What do Pictures Want?

Abstract

As I browsed many publications on display in Artbook bookstore, some provocative language began to jump out at me. Several titles posed questions or challenges about nature of photography that reflect, if not a crisis, a restlessness, a collective reevaluation of what images are and what we should do with them. I was inspired to use those titles here to help punctuate my summation of this weekend's conversations. Because I had some perspective from moderating first Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) Photo-Bookworks Symposium in 2010, I couldn't help but reflect on developments in field in two intervening years. What are we thinking about? What do pictures want us to do with them? The 2010 symposium was hardly first time that a conversation about photobooks had taken place, especially at VSW. Scott McCarney reflected on his beginnings as a photobook artist in early 1980s, when photobook was future of medium; now we discuss future of photobook, not because it is threatened but rather because it is, in fact, increasingly essential, and we can't wait to see where it's headed. My sense from that first symposium was one of reaffirming photo-bookwork as an integral, vital component of contemporary photographic practice. The artists and publishers who spoke then understood history, as well as their roles in writing a new definition of what a photo-bookwork is. In my closing remarks two years ago, I wrote: The photobookwork, then, is a series of images--that is, a tightly knit, well-edited, organized group or set of images in a linear sequence presented in book form. Linearity is important because it gives imagery its temporal quality. Events occur, stories unfold, things are shown and said; through progression of construct, we view conditions of being in world, flow of time and experience. Now, I would say that definition has greatly expanded. As Valerio Spada mentioned, every contemporary photographer also shoots video; technology facilitates it, and pace of internet demands it. At Rochester Institute of Technology, where I teach photography, we increasingly accommodate push toward moving media--although, in private, we may wonder among ourselves: who is watching all of these videos? It is encouraging, therefore, for us still image aficionados, that all of artists we've heard from this weekend are committed to book object, although it is not without its complications, nor is it necessarily doing all work itself. What emerged from these discussions was an intriguingly contemporary theme: the photobook as performance. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In his witty and evocative presentation of his recent book The Amnesia Pavilions, Nicholas Muellner challenged us to visualize, as another recent title suggests, Words without Pictures (by Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein). Muellner sees work in multiple forms; his perfectly paced dance between images and text, sometimes overlapping, alternating silence or darkness, is mirrored by deliberate rhythms of his book design, yet Muellner readily acknowledges what he calls compromise of both forms--writing and imagemaking--in his work. Through performing his book, Muellner has found a way to deliberately exploit and subvert limitations of each medium. We all know about and some of us may have even experienced--Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a slide show set to love songs, but I never understood it as a codependency between forms; they are separate. As if to underscore Muellner's complex presentation, John DeMerritt, a fine art bookbinder, shut it down, as kids say, showing us a pretty spectacular book he fabricated with LED screens embedded in pages--a book that has been, not exhibited, but performed, in two venues. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Muellner's sketchy diagram for his presentation (beginning > pathos > gay > ending) is, I think, also a useful framework for several of books we've seen--all highly personal works--including Myra Greene's book project My White Friends (2007-present). …