Abstract

The image surplus of the 21st-century directly maps a crisis of critical new ideas, as well a social shift away from confronting economic, environmental and political consequences. Today, in the economy of images, exchange is the formal determinant of a distracting means of re-production. In an age of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, photography is a form of both abstract labour and enjoyment. While we usually consider photographs to be equivalents of a diverse number of things – when they show our faces, our sunsets, our favourite food, our pets, our holidays and our celebrations – ultimately they fail to maintain this assertion, under even minor scrutiny. What if photography contains within it the capacity to be more than a representation of some thing or other? Would this not provide a radical re-reading of photography and a means to reimagine the structures of capital? In other words, to engage with photography as a way of thinking allows us to begin to rephrase the discourses of production and exchange.Following Marx’s formula of commodity-money-commodity I suggest there is a process of experience-image-experience, when an experience is photographed. I argue that in the digital world we are undergoing an inverted shift to image-experience-image. This occurs when the creation of images becomes the primary aim and objective. In this new formula, image becomes more than image: it is the mediation of experience into something incrementally excessive of simply image and becomes a new means for a different mode of production.

Highlights

  • In the economy of everyday photographic images, we might consider exchange as being the formal determinant of a distracting means ofproduction.1 At a time of crisis, regarding challenging economic, environmental and political consequences, the obsession with and production of an excess of images appears to express a fundamental failure of our vision: signifying a kind of blind spot in our awareness

  • If photography operates at an intersection of two forces – of labour and enjoyment – undefined by either one or the other, oscillating between them, how might we understand these? On a representational level, a surplus escapes the photographic image

  • As I have outlined above, in representational terms, I suggest that what is excess or surplus in the image is the very nature of photography itself

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Summary

John Hillman

The image surplus of the 21st-century’ directly maps a crisis of critical new ideas, as well a social shift away from confronting economic, environmental and political consequences. In the economy of images, exchange is the formal determinant of a distracting means of re-production. To engage with photography as a way of thinking allows us to begin to rephrase the discourses of production and exchange. I argue that in the digital world we are undergoing an inverted shift to image-experience-image. This occurs when the creation of images becomes the primary aim and objective. In this new formula, image becomes more than image: it is the mediation of experience into something incrementally excessive of image and becomes a new means for a different mode of production

Introduction
The limits of representation
Photographic excess
Algorithmic photography and contemporary experience
The distracting rhythm of photography
The rendering of desire
The surplus of experienced reality
Conclusion
Full Text
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