A Documentary Practice … of Sorts

Abstract

Since the overarching theme for this conference is Expansion--examining how photography has expanded since 1960 and contemplating what we are going to do with the unprecedented proliferation of images in the world--I thought I would start with a short piece I wrote for An in America last year in response to similar questions about the current state of contemporary photography. I think it sums up how I position my practice in relation to photography now. Pictures are not still anymore--no longer tied to any particular substrate or file extension), they're constantly moving and forever changing. The image torrent is actually alive, emergent and perhaps more indexical than photography has ever been conceived in the past. The sheer quantity and accessibility of digital images neutralizes the personal, particular, individual, and transforms the local into the impersonal, abstract, collective, and global. All images (artful, authored, pedestrian or un-authored) become un-assignable and anonymous in this unlimited exchange of visual information, and function as a collective visual index of data that represents us--a constantly changing and spontaneous auto-portrait. The index has shifted from visually descriptive truth to accumulative visual data. When I actively wander this abstracted world as though a documentary photographer on a quest for meaningful subjects, I find them. (1) For the first time, I have been able to actually call myself a photographer as opposed to an artist who makes photo-based work. I wander this virtual space of the internet, looking for my subject. I move though various kinds of sites on the web to dig deeper into a subject in much the way I might if I were a documentary photographer wanting to take on a subject in the material world. One of my subjects is photography. In 2006 I was researching the most photographed subject in the world, so I went to Flickr because it's a cross-generational, noncommercial, nonprofessional, global photo-sharing platform. And useful to me is that people are tagging their photographs based on what they think the subjects of their photographs are. In some way, my dependency on this tagging to find images could be thought of as collaborating with these Flickr users. In 2006, was the most photographed subject on Flickr. Not surprising: we all take pictures of sunsets. But when you think about it, it's kind of absurd: We only have one sun in the sky, but we make millions of images of it. And, more absurd, we then upload these pictures to photo-sharing sites. So the image of the singular sun--hot, consistent, symbol of enlightenment, feeling good, vitamin D, out there in infinite space--is literally being subsumed by this electronic, cool, virtual space. I couldn't imagine a greater contrast. And equally striking to me was that most of the pictures looked the same. They followed a visual script. So I started to focus on the sun itself and think about the idea of individuality versus collectivity. What does it mean for us all to take a picture of the sun? What kind of ownership is involved in that? I downloaded the images that had a very distinctive sun imaged in them somewhere. I wasn't interested in images that looked unique or authored. I wanted only those that looked the same as all the other images, that had the same iconic sunset quality to them. Collecting a couple thousand of these pictures, I cropped just the suns from them and uploaded them to Kodak (when Kodak Gallery was still around), to make 4 x 6-inch mini-lab C-prints. I also uploaded them back onto Flickr. In 2006 there were 541,795 images tagged sunset on Flickr. And in 2007, when the work was installed at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, there were 2,303,057 images tagged sunset on Flickr. The exponential rise seemed extraordinary, so I began to use the number on the day of making the installation as part of the title--the title of each installation reflects the number of sunsets photographed and shared on Flickr at the time that I'm showing them. …