A última foto: photography after landscape

‘Which of the two?’ – one feels compelled to ask on looking at the duplicated Christ in
Eduardo Brandão’s photograph, commissioned for Rosângela Rennó’s 2006 project A última
foto (The last photograph). And why would it have to be the last if the replication of Messiahs
within the picture appears to indicate the exact opposite, namely: infinite reproduction, or the
eternal return of the photographic. Even if such endless reproductibility were somehow the
target of a critique here, regretting the loss of singularity and substance, I doubt whether it
would really convince anyone since, of course, seriality was precisely what photography
introduced into Western visual economy. The possibility of mechanical reproduction, as
Benjamin insisted, condemned every image to the status of a copy without an original, an
Abbild without a Bild. In Brandão’s image, however, the idea of ‘reproduction’ is complicated
by the fact that the two images are eminently not the same. One –the screen of the little digital
camera– not only does not include yet another image of yet another camera focusing on the
Corcovado Christ, but it also limits the frame to the latter’s figure in telescopic zoom-in,
whereas the ‘outer’ image is a panoramic shot that includes the surrounding mountains. The
little digital camera might thus be seen as carrying out some kind of ironic revenge against the
analog image that enframes it, by directing against it the same de-auratizing effect that
photography, still according to Benjamin, had wrested upon things by stripping them of their
capacity for remote action on the mind –what Goethe and the Romantics called Stimmung–
reducing them to mere physical presence which, paradoxically, the photograph would never
again restitute in its fullness.
And yet, A última foto –or rather, the series of 43 photos of Rio’s mountaintop Christ that
make up Rennó’s project– cannot be reduced simply to a gesture of de-auratization that
undermines the ‘secondary aura’ of the tourist icon through the revelation of its mode of
production, something like a Brechtian ‘alienation effect’ – in the first place because, what the
‘image within the image’ reveals is, in fact, another mode of production, which translates
luminic information into digital algorhythms rather than to fixate its physiochemical
impression as did the apparatus that is exhibited next to the print. While the figure of the
Redeemer certainly suffers the diminishing impact of this change of visual regimes –
paradoxically, on being blown up on the digital camera’s monitor– this is not because of a
‘crisis of presence’ as a Benjaminian critique of auratic loss would be tempted to suggest. In
any case, it is the image itself and not its monumental referent that suffers the
‘dematerialization’ of being turned into instantly transferable ‘data’, a mode of circulation
that is being alluded to through the battery of antennae on the adjacent hilltop, a sort of
parallel Golgotha registered only by the analog image, precisely the one that is being crucified
on its waves. A última foto, then, portrays this change of the image’s space-time regime as if it
were a crime scene: a crime that consists, in fact, of a double displacement, or hijacking, of
the ‘Holga’ camera as well as of the monument that is being abducted from one visual frame
into another and also, finally, of our own gaze that is being pressed here into the role of
witness and victim at the same time.

Almost a hundred and fifty years before, the indexical presence within the image of the
latter’s own mode of production had been spectacularly rendered in what is undoubtedly one
of the fundamental images of the American West, Timothy O’Sullivan’s Sand Dunes Near
Carson City, Nevada Territory (1867). Here, the presence of the authorial subject is indicated
not just by the photographer’s footsteps in the sand but also by his carriage he has left in
search of the most attractive angle, which also doubled as an ambulant darkroom for on-site
revelation of the plates. As Maurício Lissovsky has pointed out, modern photography would
strive to delete these footprints in order to produce an image free of subjective inscriptions,
both those referring to its own process of production and those associated with the
conventions of pictorialist landscape, both of which, quite literally, are brought into relief by
O’Sullivan’s footprints searching for an elevated, visually attractive viewing platform. This
emptying-out of presence which, says Lissovsky, not by accident runs parallel, in the history
of the North American landscape, with the final decades of westward expansion that brought
the massacre or the deportation of the last bastions of indigenous resistance, has to be
compensated within the image through subtle acknowledgements of this very lack, be it –as in
Ansel Adams– through the divinization of sublime extensions apparently free of human
interventions (a sensation obtained thanks to an extremely small aperture allowing for long
exposure times and for rich and textured depths of field), be it –as in Edward Weston–
through the morphological study of the affective intensities of isolated objects and landscape
features. In both cases, the erasure of the author’s signature within the image (literally
speaking, in Weston’s 1936 dunes already bereft of footprints or carriages) is counteracted by
the extreme prolongation of the ‘photographic instant’ that is proper to amateur images and
from which the ‘art of photography’ takes leave by constructing a different relation with time
and space, one that claims to fall free of the rhythm of capitalist production to which the latter
–‘amateur’ photography– is in thrall.
A última foto, of course, is not least an ironic subversion of this idea of two clearly
distinguishable chronotopes of the photographic, so fundamental to aesthetic modernity, as it
collapses onto one and the same plane the touristic snapshot and the more ‘artistic’ landscape
panorama. Indeed, that which photo-art claimed as its exclusive purview has always been a
key feature of amateur usages of the apparatus as well: the extension of the photographic
point of view towards ‘other’ spaces constructed as such through their supposed non-
absorption into the machine time of industrial capitalism, to which the camera in fact sutured
these spaces, projecting capitalism beyond its own limits. Modern photography, as Peter D.
Osborne has shown, was an apparatus of visual accumulation, linked right from the outset to
practices of travel, as it made available to the tourist’s imperial eye, as a ‘system of
attractions’, the colonial peripheries of Europe. Only months after the presentation of
Daguerre’s invention at the Institut de France in 1839, Pierre-Gustave Joly de Latbinière was
already taking the first snapshots of the Acropolis, inaugurating not just an endless string of
postcards but also, more importantly, defining what would become one of the dominant uses
of the apparatus. Ever since, the machine’s viewfinder has preferably been turned on spaces
and times that were supposedly different from its own: beaches and mountains, formerly inert
spaces at the fringe of cultivable lands that were now being resignified as topographies of
leisure, but also all kinds of intimate and familial rituals, zones of time emphatically kept
separate from the everyday rhythms of labor. In fact, then, the capture on behalf of
professional users of the camera, of pristine and faraway natures or even of the clearings
within the city where the latter could be framed as a landscape, as well as the ‘ethnographic’
exploration of ‘primitive’ societies (likewise including the marginal subjects of the city itself:
ragpickers, prostitutes, street urchins, the elderly, the insane), is but a radicalization of this
mode of putting at a distance, and of putting distance into focus, which determined the
construction of a photographic perspective in modernity (I use the term ‘perspective’ here in
the sense established by Panofsky, as a ‘symbolic form’ that underwrites yet is naturalized in
the production of the image).

The arch-conventional picture of the couple posing in front of some monument of nature or
culture combines in a single image these two spatio-temporal modes of modern photography.
If, on the one hand, photography offered a visual opening towards areas of experience outside
the machinic time and space of the assembly line, it also re-inscribed these ‘exceptional’
places and moments into the factory’s chronotope by way of its serialized processing and
printing – a dialectic that also echoes in the most popular forms of consuming photographs
such as the family album and the slide show, both of which invent new articulations between
singularity and seriality. Photography, then, was a means of projecting the logic of capital on
that which lay beyond it in spatio-temporal terms, a device for capturing physical and
affective constellations in landscapes and poses that thus became prospectively subject to
what Deborah Poole calls a ‘visual economy’ of universal equivalence and exchangeability.
My point here is that the emergence of the digital did not, or not only, herald the beginning of
‘postphotography’ because of eliminating what Bazin called the ‘ontology of the
photographic image’ –its indexical relation with its subject– and thus, in Laura Mulvey’s
words, ‘a privileged relation to time, preserving the moment at which the image is registered,
[a] storage function [that] may be compared to the memory left in the unconscious by an
incident lost to consciousness…’ As Mulvey goes on to argue, ‘the digital, as an abstract
information system, made a break with analogue imagery, finally sweeping away the relation
with reality, which had, by and large, dominated the photographic tradition…’ What I would
add is that this ‘break’ between analog and digital not only impinges on the relation between
photographic instantaneousness and the duration of bodies and things but also on the time and
space of the image’s production. As we all know, the ‘translation’ through photosensitive
cells of luminic information into algorrhythms dramatically shortened the interval between
capture and ‘revelation’ of the image, to the point of deleting the latter term from everyday
photographic vocabulary. Digital technology has practically immediatized the process of
grafting the singular event into the serial regime of machine time and into the space of
equivalence in which commodities and images circulate, a lapsus which, in the age of
celluloid, still required a moment of passage through the darkroom where the luminic trace
captured in the apparatus would ‘come back to life’, as early reviewers used to describe this
spectral effect of re-illumination. But then, along with the lapsus in time, digital photography
also eliminated in its ‘instantaneous’ production of the image the spatial distance which, as I
have argued, sustained the modern photographic perspective, precisely in order to graft ‘other
spaces’ into capital’s space-time of sameness and equivalence. This in-between time and
space that had been so fundamental to the analog image disappears with digitalization, and
with it the exteriority of the physical universe with regard to the time and space of the image:
a break and a moment of crisis, I repeat, that is not so much a crisis of materiality but one of
its separateness with regard to the image’s regime of production (the way in which materiality
is being imagined vis-à-vis a capitalist regime of production that is now predominantly post-
Fordist and ‘informational’).
Consequently, it is in photographic landscape where this implosion of perspective makes
itself manifest not just as an effect of the degradation or striking back of a spatial envelope no
longer readily at our disposal under conditions that terms such as climate change,
anthropocene or hyperobject likewise struggle to grasp. What is at stake is also a problem
with, or in, the mechanics of our apparatuses of capture such as photography and landscape,
triggering moments of autorreflexivity and formal experimentation that many of us will
probably have observed in the way our own, casual forms of flickering and instagramming the
world seem to have become inextricably saturated with the rhetorics of pastiche, ruination,
irony and nostalgia – rhetorics which photographic series such as Extinción (Extinction) by
Argentine photographer Dani Yako, shot in the late Nineties and early 2000s during the most
recent collapse of neoliberal magic-economics, deploy in a more systematic and self-
conscious fashion. Subtitled ‘últimas imágenes del trabajo en Argentina’ –‘last images of
labor in Argentina’– the series deliberately draws on social-ethnographic forerunners such as
the photographers of the US Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. In
Yako’s photographs, this citational rhetoric, reinforced by the granulated texture of black-
and-white film stock oscillating between claroscuro and marked contrasts, still wants to
ressuscitate ‘for the last time’ the very space-times of labor toward which the camera can
once again perform its ‘revelatory’ mission as it registers them from a detached exteriority
that is at the same time an affinity, a shared chronotope between the mechanics of camera and
industrial production. Yet in other present-day photographic travels, instead of the nostalgic-
apocalyptic pastiche, we also find different, more openly self-reflexive engagements with
what I would like to think of as photography after landscape.
Let me turn briefly to another recent photobook from Argentina, a collective work by seven
photographers from 2003 called Rutas y caminos, roads and trails. The seven itineraries
exploring communal trails, highways and railway tracks from the northern to the
southernmost extremes of the country, many of which have been abandoned for decades
unsurprisingly avoid the iconic vistas of the national tourist landscape. In its place, true to the
rhetoric of distintiveness proper to high modernist photography, the contributors either choose
vantage points close to an ‘emic’ experience of times and spaces their travels take us into –
the option chosen by Sebastián Szyd in the opening photo-essay, ‘El pasajero’ (The
Passenger), which alternates semi-abstract compositions of roadside features with frames that
return the gaze towards the inside of a long-distance bus, this ‘inside’ thus becoming itself a
part of the ‘outside’ to which it provides access. Others adopt particular rhetorics of the gaze
from the archives of modernity, as do Guadelupe Miles in her ‘ethnographic’ account of
everyday life in Wichí and Chorota communities of the Chaco and Julieta Escardó in her
‘archeology’ of the vestiges of the abandoned C-25 railway branch, which had once
connected the towns of Formosa and Embarcación in Argentina’s far Northwest. Yet, while
Miles’s pictures, in their carefully curated composition of frame, color and corporeal poses,
also actively reveal their own stage-directed, artificial character of photographic
performances, in which photographer and subject engage in a joint and negotiated
conversation about representations of indigeneity, Escardó’s series pays homage in the small-
scale, serial format of the prints that allude both to the cinema and to the materiality of film
stock, not just to the material elements of an industrial-modern world whose sturdy metallic
structures continue to resist the onslaught of time but also to a constructivist tradition in
photography and film of focalizing these structures wrested from and once again abandoned
to nature, with abundant and open allusions to the work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Tina
Modotti, Paul Strand, and Graciela Iturbide, among others.

Pastiche and citational rhetoric are, of course, widely shared modes of contemporary
photographic practice: think of Sherrie Levine’s ‘After Walker Evans’ series (1979) or of
Cindy Sherman’s ‘Film Stills’ – or, closer to home, the re-enframings produced in 1996 by
Argentine artist RES (Raúl Eduardo Stolkiner) of various settings of the 1879 military
‘Campaign of the Desert’, the genocidal founding event of the modern Argentine nation-state,
captured at the time by the lens of ‘expeditionary photographer’ Antonio Pozzo. In all of
these, we are faced –just as, in different ways, in Miles’s and Escardó’s photo-essays– by a
second-degree image, literally by a re-presentation that, in recognizing its indebtedness to a
real or imaginary original, renounces from the outset all claims to immediacy in relation to its
referent, which modern photographs –the ‘original images’ invoked by these re-enframings–
could still imagine as anchored in a space and time ontologically separate from their own: the
futur antérieur, the ‘this will have been there’ that Barthes refers to in Camera Lucida. The
break between first and second-degree image that I have in mind here does not concern only
the ‘will have been’ of Barthes’s formula but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ‘there’;
the mise-en-distance of the object of capture with respect to the apparatus and the space-time
of production of the image. It is this association between the photographic apparatus and an
accumulative attitude towards space and time to which, I think, the shot of a transversal cut
through a Remington automatic rifle (a key piece of weaponry of the 1879 expedition) that
RES places at the center of the series –an image, in fact, that is itself cut in two– calls our
attention.

This same question –to return to Rutas y caminos– is also the one driving ‘El fin’ (The end),
the photo-essay contributed by Esteban Pastorino on Tierra del Fuego where, just as in some
of his better-known works including ‘Panorámicas’ and ‘K.A.P. (fotografía aérea desde
cometa)’ –a series shot from a camera affixed to a hot-air balloon– Pastorino manipulates the
camera or the negative in order to obtain unfathomably large panoramic vistas or images
recalling dollhouses and miniature landscapes thanks to the use of custom-built
macrophotographic lenses. Likewise, in ‘El fin’ the intervention of the apparatus complicates
our point of view: the partial and uncertain focus around a central area of sharpness around
which the surroundings appear to whirl and twist, as well as the predominant acrylic and sepia
tones, produce an effect of uncertainty and disorientation sometimes dreamlike and others
uncanny, one that is only highlighted by the desolate, godforsaken nature of the locations
themselves. Pastorino’s work dialogues with a long tradition of expeditionary photography,
from the French expeditions to Cape Hoorn in 1882 and 1890 and the murderous forays of
Roumanian explorer Jules Popper into Selk’nam lands from 1886 onwards, but unlike in
Escardó’s and Miles’s photo-essays these associations emerge here less for the images’ motifs
and compositional elements and more because of the deliberately ‘anachronical’ use of the
apparatus. Even though the effect of limited sharpness is obtained here through an inclination
of the lense in relation to the objective or, alternatively, by manually moving the film strip
during the time of aperture (procedures made possible by the construction of custom-built
cameras that are Pastorino’s trademark), the images in ‘El fin’ also look back to the
foundational era of photography (invoking forerunners such as Nicéphore Niépce’s famous
‘heliographic’ view from his window at Le Gras). There is, we might say, a false anachronism
or an imaginary historicism at play here, since Pastorino isn’t so much ‘reconstructing’
previous states of technology as intervening photographic registering technology in order to
re-introduce into it elements of the contingent and aleatory. The manipulation of the process
introduces into it areas that are out of control of the subject operating the apparatus and which
manifest themselves in the image as out-of-focus zones that also call into question the central
area’s sharpness as a reliable anchor for the viewer’s gaze. Pastorino, in fact, once more sets
apart the ‘artistic’ and ‘lay’ uses of photographic technology but not –as in modern
photography from Steichen to Cartier-Bresson– through comprehensive mastery of
technology on behalf of an author-subject writing out its objective signature but, rather, by
opening up margins of error within technology itself that reconnect us with the longue durée
of photography before modernism and invites us to reconsider its valences vis-à-vis the
techno-ontological change the image is exposed to in our own present.

In images such as this one, where Pastorino ties his camera to a kite, the indexicality of photo-
analog space and time presents itself as an area of aleatory slippage, at the same time as the
somewhat uncanny effect seeping into the areas of sharpness themselves also points to
photography’s new condition as a real without an outside. These are ‘aficionado’ images
which, by manually distorting the apparatus, also tweak it towards a space and time that have
today become subsumed in a smooth continuity with no ripples: the horizon of a mode of
historical experience (our own) where all that remains for photography is perhaps to embark
on a quixotic search for the cracks and openings through which other chronotopes may still
seep in. This, I suggest, is also what connects Pastorino’s images to photographs such as those
assembled by Juan Travnik in his 2006 photo-essay Los restos (Remains): structures already
stripped of whatever productive or architectonic purposes they may once have been devised
for, muted or eroded screens emitting incomprehensible messages, these remains have
relapsed into a time of pure duration, orphaned from a spatial envelope that has abandoned
them just like the future-oriented, projective time they had once inhabited. But thus, reduced
to pure, insignificant materiality, the remains also become remnants of photography’s own
chronotope within the image itself: in the remainder, we might say, the photographic of the
photograph takes refuge, a bit like the beach herbs which, protected from the gusts, grow
inside the dilapidated windbreaker we see in one of the pictures (which is also, furthermore, a
far echo, or a mausoleum, of O’Sullivan’s camera obscura in the Nevada desert). Its purpose,
however, is a quite different one: as do all ruins, it seeks to explode the contiguous presence
that envelops it. In its withdrawal into negativity, its infolding movement towards a collapsing
materiality, the remainder in fact works towards the opposite objective: the recommencing of
a historical process in which it knows beforehand to have no place. Its mourning gesture,
therefore, the same that had once been photography’s own, is not directed at a past that was
once its present but, rather, towards a future that, like Benjamin’s alarm-clock of history, it
seeks to awaken from the instantaneous, self-same time of postphotography.