•REC
The struggle between different ways of using photography is not a struggle over truth, as if that were a given, but a struggle over the ways of being with others.
Ariella Azoulay
First we pressed PAUSE, then PLAY, and now we press the REC button. The abbreviation for Record, which usually appears as a red circle on our screens, refers to a register, to memory, to the story of the past, and to images as a witness to reality. The relationship between image and record is a central debate in visual studies, one that has been addressed by the great names of the theory of photography such as Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and Georges Didi-Huberman. But what is left of this debate today in relation to contemporary technologies? What is the difference between accumulating archives and telling a story? What is the future of the image –and of memory constructed through visual recording– in a world of extreme, immaterial, manipulable and seemingly infinite REC?
Photo-Document
From the start, photography has been used to conjure up the passage of time. An image brings the past into the present and helps keep the memory of what is no longer there alive, so all photos are, in a sense, a memento mori. As Walter Benjamin said, “The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognisability, and is never seen again”. But the idea of the image as a record also alludes to its status as proof of authenticity: what we see is what happened.
The idea of the photo-document is the basis of photojournalism. Graphic evidence, which makes important events public or shows events that some are trying to hide, is a direct witness capable of moving consciences and changing the world. This regime of visual proof developed in particular after 1945 with testimonies about war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. As Hannah Arendt recalls, the success of the Final Solution depended on the absence of images, a strategy of “de-imagination” and systematic forgetting that permeates the memory of the Holocaust. As late as 1956, Alain Resnais’ iconic Night and Fog was withdrawn from the Cannes Film Festival due to pressure from Germany, and Sontag herself says that her interest in photography arose from a chance encounter with the images of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen she saw at the age of 12: “Nothing I have seen since then, in photography or in reality, has affected me as deeply or as instantly”.
But the reverse also occurs, with the excessiveness or forcefulness of images trivialising the experience. This is the position of Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah –the great cinematic monument to the Holocaust– in his famous controversy with Georges Didi-Huberman over the photographs of the Auschwitz crematoria that were first shown to the public in 2001, sparking a scandal and a clash of opinions that made this episode a landmark moment in contemporary visual theory. Contrary to the argument of the photo-document, which demonstrates the facts and establishes them for history, the opposing argument understands that visibility diminishes the value of the most dramatic events by turning them into aesthetic objects. As iconoclastic cultures argue, what is truly important should not be represented. The debate returns with each new episode of war, which often coincides with a new generation of visual technologies. Twenty-five years after that controversy, today we face the daily ethical decision of what to do, how to look, and how to relate to the flood of war images that reach our screens without filter or context.
The question of context is key in the discussion about the status of images, about whether they should be treated as documents, transparent windows to reality, or as cultural artefacts, in which case they acquire a more complex nature whose meaning depends on reading codes agreed on throughout history. As shown in Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s photobook Evidence (1977) –a classic of the photographic canon that brought together 56 images from corporate archives, public administrations, medical institutions and police records, carefully edited as if they were art– there is no such thing as a pure visual document. The meaning of an image is a game of negotiations, quotations, and montages that multiply points of view. To look at an image, even the most anodyne photo-document, is to assume an endless number of representational systems condensed throughout the history of visual language. That’s why some say that images always lie.
Archive fever
We don’t know what Jacques Derrida, who dedicated his work to studying mal d’archive and the role of memory in the collective psyche, would have said about the risks that threaten the future of our visual heritage. The first is, paradoxically, the success of recording devices that then lead to memory overload. It’s so easy to take photos and record videos that we no longer do so just to treasure memories, but to share them instantly and then forget them, in a race to use and throw away that fills the visual spectrum with noise. Added to this is the explosion of artificial and AI-created images, fakes in a real sense, that take the deceptive nature of the visual to the extreme. If it’s true, as Jean-Luc Nancy says, that since the Renaissance we have gone from “the image as a lie”, which is characteristic of painting, to “the truth as an image” of a media society, today we would be in the era of “every image is fake, unless proven otherwise”. In times of post-truth, the first impulse when faced with a surprising or implausible image is to doubt its veracity. The iconic photo of Che Guevara’s corpse, which for John Berger demonstrated the power of the image as information, would not immediately be accepted as evidence today.
Doubts about images’ authenticity are increasing due to the algorithms that are also trained on our lies and mistakes. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein recounts her experience of being mistaken for another Naomi, Naomi Wolf, who is also a writer but at the other end of the ideological spectrum. If at first the ones confusing them were people chatting on social media, the confusion has shifted to algorithms to the point that, if we do a quick Google search without first knowing their ideas, it’s easy to get confused about who said what. The Klein-Wolf case illustrates why, counterintuitive as it may sound, digital technologies pose a risk to the preservation of collective memory. The network of networks, supported by algorithmic intelligence and metadata –invisible capsules of information that accompany digital files and tell us when, where, or on what device they were created– is every librarian’s dream. On the surface, organizing humanity’s library has never been easier: digitisation automates classification and streamlines knowledge management to the maximum, which are tasks that don’t even require human intelligence. And that’s the problem: our archives speak languages made by and for machines, which, however, humans only know how to decipher with a deployment of software and hardware on which we are dependent. Without the right programme, updated with the latest version, readable by the right computer, connected to the network and a power source, the library falls silent. Because it is an archive by and for machines, and its design responds to the dictates of permanent innovation, which is the flip side of planned obsolescence.
The interconnection between technical devices –computers, smartphones, cameras, adapters, chargers, ports, software, apps– means that the obsolescence of some spreads to others, pushing the entire system toward a relentless updating process that threatens its sustainability. An old digital camera from the 2000s may still work, but its memory card can’t be read by any new-generation computer. Add to the equation that, in the last two decades, billions of documents have been converted into zeros and ones and stored in the cloud, a misleading term for data centres, colossal infrastructures whose maintenance requires vast amounts of water and electricity, which are already scarce resources. The “foretold tragedy of the data centres” brings us the bad news that the archive of contemporary civilization faces a serious risk of amnesia due to overload. A new paradox is that perhaps the documents that stand the test of time best are those that were never converted into bits.
Archive fever is mourning the fantasy of the register and accepting that memory is always on the verge of oblivion, that every archive is an incomplete narrative, made up of surviving materials and deliberate or accidental absences. But, as Didi-Huberman asserts, every time we look at an image, we must consider “the conditions that have prevented its disappearance”. Without falling into the fetish of the autonomy of the image, nor into the naivety of the total archive, the era of post-truth forces us not to lose sight of the value of testimony, whether visual or otherwise. The boundaries between art and document will always be blurred, but evidence, and particularly graphic evidence, is essential in historical contexts where the rollback of fundamental rights or the denunciation of crimes against humanity are at stake. Therefore, even if we continue to fill our memory sticks with fake, redundant or unnecessary images, and even if we claim them as the legitimate iconographic legacy of our time, we must not stop questioning what other images are missing, what experiences are not being recorded, and what documents of the present we should protect for generations to come. Because, according to Ariella Azoulay, a photography theorist of Jewish-Palestinian origin, the image is not an object but a collective narrative, a space for encounter, connection and negotiation.
María Ptqk
•References
•Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography (1931), Buchhandlung Walther König, 2025
•Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977), Penguin Books, 1979
•Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), Hill & Wang Pub, 1982
•Georges Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All (2003), The University of Chicago Press, 2012
•Georges Didi-Huberman, Uprisings catalogue, Gallimard, Jeu de Paume, 2016
•Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria : Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2003
•Georges Didi-Huberman, The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions, The MIT Press, 2018
•Wolfgang Ernst, Aura and Temporality: The Insistence of the Archive, Quaderns Portàtils Macba, 2012
•Jacques Derrida, Mal d´archive, Éditions Galilée, 1995
•Jorge Ribalta, El espacio público de la fotografía. Ensayos y entrevistas, Arcadia, 2018
•Marta Dahó, Fotografías en cuanto espacio público, Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, Vol. 3, Nº 1, 2015
•Serexhe, B., A. Derieg, y ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Eds. Preservation of Digital Art: Theory and Practice: The Project Digital Art Conservation, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2013
•Ariella Azoulay, What is a photograph? What is photography?, Philosophy of Photography 1 (March 2010): 9-13
•Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, 2021
•Judith Butler, Torture and the Ethics of Photography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, nº 6 (2007): 951-66
•Thomas Keenan, Hito Steyerl, What Is a Document? An exchange between Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl, Aperture, March 1st 2014, 58-64
••Basque public reading network
•Curator
María Ptqk
Born in Bilbao in 1976, Maria Ptqk is a curator, researcher and cultural manager specialising in the intersections between art, technoscience and feminisms. She holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of the Basque Country, a degree in Law and a degree in Economics, a DEA in International Public Law from Paris II-Sorbonne and Cultural Law from the Uned-Carlos III in Madrid, and a Master in Cultural Management from the University of Barcelona. She has curated the exhibitions Soft Power (Amarika Proiektua Project, 2009), À propos du Chthulucène et ses espèces camarades (Espace virtuel du Jeu de Paume, 2017), Ciencia fricción. Vida entre especies compañeras (CCCB Barcelona, 2021 and Azkuna Zentroa, 2022), Reset Mar Menor. Laboratorio de imaginarios para un paisaje en crisis (CCC El Carme, 2021), Extinción Remota Detectada (LABoral, 2022) and Máquinas de ingenio (Tabakalera, 2023).
She has edited the collective books Breve historia del pimiento para uso de la vida extraterrestre (2017), Especies del Chthuluceno. Panorama de prácticas para un planeta herido (2019) and Laboratorios ciudadanos: una aproximación a Medialab Prado (2021). She is currently curator of Getxophoto, advisor to consonni publishing house, collaborates with the Chaire Arts & Sciences (École polytechnique, l’École des Arts Décoratifs – PSL, Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso) and editorial mediator of .able journal.