signifiers of life / temporarily closed – a series using Google’s recently released satellite imagery updating aerial views of Gaza. Meanwhile the images uploaded by ordinary people that describe previous existence and businesses in the area are still available from placemarks, documenting a life that is no longer possible.
Fictional spaces from Google Earth based on real places – perhaps how algorithms attempt to recreate the world
Here’s a link to a super-long essay that my ADA symposium talk was based on. It discusses the visual presentation within Google Earth, noting that it trades on an assumed veracity that is generally felt with aerial and satellite imagery. Yet the imagery in Google Earth is complex and algorithmically manipulated. It looks at the platform through the lens of neo-colonialism and draws attention to the originating “don’t be evil” motto. Some examples show the complexities of evidence around aerial and satellite images online and how Google indulges in some old-school naivety in its quest to better the world. The essay also weighs up those claims against the air of an Effective Altruism mindset. Finally it considers contracts that Google has with both the US and Israeli militaries, noting that it’s own employees protest against the use of their work that may be furthering illegal settlements, and contributing to the furtherment of machine learning used in weaponry.
Recently I’ve built a website for Jon Carapiet’s ‘legacy’ project (which now includes an exhibition as part of the 2024 Auckland Festival of Photography and a book).
The site includes an essay I wrote about the work and a statement by Jon. The original exhibition was held at Studio One – Toi Tu in Ponsonby in Nov 2023.Site link: https://legacy.biote.net/
I’m presenting a talk at the Aotearoa Digital Arts symposium on Sunday, called “Questioning Springtime Everywhere: a visual analysis of Google Earth”.
The all wekend ADA event is here: https://ada.net.nz/events/rising-algorithms/
My talk will be a condensed version of a long essay that takes in the photographic nature of Google Earth and its slippery algoritmically manipulated imagery, taking on its colonialism and looking at its military contracts and the protests around them.
Archive: previously published as a review for PhotoForum, 1995
There is a certain duplicity in fashion, at least as practiced in the capitalist economies.On the one hand, it can be seen as a liberating force through the 20th century, and on the other, it has bound women (in the main) into fixed concepts of style, beauty, and body image.
Maybe its just that fashion tried to keep up with the continuing stages of liberation that inevitably followed the constraints of last century – anyone could wear the signs of their freedom. The market knew where the new money would be coming from, and raced to keep up with that sector.
At this time the market could be seen as filling a needed style, although, at some point it became the dictator of these styles. This probably happened as a consequence of the developments in large quantity printing, the introduction of fine quality illustrations, and then photographs. These gave rise to large distribution magazines and a quantum leap in the visual appeal of advertising. Couple this with the development of synthetic fabrics and automation of clothing production, which made cheaper (and less durable) apparel, and the fashion industry was ready to control the changing of clothing styles. It was in their interest to change fashions as often as possible.
There seems to have always been a desirable body shape for women (by men, and thus by women) through the ages, although this shape has been quite different at different times. One would have thought that the liberations that women have undergone in this century could have addressed this constraint once and for all. Instead, through the media, the ideal shape that prevails in our time is forced even more strongly on women. It also seems that there has been a stronger emphasis on desirable male body shape in the last decade.
By attempting neutrality on these issues, fashion has been complicit in imposing these restrictive body shapes on women. Similarly, by displaying a politically neutral show such as ‘Worth To Dior’, the Auckland City Art Gallery invites criticism. You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a mid-century museum display. But why should an art gallery treat clothing in any other way?
Well, art practices of the 70’s and 80’s have shown clearly that art (and life) is a political act. The subject matter of an artist, the presentation, the viewpoint, and the space in which the work is presented, are all decisions that stem from a particular view of the world. There is no neutral viewpoint, and so each decision is a political one, each depends on the politics of the artist. The decisions involved in creating or exhibiting a show are imbued with their own politics, those of the curator, the designer, and the gallery manager.
But what are we seeing in this exhibition?
We see costumes for the rich and famous; “dresses of which fairytales were made.” The costumes are presented as marvellous and unaffordable for most – the ultimate in exclusive clothing. The presentation is designed to impress, to overawe even. There is a conspicuous lack of discussion regarding the wider implications of the clothes, their wearers, and their creators. In fact we are given to believe that there are no implications, that they exist for a make believe world.
But a real world existed around this “golden age” which included two world wars and a lot of sweated labour, both of relevance to this industry.
When Charles Worth started creating his dresses for royalty, it was difficult for women to possess wealth in their own name. They were considered to be virtually the chattels of their husbands. The clothing was paid for, and was used to conspicuously display the wealth of these upper class men. The clothing was physically constraining and unsuitable for many activities. How had things changed by the ‘50s? Despite women having much more freedom in society, Christian Dior could still refer to women’s use of fashion as “the simple art of pleasing.”
During the Nazi occupation of France, Catherine Dior, his sister, spent 10 months in Ravensbruck concentration camp because of her work in the Resistance. On her release, Dior gave her clothes from Lucien Lelong, his then employer. Gaunt and thin, she said that it was “ the only time in my life that I was able to fit into his model sized clothes.”
The H line that Dior designed in 1954 involved the ‘Tudor’ bodice, shown so well in the ‘Worth To Dior’ advertisement. This was intended to lift the breasts to increase their distance from the waist, for visual appeal. And referring to the corsetry required for the 1947 ‘New Look’, Dior said that “without foundations there would be no fashion.” Women’s bodies were still being constrained and moulded for the pleasure of men.
As far as the second world war goes, it seems that couture fashion, where it could, would fall in with whoever had political control. For example, England, and to a lesser extent America, were forced to undergo austerity measures which put controls on the amount of fabric used in a dress, skirt length, and the number of pleats and pockets. Meanwhile, in occupied Paris, many fashion houses kept on producing flamboyant clothing and hats. Nazi Germany intended to take over Paris culture for its own, and haute couture fell into the category of a protected luxury trade and so had access to the fabrics they needed. Some magazines, like Paris Vogue, and some designers closed down rather than become involved with the Nazi interest in couture. But many, including the houses of Worth, Piguet, and Lelong remained open for the full duration of the Nazi occupation of France. Lelong commented that every meter of fabric wasted in France was a metre less that would be sent to Germany. A desperate defence.
In all areas of clothing production, manual labour has always been a big component. Although mass production came to other industries, clothing has never seen the same input of technology although the potential has often been there, even in the fashion industry. Compared with other industries, there is little difference to be seen between the outworkers and small scale (labour driven) factories in use today, and the ‘little dressmaker’ and sweated labour shops of 100 years ago. Perhaps the main difference today is that developing countries are used in order to keep labour costs down. Additionally, the country of production is often changed when another offers a lower rate. Thus it is these workers who have been subsidising the demand for fast turn-around, low batch run, seasonally changing fashions.
Remembering that all art has a political component, why is it that the gallery has ignored any wider issues of fashion clothing and instead given us a bland museum display?
Recently, the Auckland City Council has forced the gallery to be partially self- funding. From the many possibilities, the chosen methods have been to charge for special exhibitions and to seek sponsorship. While the former requires an interested audience (or advertising to create one), the latter requires that potential sponsors see a surefire, easy product to associate their name with. Nothing with possibilities of controversy or negative publicity.
What could be better than a display of clothes? So it seems that this show is but a commercial venture – a crowd puller with superficial content.
Unfortunately, the gallery has treaded too conservatively in order to create a financial winner.
Sources:
Chic Thrills ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson
Dior in Vogue Brigid Keenan
Understanding Fashion Elizabeth Rouse
Worth To Dior exhibition catalogue
“Worth To Dior” showed at the Auckland City Art Gallery over the period 6 March – 7 May 1995.
S. Sontier
Archive: written under pseudonym, fake publication, published in PhotoForum newsletter 1995
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Taken from XYZ magazine, April 1995, the following article is part of a speech given by Dr Lynley Forber at the Californian Institute of Learning in February 1995.
“It seems to be confirmed – photography’s days are numbered. And I think well within our lifetime we will see the demise, after 152 years, of this art form, at least as we understand it now.
Physically, several important items make this demise imminent; several of the raw materials are rapidly becoming scarce or highly expensive (one often implies the other) – the silver used in almost all black and white photography, and the rapid rise in the cost of paper are just two of the most significant. Oil, which is used as the basis of several components in colour chemistry, and in the film base of both black and white, and colour films, while at a low right now, is destined to rise in price in the next 50 years unless major new oil-fields are soon discovered.
Also the almost complete domination of colour in the snapshot market, makes the use of black and white the domain of classic documentary and landscape photographers, and a dwindling commercial area. All of these factors are weighed by manufacturers in decisions in future directions.
On the technological side, digital image systems are well advanced now, and the computational power of many home machines is enough to display and manipulate high resolution images. The main limitations here are the size of storage media, and the band width needed for digital transmission of images. These are both areas which are already receiving huge input in research, and so only a few years should suffice before we have the ability to store hundreds of photographic quality images on a standard hard drive and to send or receive these images down phone, ISDN, or cable TV lines. With rapid advancement in network technology and Internet, we will be able to scan through images stored in many parts of the world in the same way we flip the pages of a photo album What about the front end? The camera? Sure, the resolution of digital cameras is poor, at least in those that cost less than $20,000. But here again the market is moving rapidly. The standards have been set and the patents already filed, and the market is primed for introduction of high quality digital image capture devices aimed at the consumer. I hesitate to call these cameras, and I believe so will the advertisers. There will be no need for glass or plastic lenses. The thing will not even look like a camera. It will have functions that could not even be considered by analogue camera designers – no matter how much microelectronics they squeeze into their packages.
The media, the largest consumer of imagery, has been moving to digital methods for probably 10 years now. For them, it is concerns of speed of delivery, (and cost) above all. We have already got pixel rates high enough for media photographers to be using digital cameras, and within 5 years, pixel rate will deliver as standard, images at the quality of 25 ASA film on a 120 roll. But more, capture technology will make ASA less important, with low light CCD managing 1/125 sec in moonlight.
And I think this is the crux of my case for the demise of photography. Kodak and Fuji and the rest are ready to redefine all the terms of photography, and with them, the concepts. People will not think of a single fixed image any more, although they may still exist. Digital allows the complete transformation of gathered information, visual, auditory or textual. It also allows for the combining of these. We will come to see visual information connected with sounds, animated graphics, and texts (I exclude touch and smell, as no one has yet conquered these senses reliably and remotely, but it would be foolish not to expect to see them in use at some time in the future). In fact we will not be able to distinguish if the information is primarily visual, sound based, or textual. There will be no need to, because this information clump will have a new name (and it is not for me to name that, leave it to the advertisers and PR companies) and a definition of its own. The very notion of the image is under attack now. We will expect as the norm, images with embedded text such as captions, background details or historical information. Or with sounds (voice overs, or actual sound from a news event). But the primacy of the image will be gone. Moreover, control of this information will be up to us. For example, Blind people would filter the image part, as being useless to them. There will be a hierarchy of information levels and content, that the individual could choose to receive or not. This idea can already be seen happening in a rudimentary way, with the self-designed online newspapers which are being implemented. Here one selects the areas one is interested in and the paper-builder software creates a paper with only what you want to read.
On the Fine Art front, there has been a steady decline in the use of the fine photographic print, with the Starn Brothers being only two of many artists laying this notion to rest, with their explorations of the nature of the medium of photography, above the content. As with painting, when the medium itself was explored, there came a crisis.
Painting has (it could be argued) survived, but this crisis for photography, what with the previous factors I’ve mentioned, I believe could be the last.
I see an ideological move away from “images” towards information as a whole, where the hermetically sealed image will be no more. I’m still not sure whether we are ready for it; whether it’s a good thing, but it really does mean photography as we know it is approaching its end.”
Lynley Forber
Archive: written for PhotoForum as an editorial, 1994
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As photographers, I assume we are all attempting to achieve some sort of results with the images we create. At this point in time, just over 150 years since the start of it all, and on the brink of major changes in image making and distribution, there needs to be serious consideration of the place and usefulness of photography.
Already, society has quite different ideas about photographic images than say 30 years ago.
I think it is true to say that most people can usually pick a so called documentary photograph i.e. one that is making some attempt at depicting a part of the world as it was at a particular time and place and camera angle. This goes hand in hand with the idea that if the photograph challenges our version of reality too drastically, we may question the circumstances of its making or even its authenticity. Many, for instance did not believe initially that the images of Nazi atrocities were genuine. But most people still believe there is at least something truthful in such images.
At the same time, the photographs don’t hold anywhere near the same power that they used to. Possibly from the over-abundance of images, and their juxtaposition with ads and other stories in the media, we find it easy to digest an article on anorexia, and a clothing ad with a skinny model on the same page, as just one of many examples. Images have become just part of a continuous line of entertainment, and we like just a little bit of shock in our entertainment.
If we make such images for use in the media we become complicit in the purveyoring of horror as entertainment. It is one thing to be committed to a cause as an imagemaker, but now there is such an abundance of images and issues, and the media is so specialised, that editors can pick and choose as they like.
So in a way, there are many more possible outlets, but fewer possibilities.
There are formal and informal rules on what can and can’t be printed, what stories will fit a particular media profile.
Editing (in the negative sense of the word) happens either by photographers self editing to sell the story, or by the editors’ concept of their audience.
As Noam Chomsky points out, the media is there to deliver an audience to a market. The audience is a strata of society, and the market is the advertisers. Most advertisers are interested in targeting a relatively comfortable, well off, politically conservative or uninterested group. So the media is there to deliver this group to them. A contained world view has to be given with not much scope for radicalism or activism. We have to be aware of where the media are at if we want to work with or use them.
Now, what about audiences? Firstly, people read or watch what they want to, and with the specialisation of the media, the audience is less likely to be struck by things that don’t conform to their world view. Secondly, I feel that people have become inured to virtually all images that can be thrown at them. We (the audience) can glibly watch starving, war torn, tragic events unfold on a screen, while we converse, eat, etc. Similarly, we can flip through Time, with Rwandan children dead and fly- blown, and remotely wonder about their collective fate.
But, this is the crunch.
We are not moved to do anything more than perhaps give a few dollars when a collector guilts us.
In a talk this year at Auckland University on conflict photography, Ron Brownson continually pointed out that many of the images he was showing were considered ‘too hard’ when they were made, and were not used at the time. Some were only released decades later. Presumably this was when their keepers decided that the images had lost enough of their rawness to be acceptable (and thus ineffective).
We are discouraged by the seeming complexity of the worlds’ problems. My belief is that problems smaller in scale stem from larger scale, more serious things, and these relate to a lack of respect of humanity, and a lack of vision of the future .The striving for a high consumption, ego based lifestyle, has given us a self centred, money oriented world, where true compassion has no part. And to my mind, this is where ‘concerned’ photography is letting itself down. It works within that ego and money based system, when it should be criticising it. It has not widened the boundaries that it can explore, and has been subsumed by the system, so that it just produces more fodder to be marketed. It seems hard to say, but what is the point of spending a lifetime, or risking a life, to get images, if they are to become entertainment and income for the mass media owners?
We are led to believe that art has a part to play in raising important questions that don’t come up in the daily course of life, or cannot be raised elsewhere. But here again, it seems that ‘art’ has been subsumed by the art market, and everything it produces is a potential consumable product. Dada, Conceptual, performance, fluxus etc. attempted to loosen themselves from the market, and recent artists like Hans Haake, Sherry Levine and Barbara Kruger have tried to show the workings of this market. but how successful have they been? It seems they too have become part of the widening scope of the market, and serve the same elite. Again the parameters are not wide enough. I think photographers working in the art market also need to look very closely at the system, and those who manipulate it.
Too many artists like to ignore these issues and carry on believing that they serve only their own goals, while still making work in order to survive.
If we do not face up to such things we inevitably serve those who have the power, by either our indifference or our active complicity.
Unfortunately, I have no answers to the problems I have tried to raise. In part, by raising them, I hope to get some interesting replies, which may suggest directions for these answers, and would be used in another newsletter to start a dialogue. (there were no interesting replies to this piece)
S. Sontier
The recent performative attack by two Just Stop Oil activists, where soup was thown on a Van Gogh painting, resulted in widespread publicity and debate over tactics. As an artist who is embedded in the visual arts world, I was initially shocked by the action – which was staged to imply destruction of an artwork – until I considered the history of environmental protest and non-violent direct action.
Many reduced the protest to a question of whether it just polarised the public against climate activism or changed anyone’s view.
Protest and change don’t work like that. The effect of a single action can’t easily be assessed as to what effect it might have on the overall movement. Each action, by individuals or groups, feeds an overall momentum.
Many activists have spent decades writing letters, gathering petition signatures, lobbying parliamentarians, organising peaceful marches of varying sizes, and joining noisy but peaceful protests. Along the way they’ve suffered the vitriol of naysayers as well as the rain, the ignorance of some politicians and the sometimes biased, sometimes ignorant media (if the media can be induced to cover a story at all).
Those who attack Just Stop Oil and call for only non-disruptive actions are likely unaware of the history of the environment and climate movements and the rigorous thought that has gone into strategies over these decades. It is not that long ago that mass rallies and marches related to environmental concerns were common; Greta Thunberg’s Skolstrejk för klimatet garnered hundreds of thousands at times – Wikipedia puts the numbers at greater than one million in March 2019 and four million worldwide in September 2019. Politicians and media often ridiculed them either as too young to have cogent opinions or imperilling their education when they spent an afternoon protesting. Parents often supported their children’s activism.
Young people see those in power as ignoring reasoned voices and mass peaceful protest while their futures look ever bleaker and business as usual continues, after the initial hope of post-covid changes. And it’s not just the young. For many years environmental protesters were side-lined as wild counterculture hippies out of touch with reality. Now, reality backs many of those voices – in the pages of ‘Science’ and countless UN reports that warn of imminent tipping points, a future of extreme weather for the lucky and mass inundation, land loss and death for the unlucky (who are usually poorer and often less to blame). Meanwhile, corporates and hand-tied politicians continue as if very little was wrong, even when councils and countries have declared climate emergencies.
When governments refuse or are unable to stand up to business lobbying, greenwashing and decades of often clearly documented corporate lying and obfuscation, and the media treat peaceful protest as non-newsworthy, the call for non-disruptive actions becomes an attempt at wilful dismissal.
Many historical changes in policies of inequity have been effected by long-term and wide-ranging protest tactics. Many have forgotten that these were frequently hard-won battles against entrenched and monetarily-backed views which were initially not widely supported. Often diverse, non-strategic and ragged groups working semi-independently would act at various levels and suffer verbal and physical attack from an unsupportive public.
In most long term campaigns of change there are those who write letters and academic papers, those attempt to meet with politicians, others who talk on tv and radio, create websites, those who blog or document injustice, organise or turn up for marches and street actions and those who act more directly and are prepared to confront and get arrested. Each one of these actions, singly, appears to have little or no effect. But collectively and over time, with repetition, reinforcement and immense effort, each can add to a forward momentum that might result in change.
The global anti-apartheid movement acted internally and worldwide to bring attention to the South African government’s racist policies, from the 1950s until the end of apartheid in the 1990s. Actions were varied, including petitions, street protest, and attempts at a trade, cultural and sporting boycott with racially picked teams. In Aotearoa/New Zealand the latter involved attempts to stop rugby games between the Springboks and All Blacks, resulting in confrontation with the public and police. These protests split opinion over tactics and effects but protestors occupying the pitches of stalled games chanted ‘the whole world is watching’ and later found that their actions gave renewed hope to the then-jailed Nelson Mandela and others in South Africa.
Also in Aotearoa, wide-ranging action was taken against French nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific. The testing was initially above ground but even the below-ground testing endangered thousands of Pacific Islands people and irradiated islands, causing long-lasting pollution. Again, all forms of action were taken, including boats that sailed into testing zones to disrupt French operations.
The actions against a racist government and another that endangered people and environment finally resulted in lasting changes for the better, although the toll on many activists was severe. In Aotearoa the French even resorted to state terrorism against protest, blowing up a Greenpeace boat in Auckland harbour which killed a Portuguese-Dutch photographer. The French government referred to their own actions (prior to being found out as the perpetrators) as a terrorist act, and then celebrated the government agents that planted the bombs.
Other examples of successful long term campaigns are the global actions against the Vietnam war through the 1960s and 70s, which eventually turned the tide of public opinion against the US government’s activity, and the Suffragette movement which brought about votes for women. In fact, while Aotearoa allowed women to vote in 1893, Britain continued to refuse. Newspapers there ridiculed the movement (the term suffragette was initially a term of belittlement coined by a Daily Mail journalist) and the actions became more direct, with women being beaten for speaking out, and imprisoned. Women in the UK only gained full voting rights in 1928 after a long and at times violent battle, with disagreements over the aggressive tactics.
These examples all describe political changes that happen slowly and with a diverse range of interventions. Movements have groups that don’t always work together or even agree on tactics, and many vested interests work against change even when the call for it is widely supported. The public are often not on side initially, and politicians are regularly decades behind in their thinking and lobbied hard by those who would lose power or money.
Movements can change in their effectiveness and can often be co-opted by less supportive groups, for instance the takeover of child abuse hashtags by far right groups. Infiltrators can provoke or undermine action in ways that demoralise and defang groups e.g. police targeting and surveillance of legitimate protesters in the UK, NZ and many other countries.
Some protests move to violent actions in the face of frustration. So far, most environmental activism shies away from this and many activists are trained specifically in non-violent action and resistance along the lines of Gandhi’s movement in India.
Confrontational protest isn’t always on the side of movements we might all agree with. Anti-abortion protests have involved much direct action and violence for years, as have the recent conspiracy-laden anti covid vaccine protests. Right wing racist movements also try some of the same tactics.
Climate change is one part of an environmental and consumer-culture campaign that has been active in many ways since at least the 1960s. There are individuals who are effective in research that informs scientific evidence, and those who are more comfortable in actions that target politicians with letters or appearances at government select committees. Others are better at bringing sound-bite arguments for change to the media or in organisation of mass marches.
Right now, at the coca cola COP27 UN summit, world leaders and corporates are gathering to try to implement previous COP requirements and to work out whether and how to help poorer communities who are likely to be more directly affected by climate change, while having contributed less to the causes. We’ll see lowest common denominator statements, many of which will be ignored, delayed and obfuscated over. Meanwhile the Egyptian hosts are arresting some activists and side-lining others and making participation by NGOs extremely hard. It’s becoming clear that the COP27 app downloaded by 5000 attendees already, has spy-level permissions that may give authorities the ability to read email, listen in using phone microphones and view images for ‘security purposes’. One has to wonder why a vitally important series of UN talks is sponsored by a global corporate responsible for massive plastic pollution, where business interests get access to meetings and speakers while groups that try to bring the voice of the public have been pushed to the fringes or even disallowed.
The argument of this piece is that protest and engagement by the people who are most affected by climate change and environmental issues in general is becoming more and more circumscribed both by the authorities, by global organisations who might set regulations and by the media who require more juicy material for their pages.
While throwing soup at paintings may not have the most obvious connections with climate change, it indicates the frustration and anxiety that is affecting more and more ordinary people who have tried other forms of protest. This one protest continues to create debate over its tactics and effectiveness. Given that another direct action, at Amsterdam Schiphol airport, which directly targeted the use of private planes, is already starting to fade away from news and commentary, we can expect more creative, desperate and obscure types of action.
Personally, I currently remain more comfortable creating art and writing. However, as long as these other protests remain non-violent, I expect to support their objectives rather than find fault with their methodology and implementation.
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The reasons for the protest and the debate over tactics were not covered well by much of the media, which to my mind makes those media complicit in the cause of direct action protest. If you want to hear their cogent and clear arguments, Owen Jones interviews another Just Stop Oil activist, Emma Brown, in an informative, emotional 15 minute clip.
Artnews writes about it and links to a video of Phoebe Plummer, after her court appearance.
Direct tiktok link, complete with criticisms about her oil-based earrings and vest.
A skynews piece quotes Bob Geldof in support (as well as being furious at road blockades) and links to further art actions.
