The artists presented in the biennial celebration of photography
Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal are divided roughly into half
Canadian (mostly Quebecois) and half international artists,
with the last two biennials being smaller than those of many
of the previous years (this year’s edition offered twenty-five
exhibitions). This year’s organizers and its curator, Anne-Marie
Ninacs, maintained the general high quality of the exhibitions,
again providing a showcase for international work produced
over the last twenty years. Ninacs’s chosen theme was “Lucidity.
Inward Views.” She explains that the artists featured “turn their
cameras towards themselves and conceive of photography as an
introspective process, an opportunity for meditation, a mode of
consciousness, even a means of revealing the unconscious” and
notes, “lucidity also signifies seeing clearly in the darkness.”

Luis Jacob crafted his exhibition “The Eye, The Hole, The
Picture” (2011) from the photographic archives of Montréal’s
Musée McCord. The decades-old gallery views presumably
taken by museum staff anticipate the later large-format images
of Thomas Struth but the strength of the show was found in
the editorial groupings (on walls and in vitrines) that resulted
in compositions that force questions about social relationships,
with the image ultimately serving as a catalyst for subjectivity.

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The seventh annual Brave Festival and the eleventh New
Horizons International Film Festival (New Horizons IFF) took
place July 2011 in Wrocław, Poland. The festivals permeated
the city, from the cobblestone dust kicked up at the outdoor
Arsenal Stage during music/multimedia/performance works, to
the enormous outdoor cinema screen in the city’s central Rynek
Square, to numerous above- and underground clubs with live
jazz or DJ/VJs spinning it old-school. Offering more than five
hundred films, fifty music and cultural performances, related
gallery exhibitions and programming, and both ticketed and free
events, the festivals attract visitors from around the world. Just a
sampling of the offerings revealed the quality of discourse about
media-based work and culture.

Wrocław (pronounced vrots-love) is the fourth largest city in
Poland, and the capital of Lower Silesia Province. The thousandyear-
old city has a rich and diverse history: it has been destroyed
and rebuilt repeatedly since medieval times, and consequently
has had over fifty names. For the past sixty-six years, it has been
the resilient city of Wrocław. It is home to the rebellious Orange
Alternative Dwarves who brought about political change in the
1980s—nonviolently, but with a mischievous sense of disruption.
At night, as one navigates the city’s many bridges, the air is full
of light and color, reflecting off the River Oder (Odra). It is a city
that embraces cultural treasures and differences, remixing past,
present, and future—as is expressed in the planned cultural
events, street art, and clubs. Historical and cultural traces are
both very present and glaringly absent. Many cultural treasures
and people have been created and destroyed, displaced and
relocated to and from this now vibrant city of over 600,000
residents. The city has a young vibe (one in six residents are
students) and an old soul.

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During a 1998 interview, German photographer Andreas
Gursky stated that since the photographic medium
has been digitized, “a fixed definition of the term
‘photography’ has become impossible.” His statement echoes the
written thoughts of several current photographers and scholars
who have announced that photography is in the midst of an identity
crisis with various apocalyptic names and explanations, including:
“post-photography,” “the post-medium condition,” “photography
after photography,” and “the death of photography.” These
discussions are premised on the argument that the emergence of
digital-manipulation software in the 1980s caused the medium to
lose touch with one of its defining characteristics: its relationship
to the real, or its indexicality.

Digital photography has failed to measure up to those
revolutionary prophecies. Since its invention, the medium of
photography has had a malleable relationship to the real. In the
essay accompanying his Plate XX: Lace from the book The Pencil of
Nature (1844), William Henry Fox Talbot notes the photogram’s
ability “to exhibit the pattern with accuracy.” However, Talbot
also dedicates a significant portion of that text to explaining the
image’s inaccuracy: the piece of lace, originally black, appears
to be white in the photograph. Early published comments about
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1838 photograph Boulevard du
Temple remark on the photograph’s fidelity to the appearance of
the Paris street. These accounts also note the puzzling way in
which the image’s extended exposure omits moving objects such
as carriages and pedestrians. Another often-overlooked founding
father of photography, Hippolyte Bayard, “faked”—or rather,
staged—his own death in Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840).
The contingent nature of pre-digital photographic “truth” is the
central thesis of the upcoming exhibition “Faking It: Manipulated
Photography before Photoshop” (October 2012–February 2013) at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

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Documentary film scholar Michael Renov has made a
case for reading Abraham Ravett’s film Everything’s For
You (1989) in ethical terms. As Renov explains, this
means departing from documentary film’s historical recourse to
questions of truth, knowledge, and representation, and framing
the film in terms of a conception of ethics derived from the
philosophy of Jewish Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Levinas.
Renov’s essay is also an occasion to compare the practices of film
and video production in works that look to the same contested
geographical region. I propose to direct Renov’s thinking
toward Ravett’s more recent film, The March (1999), which
invites comparison with Lebanese-Canadian video artist Jayce
Salloum’s video untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999/2002).
Each work features a woman witness, and each presents us with
material for an archive of documents on the Middle East.

In The March Ravett edits together footage of his mother shot over
a number of years using sync-sound filmmaking equipment. He
makes the same request of her every time he shoots, namely that
she relate her experience of a march under the watch of Nazi
soldiers. In untitled part 1: everything and nothing, Salloum shoots
a single-take interview on video with Soha Bechara, a young
woman who has recently been released from an Israeli detention
center. The video is edited down to forty minutes and the subject’s
statements translated into English subtitles. Each work takes an
experimental approach to documentary by approaching the
record of testimony with some caution.

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In 2005 the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton in the
United Kingdom commissioned Paul Antick to produce
fourteen billboards from his art project itourist? Each
of the billboards featured photographs taken by Antick at
various locations in Central and Eastern Europe that are
associated with the Holocaust, including Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Sobibor, Madjanek, Chelmno, Belzec, and Terezín (formerly
Theresienstadt). In December 2006, the itourist? billboards were
simultaneously exhibited on the streets of Southampton and
London, and on the highway between Prague and Terezín in
the Czech Republic. In October 2009 seven were shown in a
public park in the medieval Polish city of Toruń.

Jane Tynan: Can you tell me where the itourist? project
began?

Paul Antick: When I was working at the University of
Westminster in the mid-1990s as a part-time tutor I found a book
on someone’s desk called In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941. It
was a collection of photographs by Willy Georg, a soldier in the
German Wehrmacht. Apparently he’d entered the ghetto and
then photographed what he found there. I was flipping through
this book and an image caught my attention: a young man who
looked like a beggar. He was dressed in rags and I don’t think he
had any shoes on his feet. He was staring directly at the camera
and what struck me about the picture was that it was like looking
into a mirror. He reminded me very much of how I used to look,
or how I thought I used to look, when I was that age—I think he
was between 17 and 20. Photographs often interest me, but they
don’t often affect me very much. This one did. It was an uncanny
thing, seeing that picture.

I went to Auschwitz for the first time with a friend nine years
ago. But I’d grown up with this thing people called “the
Holocaust”; I grew up in a Jewish family in England and it was a
word that kept cropping up. As I recall, nobody ever had much to
say about Auschwitz as such, nothing sustained; instead, words
like “Holocaust,” “Auschwitz,” “Germans” would be dropped
into conversations about other things. So there was an air of
familiarity about the Holocaust, and I remember sometimes
not feeling comfortable with the ways in which it was referred
to. At the time, when I was a teenager, I think it felt to me like
some people in my family derived a perverse kind of pleasure in
identifying with it. Now I don’t feel like that, or at least I don’t
just feel that. In fact I feel very differently about it. One of the
things that was obviously extraordinary about the Holocaust
was that it was dedicated to the systematic extermination of an
entire ethnic group. What bothered me as a young man was the
idea that some people who belonged to that group, people who
weren’t directly threatened by the Holocaust—for instance, the
people in my immediate family—appeared to me determined to
derive a weird form of kudos from having been indirectly touched
by it. This made me quite angry. Now I think I realize that the
Holocaust actually did touch them in very powerful ways, or at
least that being brought up in a country—England—at a time
when expressions of anti-Semitism were very common and in
many ways perfectly acceptable, was something that profoundly
affected them. Interestingly it seems easier for my family to
identify with the Holocaust than their own experiences of anti-
Semitism in England during the 1940s.

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Memory is undeniably subjective. In fact, as Astrid Mania has
noted, “The retention and recollection of experiences are among
the most unreliable and unpredictable of cerebral functions, and
our ability to accurately recall events is affected by neurological,
psychological and cultural factors.”1 Yet our desire to resist the
inevitable and preserve the integrity of our memories—guarding
our experiences and discounting revisions and editions—is
so ingrained that rather than accept the malleability of our
memories, we unconsciously forget, invent, and edit, resulting in a
loss (or gain) of detail, a re-contextualization of experience, and
a re-shuffling and re-combination of fragmented words, images,
and knowledge.

In the work of two contemporary video artists, Omer Fast and
Kerry Tribe, three manifestations of this process are exposed
and deconstructed, demonstrating several ways we unconsciously
access the past and construct a coherent representation from
incongruent—or even incompatible—fragments. Specifically, to
organize and rationalize memories we piece together available
information; to broaden the appeal and significance of our
memories we recontextualize our experience in imagined space
or time; and to clarify and confirm foggy or undocumented
memories, we intersubjectively correlate verbal, visual, and
mental clues. In turn, upon finding that both external cues and
internal gauges are in fact subjective, malleable, and unreliable,
we may acknowledge the difficulty of collating memory with
reality and venture beyond a harmonized and structured illusion
toward a more collective interpretation of the past.

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The first media art exhibition initiated by the Albright-Knox
Art Gallery in over a decade, “Videosphere: A New Generation”
represented a significant achievement for Buffalo’s modern and
contemporary art museum. The gallery last showcased timebased
art in 1996, when it organized “Being & Time: The
Emergence of Video Projection.” Curated by Marc Mayer, who
today heads the National Gallery of Canada, the landmark
exhibit included monumental installations such as Gary Hill’s
“Tall Ships” (1992) and Bill Viola’s “The Greeting” (1995). Of
the six artists featured in “Being & Time,” Bruce Nauman,
Tony Oursler, and Viola reappeared among twenty-four artists
represented in “Videosphere.”

Organized by Holly E. Hughes, Curator for the Collection, as
neither a comprehensive survey nor an evaluation of emerging
trends, “Videosphere” reflected the gallery’s efforts to bolster
its collection of time-based art, works that it did not acquire
until the 1990s. “Given its resonance with artists of recent
generations,” Hughes writes, “this genre of work has become
an increasingly integral component of strategies surrounding
collections of contemporary art.” Intergenerational and interdisciplinary,
Hughes’s selection of works connected the creative
impulses motivating the artists’ use of technology to longstanding
aesthetic themes.

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“HomeFrontLine: Reflections on Ten Years of War Since 9/11,”
co-curated by Ellen Fleurov and Leo Hsu, featured work by
eleven photographers and photojournalists exploring the impact
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The collection of images
included in the exhibition did what good photography does best:
offer windows and mirrors, those portals and flashpoints that
allow questions.

As is her strength, Nina Berman made us examine ourselves
and our home turf. Her photograph Boy and Girl at U.S. Marines
Recruiting Event, Orchard Beach, The Bronx, New York, 2007 (2007)
as well as her series “Homeland” (2003) force us to acknowledge
the degree to which militarism permeates our non-combatant
lives. Berman’s image of youth simulating a terrorist attack is the
new normal, and her image of a girl donning military gear over
her bikini at a beachside Marine recruitment event generates
curiosity more than a voyeuristic gaze, revealing much about
the concessions we make in delineating the slippery concept of
“homeland.”

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Throughout his four-decade career as an avant-garde filmmaker,
Peter Hutton has worked to transcend the limitations of words
and sounds, allowing images to speak eloquently for themselves.
Perhaps surprisingly, Hutton’s work recalls the sense of scale,
and awe of natural grandeur, that characterized the Hudson
River School painters, especially Thomas Cole. Yet Hutton’s
work rejects Cole’s “mythopoeic vision” portraying sublime
and pristine beauty. Instead, Hutton is haunted by ambivalence
toward the mixed blessings, for humanity and nature alike, of
human invention.

In a time when the majority of commercial film and television
editing seems increasingly manic, Hutton’s silent, lyrical, and
melancholy portraits of global locales evince a temporality of placidity and
stillness. As critic Scott MacDonald has observed, “Hutton’s films help us
to respect perception itself, and to enjoy an experience of cinema that seems to
lie outside the conventional world of hysterical consumption.”

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Maya Zack’s latest media installation, “Living Room,” is
seductive in its simplicity—it is comprised of an enclosed space,
a disembodied audio narrative, and four large-scale (4 x 10-foot)
computer-generated 3D prints. The subject is a 1930s apartment
in Berlin, but the imagery is a vehicle for an epistemic study of
memory, virtuality, and mediation.

Zack’s piece was housed in a living-room-sized box within the
museum. The work offers a visual-spatial dichotomy: the physical
space is empty but for an inviting bench, in contrast to the visual
fullness of the four walls, each containing an illusionistic view
of the urban apartment. The living areas might be described
as a conjoined kitchen, dining area, conservatory, study, and
parlor. The installation is uncannily disorienting; it is both flat
and spacious. Viewers physically situated in an interior space,
and wearing special glasses, look outward to see a contiguous
3D interior. The images on the four walls are all generated from
the same computer model; each shows a different cardinal point
of view that “unfolds” from the installation’s central space. We
are always outside of these stage settings and Zack heightens
this distance by dissolving and cross-cutting certain elements,
such as a piano, that would be situated at a room’s edge. Like a
movie set, the “front” wall in each image becomes a proscenium
or picture plane.

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I first experienced Janet Cardiff’s work in 2004, when her audio
walk entitled Her Long Black Hair (2004) was “on exhibit” in
New York. “On exhibit” meant that attendees could choose to
participate in Cardiff’s work by embarking on a forty-six-minute
audio journey through Central Park. Cardiff’s signature style
of combining narrative fragments with stream-of-consciousness
remarks evokes both wonder and bewilderment in participants.
In 2005, I again experienced her work, this time in collaboration
with George Bures Miller in “Pandemonium” (2005), a
cacophonous sound installation commissioned by Eastern State
Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Whenever Cardiff or Miller creates
a large-scale installation or single-channel video piece, sound is
the predominant force driving the work.

At Artpace, a residency and exhibition space for international
artists, Cardiff and Miller presented four video works and five
audio works, all of which dismantle our understanding of reality. A
recurrent theme throughout the exhibit was dreaming, and viewers
were often unsure what was real and what was a dream. The
artist duo incorporated binaural audio, “a method in which two
microphones recording separate channels are spaced several inches
apart to simulate the way in which human ears receive and process
sound,” to physically root the viewer/listener in the present.

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“ARS 11” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma,
Helsinki, was the eighth in a series of international exhibitions,
since 1961, aiming to discuss contemporary art and its audiences.
“ARS 11” focused on the art of Africa, bringing together thirty
artists working in different media that either live, have worked
in, or are from the continent. The exhibition was part of the
many exhibitions that link with Turku, the European Capital
of Culture in 2011—a two-hour drive from Helsinki. “ARS 11”
introduced artwork connected to Africa while posing questions
that are universal.

Alfredo Jaar’s video installation “We Wish to Inform You That
We Didn’t Know” (2010) presented documentary material about
the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. It juxtaposed statements by
United States President Bill Clinton with Rwandan interviewees
who survived the horrors. Jaar asks whether art can tell stories in
a way that the mass media cannot. The failure to comprehend,
respond to, and communicate an understanding about the nature
of “the pure evil” of the mass killings is apparent in Clinton’s
post-genocide speech. The evil is vividly present in the personal
accounts of the Rwandese who recall their “unconfirmed,”
subjective memories of the events. The piece invites discussion
about the differences between news coverage and artwork as
historic documents: Are there circumstances when art must
become involved in sharing the history? Moreover, can a video
installation function as a historic monument in the twenty-first
century—a meaningful memorial to an event—in a way that a
sculptural public memorial rarely can? Jaar’s questions extend
beyond Rwanda, offering the means of articulating messages and
concepts to global, transnational audiences.

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For many of us, knowledge of entomology goes no further than
the insect wisdoms of Gil Grissom of the fictional forensic team on
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Or so we think. There may be roughly
a million described insect species and millions more yet to be
recognized. In its incredible diversity and unfathomable numbers,
insect life creeps underground, takes flight, and crawls behind our
walls. According to Jussi Parikka, its logic is also endemic to our
technologies, and most of all, perhaps, our media.

Metaphors flow freely whenever humans and animals make
contact, but the threads Parikka follows tend to lead away from
narcissistic anthropomorphizing. Seeking detours around tooeasy
analogies, in which independent phenomena are recognized
as having coincident characteristics to poetic (if otherwise scant)
ends, Parikka takes a different track. With daring and disregard
for disciplinary boundaries, he argues that insects are actually
forms of media—or components of media systems. Not only can
we consider “media as [modeled on] insects,” but also “insects
as media” (viii). If the former schema imagines the insect as a
dessicated automaton that can be mimicked in technology
design, the latter underscores the vivacious interrelationships
upon which a colony depends. The superorganism formed by
inextricably linked members of a colony of termites, ants, or
eusocial bees and wasps is not simply a singular being sustained
through distributed intelligence. It is also a community, sustained
through communication practices observable and unobservable,
which we can begin to understand as media systems embodied
by individuals.

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Havana is fetishized in the American imagination. A nearly fiftyyear-
old embargo has imposed restrictions on travel and quelled
the spread of Cuban art and culture. The long-standing political
rhetoric against the Castro regime has only fueled a desire to
make sense of this island nation only ninety miles off the coast
of Florida. Michael Eastman’s new volume, Havana (2011), a
collection of nearly a hundred photographs from over the past
two decades, pays tribute to the spaces and people of the city, its
faded glory, and its all but forgotten beauty.

Eastman’s photographs are doorways to life in Havana, not
windows. The book is filled with full-page spreads and viewers
are invited to imagine the people who lived there as they cross
the threshold of the photograph. Skimming through Havana, one
imagines what it would have been like to be the first archeologist
to uncover the remains of Pompeii, as layers of ash revealed a
city frozen in time. In these photographs, readers discover a city
stuck somewhere between colonial past and post-revolutionary
present. Dramatic lighting illuminates empty spaces devoid of
people, in which the only sense of life is the richly colored walls
that have survived the ravages of time. In Portrait, Havana (2010),
turquoise walls frame a nearly abandoned sitting room sparsely
furnished with two chairs and a dusty chandelier. Like Pompeii,
the former majesty of the space is only conceivable in the absence
of figures. The former inhabitants of these spaces, as Vicki
Goldberg writes in her essay for the book, are “the successful rich
who were knocked off a pedestal by a revolution” (130). However,
in spite of this violent history, these spaces are strikingly beautiful
and bear no noticeable scars.

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The Electronic Mediations (EM) series of the University of
Minnesota Press has issued a welcome three-pack of titles by and
about Vilém Flusser. The series of volumes (numbers 32, 33, and
34) form a triad and complete a double set of Flusser’s previously
published books that once stood in somewhat lonely isolation in
English philosophical literature. Volumes 32 and 33 of this new
set complete Flusser’s writings on the technical image that began
with Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion Press, 2000);
and also constitute a third set of Flusser’s work in the EM Series,
including EM Vol 6, Flusser Writings (2002). If there’s a trilogy
among these double sets of threes, the constant base arises from
the recent EM volumes reaching back to the previous publications.
Towards a Philosophy of Photography finally has companions in print
with Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have
a Future? With this trilogy, we are able to complete the arc of
Flusser’s ideas on the far-reaching consequences of photography
on culture, communications, and thought. Ironically, the end
of the three-part run is capped by an implied beginning, Vilém
Flusser, An Introduction (hereafter, Introduction), the critical overview
that a growing number of Flusser readers have been waiting for.

Rather than a bit of irony, there is an aspect of necessity for
the Introduction appearing as a capstone to the series. It marks
a milestone in that we now have enough of Flusser’s writings in
English to begin to apprehend the constellations of his thought
involving media, translation, imagemaking, writing, and
history. Finally, there is a critical mass to work with thanks to
the University of Minnesota Press. Even so, as the Introduction
makes clear, every direction of Flusser’s work and thought
resists closure—as a trilogy, a quadrant or any other pattern
of numbers. And, as the Introduction makes even clearer, much
of Flusser’s work has yet to see the light of day as an English
translation or publication in any language. The factor of threes
with the EM series more appropriately marks a critical stage in
unfolding Flusser’s work twenty years after his death. With these
overlapping sets of three, we finally have an adequate base of
publications in English to gather a vivid unfolding of Flusser’s
thought, especially concerning his media theory of images and
the fate of writing.

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