Inside ‘the image factory’*

Over the past couple of months I have been conducting interviews with people from the picture industry, trying to get a range of insiders’ viewpoints on the transition from analogue to digital production and archiving. My hypothesis – that the work of picture research and archiving is materially altered when carried out via a screen as opposed to in a physical, three-dimensional environment – has to a great extent been confirmed. But each individual’s experience of these changes has clearly been different. Some feel empowered by what they see as better, faster and easier access to photography collections in digitised form, while others emphasise the loss of the materiality of the image and the sensory pleasures of rooting through a roomful of boxes and filing cabinets. Nearly everyone – even those who consider digitisation to be wholly positive thing – express some regret at the loss of the personal interaction between researchers, archivists, photographers and lab technicians that used to characterise the industry in pre-digital days.

The stories told by the people interviewed so far – several of whom got in touch after I posted a request on the industry site Photo Archive News – seem to divide into two camps: those that emphasise the benefits and possibilities of electronic image storage and retrieval, and those that accentuate what they perceive as numerous losses of quality in the transition to digitality. This perceived deterioration of quality applies not only to images (digital files unable to reproduce to the same standard as a film slide or negative, for instance) but also to the working environment and to the performance levels of the younger generation of researchers, who are often said to be ignorant and lacking in both pride and initiative. I haven’t got far enough in my analysis of the interviews to draw any hard and fast conclusions about what digitality ‘means’ to picture researchers, much less how it might affect the future of the industry. But all the practitioners I have spoken to have opened up unique, personal perspectives on the work of picture research which in turn have led me to consider new directions for my own research into this subject.

In the middle of my interview schedule the news broke that Getty Images had instructed an investment bank to assess the possibility of attracting potential buyers for the business. This occasioned a good deal of brouhaha, and forced Getty to issue a guarded statement that it was ‘exploring strategic alternatives’. Whatever this might mean, it got me thinking that if a pioneer of the digital visual content industry like Getty had even begun to consider the idea of selling up to private equity or similar, it might suggest that they think there is limited room for what business people and economics commentators like to call ‘further growth’ in this area. In which case it makes one think about what sort of ‘business model’ might eventually replace it. But what do I know…

* cf. Paul Frosh, The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry (Oxford: Berg, 2003).

Technostalgia and tangibility II

In early November I attended the 23rd annual CHArt conference, which this year bore the title Digital Archive Fever – as precise a diagnosis of my own current condition as any. For me, the most interesting contribution came from Doireann Wallace, a PhD student at the Dublin Institute of Technology, who is doing some important work on the dissemination and exploitation of stock photography through online image banks à la Corbis and Getty Images. Focusing her paper on a close reading of Getty’s online operations, Doireann touched on a section of this website which utterly fascinated me and which I immediately wanted to explore in more detail.

Technostalgia and tangibility I

In the past weeks I have been working on several conference papers and abstracts, and as part of this process tried to come up with snappy titles that would somehow sum up what I felt was at stake in cultural productions such as the Lee Miller exhibition discussed earlier on this blog. I came up with what I thought was the neologism ‘technostalgia’ – a term that seemed to encapsulate the longing for an earlier, more tactile and seemingly more ‘real’ technology represented by pre-digital cameras, film canisters and paper prints. The term was clearly too perfect not to have been already coined by somebody somewhere, and so it proved when I investigated the matter through a quick Google search.

Merchandise and materiality: Lee Miller at the V&A

In view of the expectations raised by the microsite for The Art of Lee Miller exhibition, currently at the V&A Museum (see previous post), I was not disappointed when I finally went to see it today.

The show itself foregrounds photographic materiality and historicity by privileging vintage prints (produced close to the time of the negative, as the introductory panel explained), even when these are in a fragile or even damaged condition. This means that most of the works on show are quite small, and invite a the viewer to take up a pleasingly intimate distance to each object. The sense of intimacy is further induced by the dark interior of the exhibition space – the walls are painted black – which is of course also an illusion to the interior of the black box that is the camera.

Materialising the medium

Since my current research focuses on the materiality of pre-digital photography I am always alert to the ways in which this materiality is foregrounded in contemporary representations of the medium.

A good example is the website design for the exhibition The Art of Lee Miller, which is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 15 September 2007 – 6 January 2008. The pages devoted to this exhibition on the V&A website quite deliberately deploy signifiers of photographic materiality in order to historicise Miller’s work within a bygone era of the medium. The text panels appear against a background that is meant to look like the back of a faded paper print, complete with scuffed edges and the slight miscolouring that such old-fashioned fibre-based (i.e. non-resin-coated) prints tend to acquire with age. Moreover, each page features an image of some sort of outdated photographic paraphernalia: the visitor information page shows the various parts of a 6×6 roll film, complete with tin canister, while the events page depicts a battered light meter of the hand-held kind (from the age before cameras had built-in light meters).

(click to enlarge)

The overall background seems to resemble some sort of coarsely woven green cloth, possibly intended to evoke Miller’s uniform when she was an accredited photographer with the US Army during the Second World War. I haven’t yet been to the actual exhibition (my enthusiasm for Lee Miller having been severely dampened by recent overexposure to badly-written undergraduate essays on the subject) so I can’t say how the show itself might address or, indeed, harness the haptic quality of old press prints, dented film canisters or crumpled contact sheets.

The Memory of Photography

Photography is a primary example of what Régis Debray would call a technology of memory. These technologies include writing, printing, painting, sound recording, computer code, and all the other ways in which we inscribe images and utterances in order to preserve and/or transmit them. Photography has of course since its invention, to a much greater extent than any of these other technologies, also been conceived as a powerful metaphor for memory – and memory has often been likened to photography. (Recall Oliver Wendell Holmes’s description of the daguerrotype as a ‘mirror with a memory’ or look up the cognitive science concept of flashbulb memories.) As anyone who possesses a family album will acknowledge, photographs are important instruments in the work of memory. In this project, however, I am also concerned with how memory functions as a crucial tool when working with photographs.