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PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE POST-TRUTH ENVIRONMENT.

“Truth may be stranger than fiction, but many of the camera’s statements are stranger than truth itself… after countless processes of reproduction and re-reproduction [the photograph] has become an autonomous entity on its own [and] functions almost as a symbol, an image, a work of art in its own right”

Extract from Reyner Banham’s essay ‘Parallel of Life and Art’, Architectural Review (1953)

If one rhetoric has been exhausted above all others during the past twelve months, it is that we now live in a post-truth world. Despite unanimous agreement that this no sort of accomplishment, given their sudden emergence and subsequent pervasiveness in mainstream media, post-truth narratives have often tailed into sensationalism; implying the immediate abandonment of all transparency and certainty, within the duration of a ballot count.

Nonetheless, for many artists, probing the nature of truth in society is nothing new. From Reyner Banham’s seminal review of Parallel of Life of Art (1953) [i], via John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) [ii], and as recently as Wolfgang Tillmans’ Truth Study Centre (2005) [iii], critical investigations have long emphasized visual media’s role in the construction of preconceived principles and judgments.

At a time when a resurging appreciation of brutalist aesthetics has triggered enquires into the writing and rewriting of the movement’s history, it is no coincidence that the presence of Banham’s critical spirit could be felt across multiple major exhibitions of the first post-truth summer. Engaging particularly with the relationship between visual reproduction and symbolism, Wolfgang Tillmans’ solo exhibition at the Tate Modern, David Campany’s A Handful of Dust at the Whitechapel Gallery, and Akram Zaatari’s Against Photography: An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation at the MACBA, all reassess the dualism of art and reality to reveal how the photograph - more than a mere documentation of the latter - can function as a work of art in its own right. Coincidentally, with the infamous Brexit Bus having since become an unlikely metaphor for a referendum of unfounded claims and inevitable compromise, the exhibitions pay particular attention to the photographic production and reproduction of vehicles. This is a part of a wider common focus on material objects and the relationships implicated by their visual representation. As suggested by Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, these connections are made problematic when images, whether they are cultural symbols or judicial artifacts, become politicized; a process for which the artist’s accountability must also be evaluated.

Having dual German and British citizenship, Wolfgang Tillmans’ engagement with the EU referendum reflected at once his personal anchoring to the matter and a consciousness towards the political responsibilities of the artist. Nonetheless, whilst the posters and prints he designed for the Remain movement feature in his latest solo exhibition, Tillmans’ interest in the political rhetoric now associated with Brexit’s chaotic upheaval - of unfounded claims and inevitable compromise - predates the recent referendum. Coming to prevalence at the start of the 21st century, the artist’s emergence coincided with the politics of the “Unknown-unknown”; a phrase coined in 2002 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to describe the supposed threat of nuclear arms in the Middle East and justify the USA’s subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2002. Such oblivious ignorance towards the political prerequisite of certainty, and the increasingly ever-warping standards of truth and justice, would influence Tillmans’ 2005 book and exhibition Truth Study Centre. Further inspired by the blanket denial of HIV and AIDS by certain orthodox organizations in Africa, Tillmans is conscious of the way that media, in cohesion with other political institutions, seeks to deliver truth, and the socio-political implications of making such a claim. To exhibit the photographic work of Truth Study Centre, Tillmans interweaved his intensely-personal images with various photocopied newsprints and press-clippings reacting to specific events. Across the thirteen tables Tillmans presents, severe disjuncture emerges. The result is a set of conflicting, incongruous narratives, all claiming to represent the truth, whilst in reality undermining photography’s credibility as a documentary tool, disrupting the pretense of journalistic objectivity, and suggesting the possibility of interplay between the two.  

With the Tate exhibition also encompassing his previous works Fruit Logistica (2012) [iv] and The Cars (2015) [v], the audience is urged to reassess its understanding of material objects and recognize how images can multiply and manipulate their meaning. Whilst material goods are so often understood – if at all - as fixed sign of everyday life, the exhibition stresses the myriad of social and cultural interactions that define the relationship between commercial photography and materiality, both in terms of the advertising of capitalist goods, and the physical reproduction of images. With the development of high-resolution printing and scanning devices enabling his growth as an artist in the past two decades, Tillmans has long utilized his natural attunement to visual reproductive technologies to explore their capacity to manipulate reality. Aligning photographs taken at a fruit exposition in Berlin with parallel images from a screen-printing fair in Barcelona, Fruit Logistica blurs the boundary between the actual and the technologically reproduced; satisfying Banham’s assertion, and materializing the image of the organic object into an autonomous entity. Beyond an ode to his own medium, the 2012 work served as a wary assessment of the capabilities of commercially reproduced imagery as a recreator and proliferator of modern, street-level assumptions.

This is further explored in The Cars, which unravels the excess materialities of the automobile. Intrigued by the photographer’s tendency to edit or remove any signs of vehicles from architectural images as if they are obstructions, Tillmans presents the vehicle as an inescapable and productive feature of the urban landscape. Aligning photographs of passing cars, as would be immediately perceived by the artist, with both static and commercially-derived images, the work reveals the vehicle’s multifaceted social and cultural identities. Whilst the first form of images present the car as an object of physical urban movement – the moving subjects often blurred, unidentifiable or in an anonymous mass – more precise assessments of car design reveal an underside of calculated inequalities. The presentation of luxury cars as polished objects of desire not only conflicts with the experience of vehicles for the vast majority of the world’s population, but reinforces the car as a vehicle of not only physical, but also social and economic mobility. Right down to Tillmans’ (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) observation of the increasingly menacing appearance of headlights, Cars is an intriguing insight into the grander hegemonic forces for which the automobile is a symbolistic vehicle.

By defetishizing the car, Wolfgang Tillmans engages with what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek describes as the “unknown-knowns” of society; the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend to not know about even though they form the background of our public values [vi]. Whilst Donald Rumsfeld justified the Iraqi invasion as self-defense against a speculative and generalized threat, Zizek’s interpretation - reacting to the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the obscenely-celebratory images through which it was delivered to the Western world – reframes this fear as an internalized and constructed specter of the Islamic world. Seeking a link between cultural assumptions and the means via which Orientalist narratives are produced, Akram Zaatari’s Against Photography: An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation [vii]  uses images of the vehicle in twentieth century Egypt to simultaneously trace the lineages of the country’s modernization, and underline the problematic nature of documentary archives. Stemming from his work with the Arab Image Foundation, a photographic collection and preservation archive which currently holds a record of over 30,000 images from the Middle East and North Africa, Zaatari’s project faces both the internal challenge of a culture in which photography is not as openly embraced, and the external difficulties presented by the selectiveness of Orientalist representations of Arabic world. Images which appear to symbolise modernisation, like that of an Egyptian man posing next to a Western automobile, are concealers of hidden privileges such as having the status and wealth to sit for a photographer in the early twentieth century. In the meantime, lending to the increasing popularity of the automobile, Syrian nomadic culture disappears without photographic trace. Such inequalities of privilege and preference manifest themselves in Zaatari’s wealth of Egyptian tourist photos; many of which have been deliberately underexposed to ensure that local workers are obscured to nothing more than barely visible shadows, whilst simultaneously emphasizing the pale skin of the Western travelers posing camel-back. Having remapped the landscape in line with notions of territorial identity, themselves a by-product of the borders fixed by European colonial powers at the beginning of the twentieth century, Zaatari argues that the automated vehicle has replicated geographical colonialist legacies. Thus, with the camel repressed as a nomadic tradition, yet all too prevalent in these type of images, its reproduction in Orientalist contexts marks the divergence between the reality of Arabic modernization and its photographic representation.

It is now evident that attempting to construct a historic order or lineage using only photographic sources can have severe limitations and implications. Nonetheless, having seen its capacity to reveal modern intimations, both intentionally and accidentally, it is equally problematic to denounce photography as a documentary medium. As Reyner Banham asserted, across the lifetime of a photograph – caught in the balance between instantaneousness and timelessness – its meaning can be radically altered and exploited. Therefore, any artist willing to embrace photography as a documentary tool must possess a heightened awareness of such timings, particularly in a political context.

To navigate this issue, curators whose work comprises of building histories via the photographic medium must acknowledge that their work is merely speculative, particularly if they assume a privileged position.

One artist to do this is David Campany, who embraces the flexibility of the photograph in his book A Handful of Dust (2015) [viii], subsequently presented at the Whitechapel Gallery. An imaginative and experimental realignment of culture and photography in the twentieth century, Campany probes the multiple facets of an image made by Man Ray and Duchamp in 1922, now commonly referred to as Dust Breeding, to hypothesize the development of the medium’s chemical, artistic and documental nature. Campany’s work underlines the ease with which a determined narrative can be curated through images, but simultaneously reiterates the danger this carries. Despite being wholly apolitical, A Handful of Dust’s narrative is neither accidental or coincidental, and rather the work of an artist whose curation process involves highly-privileged access to archival and documental sources. Therefore, whilst they occupy different spheres, A Handful of Dust shares many of the privileges exercised by the very powers that Akram Zaatari attempts to subvert.

Thus, if the image is made problematic by a process of reproduction which emphasizes one narrative over the other, then how does a medium so vulnerable to misinterpretation, yet with so many inextricable ties to truth, continue its documental responsibilities into the future?

Advancing on the notions of Gerry Badger’s CCCB exhibition Propaganda Books Versus Protest Books [ix], which tests the flexibility of photographic interpretation in the most intense political situations, Eyal Weizman’s MACBA installation Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics [x] works against the manipulating nature of war images to propose an alternative process of investigative photography. As outlined in the project’s de-facto manifesto, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2017) [xi], Weisman’s demand for more material and aesthetic engagement with the implications of state violence and armed conflict marks an evolution of the constructionist work of his contemporaries. Bringing such ideals into the legal realm, the Goldsmith’s-based research firm provides a blueprint for the future of photographic documentation which acknowledges the medium’s role in constructing inequalities, only to stress its parallel capacity to rework them. When the presence of an image is multiplicitous - its manipulations at any one time political, juridical, institutional and informal - any attempt to counter-act such processes must be likewise. Therefore, rather than abandon photography as a documentary medium, and in turn surrendering its power, Weizman engages with the functions and vulnerabilities of the image, to re-formulate it is a forensic medium.

The decision to initiate Forensic Architecture, claims Weizman, was inspired by the ground-breaking investigative work of Richard Helmer. With a team of fellow pathologists, Helmer orchestrated the positive identification of Josef Mengele in Sao Paolo, Brazil, following the exhumation of the body of the Nazi war criminal in 1979. Unlike traditional forensic analyses, the Mengele identification process collated and combined, for the first time in an instance of such importance, various forms of photographic imagery to develop a bank of visual evidence sufficient to provide a conclusive identification. With photographic stills of Mengele being the only available source from which to identify a likeliness between the subject and the exhumated skeleton, Helmer moved beyond the superficial capacity of the photograph by imposing static images of the criminal’s head over video images of the found skull. When the result was deemed sufficient evidence to positively identify Mengele, Helmer had initiated a new wave of technological forensics.

Taking issue with the tendency of traditional forms of conflict documentation to drive parochial narratives, Forensic Architecture builds upon Helmer’s legacy in its demand for innovative sources of visual evidence used in response to issues as wide as terrorism, state-violence, and climate change. The need to drive for innovation, however, is also a politically enforced one. Investigations carried out by Forensic Architecture into civilian deaths and drone strikes in North Warizastan have faced obstacles in the form of the state’s control of satellite imagery. Unmanned aerial vehicles have re-configured the geographies of conflict, making anybody visible – thus, vulnerable – at any moment, no matter their location. Simultaneously, this form of panoptic surveillance has birthed a new wave of image conflict. It is perhaps no coincidence that when UAVs surface on the news, it is too often to report cases of friendly-fire or the destruction of unintended targets; over drone footage of scrolling, dark foothills, and human settlements reduced to silhouettes of white-heat. When drone strikes can leave an entrance hole as small as 4cm in the roof of a building, for the Forensic Architecture team, tracing the genealogies of an attack can be an incredibly difficult task. To make secondary visual evidence more inaccessible, censorship of US military satellite imagery renders any suspected victims virtually invisible, with the resolution of images degraded, supposedly on the grounds of privacy and security, to the extent that a male body is masked within the square of a single pixel. As a result, when investigating civilian deaths, Weizman and his team are forced to undergo a process of visual reconstruction, using a combination of primary visual accounts of the drone strikes, and sources of secondary information which hasn’t been rendered unusable by state control. Investigating a case in Miranshah, Northern Warizastan, video footage of the site’s wreckage, which had been smuggled out of the zone and aired on public TV, was meticulously studied to build a spatial visualisation of the attack. Using a collage technique from single frames, Weizman and his team were able to reconstruct the building, reveal the scale of damage, and estimate casualty numbers. Once a location has been identified, this can then be verified by publicly available resources, even those as rudimentary as Google Maps, and subsequently tied back to known drone attacks.

Another area that Forensic Architecture has been active is in Palestine, where it has sought to hold IDF forces accountable for crimes when existing evidence falls short. In the case of Bassem Abu Rahma, who was struck and subsequently killed by a tear-gas canister during protests in Bil’in, West Bank in 2009, Weizman and his team of investigators used available primary evidence to create a comprehensive audio-visual spatial analysis of the event, and subsequently challenge the Israeli verdict of accidental death. For Palestinians, the camera is an essential protest tool. Beyond its empowering potential for publicity, it is also too often the only piece of evidence capable of proving excessive-force and out-right violence against demonstrators. 

Further considering the IDF’s notoriety for targeting and destroying Palestinian cameras, video-recorders are therefore indispensable for protestors, and Weizman was fortunate enough to access an abundance of visual footage at the scene of Abu Rahma’s death. Identifying the firing of the munition by a soundbite to begin with, the forensic architects synced the footage of three on-site recordings, and subsequently used satellite imagery to trace the movement of the corresponding cameramen on a map. This enabled Weizman to locate the victim, the trajectory of the munition, and a wired-fence, which according to Israeli military caused a ricochet that forced the direction of the canister towards Abu Rahma. It was a single still-frame of David Reeb’s footage, fatally marked at 5:44:07, which pinpointed the final contact, and where all possible trajectories were analysed. Weizman devised a threshold to determine whether the shot was fired directly at Abu Rahma, or if a supposed ricochet was plausible. Calculating a maximum angle at which the shot could have realistically caught the wire fence by chance, and thus be deemed an accident, the investigation concluded that the canister had been deliberately aimed towards the victim. Weizman’s evidence caught the attention of various human rights organizations and in July 2010, the Israeli military backtracked on their previous statements by re-opening a criminal investigation into the case. After an initial failure to prosecute the soldier guilty of killing Abu Rahma, the victim’s party have continued to seek justice for his death, and the evidence collated by Weizman and the Forensic Architecture team will remain invaluable in doing so. Nonetheless, with Israeli government officials maintaining that the evidence is insufficient, despite failing to provide any sort of alternative, it is clear that Forensic Architecture still faces some substantial obstacles.

If there is any merit to be found in the recent political climate, it may be that the growth of discourse surrounding political truth has reinvigorated discussions regarding the instability of photography as a documentary medium. Building on the legacy of Banham and Berger, Wolfgang Tillmans’ work has helped to reassert the image’s potential as a cultural symbol, with the capacity to shape and re-shape the assumptions that we consider truth. Additionally, Akram Zaatari’s anti-orientalist engagements have gone one step further to demystify the nature of subconscious assumptions, framing them as the hegemonic constructions of an external, dominant force. With selective photographic reproduction and the privileging of specific discourses the means by which prejudiced histories emerge, these artists have found success in subverting these legacies of inequality.

Nonetheless, as much as the re-reproduction of images makes for an artistic project fit for the post-truth era, it is also evident that such works are not themselves entirely unproblematic, nor freed from the implications of the discourses they attempt to subvert. Rather, to collate and manipulate images in a constructive manner, artists must exercise – to some degree - the same privilege they work against; characterized by a power to influence through visual imagery, and an access to archival resources sufficient to do so. Furthermore, being retrospective by nature, such works do not face to the same extent an active fight against the physical, infrastructural, and legal controls which orchestrate the construction of inequalities. Whilst attempts to re-construct documentary lineages have moved beyond an understanding of the possession, production, and reproduction of images as a purely technical process, we are only now beginning to understand how corresponding political engagements work on the ground level.

For Eyal Weizman, the fight to deliver truth, though mediated via visual imagery, is an explicitly legal one. Forensic Architecture is neither a journalistic institution nor a human rights group, but in its loyalty to the photographic medium it must assume the responsibilities and implications of both. The result is a premise for the future of documentary photography which challenges the traditional manifestations of the medium’s vulnerability whilst fighting the physical, violently juridical processes which constitute them.

Therefore, although photography’s role in the privileging of discourses and the formulation of cultural symbols has long been perceived as a gradual, inevitable process, at the time of the demystification of post-truth politics, recognizing photography’s active participation in current inequalities and uncertainties may likewise provide a diagnostic blueprint for its future as a documentary medium.

References and Readings:

[i] Banham, R. (1953) Parallel of Life and Art. Architectural Review. [ii] Berger, J. (1972) Ways of seeing. London: BBC Enterprises [iii] Tillmans, W. (2005) Truth Study Centre. London: TASCHEN [iv] Tillmans, W. (2012) Fruit Logistica. Köln: Walther König. [v] Tillmans, W. (2015). The Cars. Köln: Walther König. [vi] Zizek, S. (2004). What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib. In These Times. [vii] MACBA (2017). Akram Zaatari Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation.  http://www.macba.cat/en/exhibition-akram- zaatari/1/exhibitions/expo. (Accesed: 24/09/17) [viii] Campany, D. (2015). A Handful of Dust. Mack: London. [ix] CCCB (2017). Photobook Phenomenon. http://www.cccb.org/en/exhibitions/file/photobook-phenomenon/225004. (Accessed: 24/09/17) [x] Forensic Architecture. (2017). Forensic Architecture. http://www.forensic-architecture.org/.(Accessed: 24/09/17) [xi] Weizman, E. (2017).Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Massachusetts: Zone Books