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).

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.

The section is question is called Change Me and it is accessed from the so-called Creative area on the main site. As far as I can make out, Change Me was set up as a kind of feelgood time-wasting feature for bored ‘creatives’, where people were invited to select an image from the Getty Images collections, make some sort of comment on it and submit it for dissemination on the website. You can see a particularly toe-curling example of the sort of thing it produced here.

For each submission, Getty Images would donate USD10 to something called Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a lobby group which, according to its own website, ‘works to educate, engage, and mobilize Americans in the fight to end the worldwide burden of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria’. Once the donations based on image submissions had reached USD250,000, Getty Images ‘donated’ a further USD250,000 by granting a number of image licences totalling this sum – presumably for images to be used in campaign material by the Friends of the Global Fight – thus, in the words of the website, ‘enlisting the power of imagery in the battle to end the worldwide burden of these three diseases’. Without commenting further on this slightly nauseating piece of rhetoric, suffice it to say that Jonathan Klein, the co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, sits on the Friends’ board of directors.

What really fascinates me about this entire enterprise is not its political or charitable merits but rather the visual methods by which Change Me seeks to attract and retain its audience. In my opinion, the feature is as pure an expression of technostalgia as you’re likely to come across anywhere. It is a digital simulacrum of analogue art direction, bringing together every conceivable signifier of pre-digital ‘creativeness’: scribbles in pencil and felt-tip; typewriter-esque type; yellowed crumpled paper; peeling stickers; stained and faded paper surfaces; polaroids; large format transparencies; piles and piles of paper stuff with torn edges; scissors; bits of string (or is it hair?), and in the change-overs between screens always human hands touching, moving, fingering the material displayed on the simulated worktop.

As with all simulations, the virtual studio environment of Change Me is like an over-egged pudding: the elaborately haptic imagery of the screen environment completely drowns out the allegedly ‘powerful’ images it is meant to support.
The Change Me feature exemplifies what the design critic Rick Poynor has called ‘luxurious frugality’, a concept he associates primarily with so-called bobos (‘bourgeois bohemians’). Bobos ‘have a lot of money, but they identify with anti-Establishment, countercultural styles’, writes Poynor, with ‘styles’ being the operative word as far as I can tell. For through the elaborate simulation of ‘primitive’ design tools (paper, pens, photographs) the Getty website offers its designer clients a nostalgic image of earlier, less affluent days – their time at art college, for instance – and thus of authenticity, which, as Susan Stewart has noted in her book On Longing (1993) is always the ultimate referent of nostalgia. This fabricated authenticity, yoked to the bobo self-image of counter-culturalism, is clearly intended to put visitors to this part of the site into a frame of mind where they will feel interpellated by the appeal to support the Friends of the Global Fight – a name which conjures up revolutionary struggles and anti-globalisation movements, yet which turns out to be an office-based lobby group in Washington, DC. Much like the papers, prints and stickers so luxuriatingly displayed on the computer screen are mere mirages of tactility, protesting rather too much their material difference from the binary digital code that they actually are.

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.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, technostalgia has so far often been deployed to describe some sort of nostalgia relating to computers – the collecting of outmoded hardware, for instance, or the simulation of antiquated computer games using state-of-the-art software (see for example Melanie Swalwell, ‘The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games’, journal of visual culture 6:2, 2007). On a more sophisticated level it has also been defined, by blogger Kenneth Rufo, as the phenomenon of how ‘thinkers bemoan the present technological moment precisely because its presence cannot measure up to the tortured univocality their theorizing demands of it and look to a technological predecessor as a means of reestablishing their selves, their world, and their politics’ (Ghost in the Wire, 24 January 2006). David Bell, on the other hand, has used it to denote what he calls ‘memories of futurology’, that is, the comparison of ‘the present as it is with the present as it was imagined in the past as the future’ (‘The Culture(s) of Cyberculture’, 2005). The earliest (published) coinage of this term that I have found referenced is from Richard Francaviglia’s Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America’s Historic Mining Districts (Iowa City, 1991). I haven’t got hold of this volume yet, but in a later essay Francaviglia glossed the term as ‘the nostalgic appreciation of earlier forms of technology for what they conveyed about our lost connections with time and place’ (‘Walt Disney’s Frontierland as an Allegorical Map of the American West’, The Western Historical Quarterly 30:2, 1999). This seems to me the most fruitful definition of the term, and one which chimes well with my own conception of the phenomenon.

Photographic technology is perhaps an overdetermined object of technostalgia, since its primary product – the photograph – functions in and of itself as a material allusion to ‘our lost connections with time and place’. Much of the anxiety surrounding the virtualisation or dematerialisation of photography in the digital age has been linked to the perceived loss of the photograph’s indexical relation to the referent, which is what underpins the materiality of this allusion – the idea being that the digital code which stores the information gathered through the lens in a digital camera does not have the same physical relation to the object in front of the lens as does the film emulsion on which the same reflected light is registered in a traditional camera. This notion labours under something of a technical misapprehension, as André Gunthert (among others) has argued. Be that as it may, while most people’s trust in photographic ‘truth’ has remained more or less unaffected by the different technological phases of the medium’s development, I would venture that they experience digital photographs, on the whole, as less tangible traces of a time or place in the past. My own take on technostalgia is therefore concerned with tangibility as a hallmark of technostalgia, explored through analysis of contemporary cultural productions that exploit the tangibility of pre-digital photography as a tool as well as a theme.

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.

In the section devoted to Miller’s wartime photographs, the visitors are provided with two facsimile copies of an issue of Vogue (June 1945) which featured her photographs taken with the Allies in Germany in April and May that year. The curators are doing the audience a crucial service by allowing us to flick through this magazine rather than simply admire the spreads in glass cases (although they are also on show in this manner). For by leafing through the pages upon pages of advertising for the most absurdly luxurious items, which precede Miller’s pictures from the liberation of Buchenwald, we may in some sense come to these horribly familiar images of atrocity anew, and recognise something of the shock they must have produced in their viewers the first time they were published – in that most unlikely of publications.

Displaying the wartime spreads from Vogue in three different formats – as blown-up photocopies on the wall, in the facsimile magazines and in the original copies of the magazines on show beneath glass – the exhibition is at pains to underscore the material context in which these particular photographs first appeared. Yet the real treat for visitors who relish in the materiality of photographic production lies (quite literally) in store once one has left the exhibition proper. For in the shop into which one is forced to enter when exiting the show itself, the V&A’s merchandising team have created what is in many ways a second exhibition: a display of objects for sale whose sole criterion for inclusion seems to be that they function in some way or form as material allusions, either to photography, to Lee Miller, or to both. Thus we have, for example (click to enlarge):

On the left, an apron (!) decorated with prints of a Rolleiflex camera and a light meter, reproduced more or less to size. On the right, a pile of kaleidoscope lenses fitted into holders made from a photographic reproduction of a Rolleiflex camera (they are available in several other, pre-digital camera types as well, the newest of these outdated objects being the Nikon F90, which came out in 1992). To left in the right-hand image one can also spot a stack of loupes, of the kind with which we used to look at 35mm negatives. In addition, the same table offered pinhole camera kits, notebooks with an image of a Rolleiflex on the front, lapel badges with the same motif, and an empty wooden box with elaborate ‘retro’ typography, which supposedly was meant to contain ‘photographs’.

Add to these items of merchandise the mugs, the t-shirts, the calendars and, er, the pots of ‘Lee Miller apple jam’ offered for sale (Miller’s last decades having been characterised by a love of cooking – presumably also the tenuous justification for the apron), and The Art of Lee Miller exemplifies that knick-knackification of art exhibitions which is more and more an integral part of the museum ‘deal’ these days. It is as if, having first experienced a body of work as ‘Art’, we are immediately expected to re-consume it in the form of kitsch.

Interestingly, however, the Lee Miller estate is too keen to preserve (or should that be push?) the status of her œuvre as ‘Art’ – cf. the exhibition’s title – to have allowed too much exploitation of her images in the merchandise accompanying this particular show. As far as I could tell from my visit, there is only a calendar and a few postcards that actually feature reproductions of Miller’s photographs, although the mug is decorated with one of her drawings. Instead, it is photography that provides the knick-knack merchants with their main visual and material referent.

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.

Of course, in exhibitions devoted to dead photographers, objects like cameras and light meters have long functioned as relics of the medium’s past as well as of the revered auteur in question. So I’m not saying these sorts of things have suddenly come into fashion thanks to the impact of digitality. It nevertheless seems that more attention is more routinely being paid, at least by curators, to the means and materials of photographic production. Recent shows such as Pictures for the Press at the Getty in Los Angeles and La Photographie humaniste at the BnF in Paris have in different ways dealt with the materiality of editorial photography in the era of paper-based mass media. Meanwhile, the Parisian auction house Artcurial has in their handling of print sales from the archives of photo agencies attempted to imbue the ephemeral and often anonymous news photograph with the value of the collectible objet d’art. (I examine this phenomenon in an article to appear in the first issue of the new journal Photographies, forthcoming early 2008).

One of my working hypotheses is that, as photographs are increasingly experienced as de-materialised objects, flickering (or flickr-ing, if you like) across a screen, the physical accoutrements of analogue photography are correspondingly becoming imbued with an auratic, even fetishistic quality. This is not to deny that digital photography has its own materiality. Rather, it is to acknowledge that film, paper and wet chemicals – the production materials of the analogue photographic process – may point more acutely towards a particular haptic object than do the instruments of digital photography. This may be because the combination of film, paper and chemicals always in the final instance produce some sort of photographic, or at least photo-technic, object, whereas a photographic image is only one of any number of products that can be realised with the help of code, screen and keyboard.

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.

Inspired by the evocative representation of a photographic library in Stephen Poliakoff’s Shooting the Past (BBC, 1999), and building on my own personal experience as a picture researcher, I’m investigating how memory is utilised by those whose job it is to classify, organise and retrieve photographic images. One of my contentions is that the type of ‘photographic memory’ which is a major asset when attempting to locate a given picture in a physical archival space is quite different from the type of memory required when trying to retrieve an image from a digital archive using a text-based search engine. The very exact visual and spatial memory that the term photographic memory refers to seems to be of little use when one cannot remember the precise keyword that will bring up the desired image on the screen. And likewise, it seems an impossible task to supply each image file with enough keywords, or metadata, to cover all the potential associations and connotations that the human brain might make from the totality of visual stimuli contained in one single image.

Computer scientists work to bridge this semantic gap between language and visual interpretation by the development of ever-more complex image recognition software, with a view to enabling so-called content-based image retrieval (as opposed to the concept-based format of the keywording system, which in effect is only a digitised version of the traditional index or card catalogue). In my project, however, I am less concerned with how computers might be taught to replicate human brain functions than with how the actual human beings working with pictures and computers negotiate, on a daily basis, not just the semantic gap between data and image but equally the sensory gap between image file and image object.

The notion of the photograph as a material object is critical to the other aspect of photography’s relationship to memory that I want to explore in this project. This is related to questions first raised in my PhD thesis, which engaged with the intimate relationship between personal, cultural and material memories as they converge in popular photographic representations of the not-too-distant past. Towards the end of that project, I became intrigued by how the memorial significance and poignancy of black-and-white photographic prints appears increasingly bound up with the pastness they figure by virtue of their very material support – that is, their physical manifestation on photo-sensitised paper or film. My current work proceeds, in part, from this premise that the photographic print is increasingly coming to represent a material memory of the medium’s own past.