulse over the constructive or generative image beyond the moment of the picture’s making: the problem with a fictitious or photoshopped photograph is not at all that it is fictional. It is problematic because it breaks with our conception of the image as a record or objective document, static or unmodified, those very qualities which are themselves fictitious. What is problematic in a constructed photograph is not that it is constructed at all, but what is wished for in that fiction, and what its consequences might happen to be. An impossibly airbrushed future is unobtainable and unsustainable, problematic because a pressure exists to reproduce it, but also because it maintains a system of unequal privilege; by contrast, a plausible or informed future, a future aspired to, and gradually brought into being – which Campt describes as an image ‘that which must be’ – is not problematic at all. Photographs are, of course, propositional. We require a renegotiated, and more nuanced, understanding of the photographic, not as a duality, but as a practice with consequences and possibilities.

By thinking through both Campt and Hui, we can observe a complex potentiality for photographs to not only record the world that has been, but to be there at the moment of its becoming, to be constitutive, or catalysing for a vision of the world. If both the human and the technical apparatus function with the capacity for protention – the anticipatory, speculative and projected thought that Husserl describes as fundamental to our experience of our time and agency – there remains the possibility of a photography that looks ahead and not back, which constructs the future, and does not document only the past. We can see this if we return momentarily to the technology of pre- capture: the camera, anticipating the use of its operator, also reveals to us that photography was always already protensive. Is the photograph not catalysed by the recognition of an image to come? Is it not our concern, as image makers and producers, for the photograph’s future consequences? Its audiences, and knowledge, and questions to come? The image is directed not towards a condition of the past, but a condition of the ‘that which must be’.

What can we do with this agency, which is revealed to us by noting the photograph’s capacities to anticipate, project, and shape the moment of encounter? We can start with rethinking and paying attention to the acts of the image maker who recognises that the photographic process has a force. Sethembile Msezane’s ‘Untitled (Heritage Day)’ (2013), the first work in a series of photographed performances critiquing and attempting to modify the hold of statues on cultural memory, asserts a changing emphasis by showing that power can be remodeled within the image (the photograph, Flusser asserts in ‘Into the Universe of Technical Images’ (1985), is exactly this, a model). Msezane is photographed performing in indigenous dress (the writer Kopano Maroga identifies this as celebratory dress, from a Zulu coming of age ceremony for women),⁸ in the foreground of a statue of Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa. Botha, who actively suppressed the rights of black South Africans, is perched on horseback in front of the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town. Performing in front of Botha, who is set faintly out of focus, Msezane stands calmly but with assurance, situated in the foreground. Being placed here is no accident. Msezane not only appears sharply in focus, rendered visible, but is, by the position of the camera, set in pictorial space so as to rise above and overlook Botha to her right. A deliberate use of how photography is put to work to emphasise and make concrete, photographed here Msezane is made solid and iconic, and it is this solidity that contests the racialised and gendered privileging of public space and the monument. Msezane’s work is a gesture – it begins with performance – but we would be naïve to neglect its consequence: ‘Untitled (Heritage Day)’ has entered into the circulation and has been widely reproduced. It is made not just for that moment, but for future encounters, thinking beyond just the now. As an artwork, it occupies a discursive position in the history of images. This is the emergent power of the photograph, which constructs a reality that it wills into being, that thinks beyond its making. As the recipients of images, we have no less agency. We distribute and continue the trajectories of images, and they are accelerated and modified by our encounters. What is at stake is a complex understanding of an image world that we both give shape to and continue, produce and reproduce. It is these conditions – production and reproduction, which are always at the centre of how we work with images.

In closing, we might modify some of the judgements we bring to the photograph. Truth is constructed and not inherent, is debated and not forced: a photograph that declares itself true must account for how it is conditioned to see: to in effect, reverse-engineer the photograph, so that its position, operations and capacities are observed and factored in. Forensic Architecture’s study of amateur footage of Israeli bombings of Palestine and the Beirut Port Explosions – geo- locating the positions of several ‘eyewitness’ accounts, to show that they matched and were spatially and temporally continuous – is one such example, where truth is complex, an assemblage which is the result of an archaeological process. But for many photographs, it is not truth that is at stake at all: what is meaningful is what a photograph enquires to do, and what we can state that it reveals and conceals. This is why the futurity of the photograph matters: do we perpetuate magical thinking, or enact complex understanding? Does the photograph negate the gestures of a human operator, or does it negotiate or reframe the photographic program? Does the image construct conditions of encounter – enquiry, experiment, and experience – or does it slip within the flow of the pressures of the moment, seeking little friction and proposing an illusory transparency, objectivity and permanence? Do our technologies make the decisions for us, or will we participate in both the past and the future?

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