This essay is part of an ongoing research series on Camera Roll Art; a framework I am developing, arguing that contemporary painting from the smartphone camera roll restores consequence and selection to an image culture defined by excess. Each essay in the series responds to a book from the critical literature. This is the third essay in the series, covering David Joselit’s After Art.

I went into this book so heavily opinionated and convinced that Joselit was wrong. The way I have to backtrack right now is embarrassing. My apologies to David Joselit; my first take on his work was based on an ai summary. I outsourced the interpretation of his work to a digital tool and fully trusted the output. In my first draft for the final Camera Roll Art article (which will be published in the future) I wrote several paragraphs arguing against what Joselit was saying. Or against what I thought he would be saying.

First I’ll explain my previous understanding of Joselit’s theory, from before I actually read the book: Joselit diagnoses an explosion in image population. Images are now everywhere. This leads to the loss of meaning of singular images, exactly the same argument I am making in my Camera Roll Art article. As a solution Joselit proposes to work within this system of excess. To bring back meaning into singular images Joselit proposes to find ways to spread those individual images to be everywhere at once. In other words: to bring back meaning to singular images, the image should go viral, it should reach as many people as possible.

In my initial draft of the Camera Roll Art article I based my understanding of Joselit’s theory on an ai summary. I found a digital copy of the book (not pirating, I have bought the physical copy too) and pasted it into an ai chatbot. I asked the ai to summarize it for me and used the ai summary as my first understanding of Joselit’s work. I wrote my stance, then read the actual book and found out what he actually says.

In his actual writing, Joselit opens with an observation about scale. Digital technologies and globalisation have created what he calls an image explosion: images now reproduce effortlessly, travel instantly, and cross borders without friction. Under these conditions, they begin to behave like currency. Just like money is an instrument to transfer value efficiently across any border, images now carry power (persuasive, political, psychological) and they circulate with the same freedom as currency. The more points of contact an image establishes, the greater that power becomes. This is what Joselit calls “buzz.” In place of Benjamin’s aura - the value that a singular object derives by being in a specific place and time - we now have the value of saturation. Like a swarm of bees, a swarm of images makes a buzz. Being everywhere at once is a new source of meaning.

From there, Joselit turns to how this power moves and how it can be shaped. Images move through networks, and it is the connectivity of those networks that determines an image’s reach and therefore its power. This leads him to his central proposition: the relevant unit of analysis for contemporary art is no longer the medium - painting, sculpture, photography - but the format. Where a medium produces a fixed, discrete object, a format is a flexible structure that channels how images move through networks, linking them to financial, political, and social registers simultaneously. A real life example of format would be the layout of a museum. When designing the layout of a museum, the architect thinks about how people move through the museum, and thus thinks about what information the viewer receives, when, and in what order. This is the concept of format applied to architecture. Applied to artworks an example would be Sherrie Levine’s Postcard Collage #4, 1 - 24 (2000); twenty-four identical postcards of a seascape, individually framed in a grid. The viewer’s experience of each postcard shifts depending on every other one they’ve seen. Levine, in this case the creator of the format, shapes the network according to how they think the information, or the viewer, should flow. Regarding art Joselit proposes that artists should not only think about what they produce but also think about how it moves after production. After Art makes the case for expanding the definition of art in a way that embraces configurations of relationships and links rather than discrete objects alone. Art has power after it has been produced, this power is political, and in Joselit’s view, which I fully agree with, it should be used deliberately.

There is one thing I still do not fully agree on. Joselit implies that the way to leverage the image power is to format networks in such ways that the image reaches as many network nodes as possible. Placing emphasis on quantity of nodes. In my opinion this does not fully address the weight of the quality of individual nodes. In a system of saturation, of excess even, it seems reasonable to assume that the high quality nodes will insulate themselves from the excess, as a means to protect their quality. Put plainly: I’d rather have my art reach the right people rather than the largest amount of people. I’d rather have my work hang in the Louvre than go viral.

Overall, despite this minor disagreement, Joselit’s After Art and my Camera Roll Art are not on opposite sides of a spectrum. They are not even on the same spectrum. They handle two distinct things. Camera Roll Art looks at how to deal with the loss of meaning of singular images in an era of image saturation, or excess. After Art deals with how this image saturation brings about a new form of image power, and prompts artists to use that power. Better yet; Joselit’s writing describes strategies that I already employ, and increased my understanding of them. The theory I am writing, the salon I am organizing, the sequenced publication strategy. Behind the scenes I am deliberately formatting how, when, and where my works enter circulation. Optimally formatting networks in a way that serves my art career goals.

I went from full disagreement to full agreement with Joselit. My initial disagreement was built on a representation of Joselit’s theory produced by an algorithm. The moment I relinquished authorship to a digital tool it produced the very consequencelessness I am trying to solve with Camera Roll Art. The moment I retook authorship into my own hands, actual value was reintroduced. My journey with this book has been a great illustration of the spirit of Camera Roll Art; we cannot replace our humanness with digital tools. Each time we try, the things we create will end up meaningless, or just plain wrong.

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This essay is part of an ongoing research series on Camera Roll Art; a framework I am developing, arguing that contemporary painting from the smartphone camera roll restores consequence and selection to an image culture defined by accumulation. Each essay in the series responds to a book from the critical literature. This is the second essay in this series.

What would my current research be worth if I did not start with the inevitable work of Susan Sontag. If you’ve kept up you know that I am currently looking into image culture and memory, specifically into photography’s role in society; how it has changed, and how we might respond to it. Naturally, Sontag’s work is the starting point for this research. When diving into it I assumed that her stance and my stance would naturally align. Eventually, I do have a lot to say about it.

Sontag’s thesis is built upon Plato’s idea of reality. Plato argued that reality as we perceive it is a mere shadow of true reality. Our interpretation of reality, interpreted through our senses, is a copy of true reality, made by ourselves, in our mind. Logically, this means that our perception of reality is not reality itself, meaning we are always one degree separated from what is truly real. Sontag expands on this. Saying that humankind is ever stuck in Plato’s cave, looking at a shadow of reality. She identifies photography as a secondary imprint of the reality we know; the reality we know, in this Platonic chain of reasoning, being a copy of true reality. Making photography a copy of a copy. She drives us to the conclusion that photography is yet another degree away from true reality. We have put so much faith in photographs as a true imprint of what is real, that we’ve come to trust them as real. Gradually replacing what we perceive as reality with the copy of the copy, replacing reality with photographs. What she is saying is that with the proliferation of photography we’ve slowly moved ourselves another degree from reality, removing us further and further from what is true. That being the core of her thesis, there is another mechanism that Sontag describes in her book and that I specifically would like to single out. The mechanism she describes is about how the proliferation of photography impacts our response to our reality. She argues that repeated exposure to photographs of certain events, like war, desensitizes us to the real thing. Through photography we receive harmless doses of events that would warrant a strong response in real life. Harmless because the way we witness them, through photographs, is at a safe distance. Through repeated exposure we get used to these events - pacifying the response we would have if we’d ever encounter such events in real life - and this flattens our experience of (our second degree) reality.

Sontag describes more than I could ever cover in a single essay. Countless observations that made me think to myself “I understand why this book is so recognized”. She speaks about schools of photographers; realists, surrealists, pictorialism, photo-secession. About photography’s struggle to be recognized as a fine art. About the times where art and photography believed that they had reached a truce, a balance. About how that truce often fell apart again. About how photography, in a way, freed painters from the burden of realistic presentation and permitted them to dive deeper into abstraction. A lot of observations. Sontag’s On Photography truly is a book that brings on an epiphany every other page, and any take on photography’s relationship with society would not be complete without it.

There was one observation that I found particularly interesting, in light of my research, and that is one about scattershots. Sontag writes about how, through continuous technological developments in photography, it at some point became possible for photographers to shoot bursts of photographs, and to select the right shot afterwards, likening cameras to machine guns. Sontag uses this observation to make a point about authorship and intention. And I don’t know if she had foreseen this angle, I am sure she did, but it resonated with me mostly as an indication of how we have gradually been removing the technical constraints from photography. We used to be limited by power supply, availability of film, the camera needing to warm up, storage space, a myriad of other things. Now we have battery powered, digital, point-and-shoot, cameras and virtually limitless amounts of cloud storage. Any constraint one could think of has been removed. Taking a picture comes without any form of cost.

I once heard someone say that philosophy is like a collection of conversations. Conversations spanning thousands of years, between everyone who ever wrote on certain topics. Conversations about life and death. Conversations about good and bad. And conversations about what is true and what is not. On Photography is the continuation of a conversation that Plato took part in on what true reality is, and on what it is not. And rather than one of disagreement, Sontag’s writing is one of continuation of Plato’s argument, extending his frame of thinking to current times. Sontag’s thesis - photography being a third degree of reality, and therefore yet another degree away from true reality - assumes Plato’s Idealist argument to be correct. It builds on top of its logic. But what if we were to adopt a realist or materialist take on reality, how would we then interpret Sontag’s observations? What part of it would still hold? Sontag’s thesis forced me to dig deeper, to think about what reality truly is. But I am lazy, and I have things to do, so I won’t spiral into that topic now. All I know is that disagreeing with Plato’s take on reality would logically put one in disagreement with Sontag’s core take on photography, as Plato’s chain of reasoning is the absolute foundation of her argument.

There are a lot of things I do not know. What I do have is a gut instinct, a feeling. And sometimes I believe that feeling to be right, even before I have the literature to back it up. One of Sontag’s foundational claims is that society is gradually using photographs as substitutes for (perceived) reality. We trust photographs so much as a true depiction of what is real, that we take them for truth. We take them for proof that something existed. We verify our reality through photographs. People go on their holidays with the specific intention to take photographs, to make their experience real. We use photographs to authenticate our experience. To make the real real. We take photographs to see things that we wouldn’t have seen with the naked eye, zooming in, zooming out. Adding new perspectives to our reality. Why bother experiencing the real event if you can experience something through photos? Photographs are slowly becoming our new reality, as per Sontag.

What I feel is that Sontag was onto something. I agree with her in spirit, but not per se in what she claims. I think she was right about the fact that there is a problem. That the proliferation of photography poses a threat to our experience of life, of reality. But I disagree on the nature of the threat. We are not using photographs as substitutes for reality. I believe that rather than replacing experiences, photographs extend experiences. We capture an image that would otherwise be fleeting. Allowing us to sit and reengage deeper, longer, with certain places, moments, people, or objects. We often refer to photographs as memories, and that is what I think photographs are. Artefacts of remembering. Tools to help us remember more vividly. Just like a smell, a story, or a place could help us invoke certain feelings, I think photographs do too. And I think that is their function - or one of their functions - in society. Hence, I do not think that the proliferation of photography leads to a replacement of truth. Instead, I think it leads to false memory. To a point where we think we are remembering more - by capturing more memories - but that we accumulate faster than we can revisit, and therefore impair photographs their use as an actual memory.

This disagreement described above shows up as the difference between substituting reality and extending reality, but I believe it runs deeper than that. Sontag’s On Photography looks at photography, and its relation to society, through a lens of the human tendency of wanting to grasp reality. In Sontag’s terms; we appropriate reality through photography, granting us a false sense of ownership of it. And through developing photography technology more and more, we are able to capture reality more and more, or at least we feel like we are.

In Petersen’s movie Troy there is a famous scene. Where a Greek child tells Achilles that he would never dare to fight Troy’s strongest fighter. To which Achilles stoically responds “That is why no one will remember your name”.

What if, for a moment, we assume that the driving force behind our efforts to capture everything is not grasping reality, but instead it is the human tendency to immortalize themselves. That it is the human tendency to try and live on, far beyond our natural lives. Long before photography and long before archives, people’s legacy would live on through told stories. Many have tried to immortalize themselves through what they thought of as greatness. Just like Achilles in Troy, their main drive for pursuing greatness was to immortalize themselves. Of course not everyone can conquer a continent, so people find a democratized way to pursue greatness; for example by identifying themselves with a “great” nation. Think of American Nationalism. Some people live their identity through something that they think will matter historically. Attaching themselves to something they think will be remembered for decades to come, forever. And by being part of something that will live forever, they will live forever. The human tendency to immortalize is there. And viewing photography through this lens, rather than Sontag’s grasping reality lens, reveals a different angle.

Photographs as memory objects allow people to invoke the feelings, the mental and bodily state, they once had; during a certain moment, with a certain person. It allows them to invoke who they were at the moment of capture. It allows them to relive a past identity. Think of a high school quarterback, whose team won the championships. Years after the championship the quarterback will still have the picture up. Because when they revisit the photo, they can invoke how they felt, who they were. For a moment they can be that champion again.

Alas, shifting the lens from a reality perspective to an immortality perspective brings on a whole different picture. Not a false appropriation of reality but a false sense of immortality. False, because by the logic of Sontag’s argument - that repeated exposure dims the emotional response to the photograph over time - even this past identity, the one that the quarterback feels like he can hold onto forever through the photograph, will wear off in time.

Looking at Sontag’s observations from different angles makes one realize that her conclusions in fact critically depend on the angle they are taken from. Despite the different ways of looking at things - between accepting Plato’s writings on reality as truth and rejecting them - there is still a core point of agreement. The omnipresence of photography and the problems arising from it are all still real. Sontag offers real observations and a disputable diagnosis. What Sontag doesn’t offer is a proposed response to the diagnosis. And accepting Plato’s chain of reasoning, as Sontag does, comes with a pessimism that renders a real response impossible. My whole research is in light of my proposed response; Camera Roll Art. One that becomes possible if one would not assume Plato’s truth to be truth.

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I am not a writer. I am not a researcher, not a scientist, nor a historian. Even though I might slowly be becoming some of these things, I am a painter first and foremost. A painter exploring what he paints, and why. Within this context: the following paragraphs are an early working draft of a theoretical framework I am currently developing. A more complete version will follow.

Something has changed in the relationships between photography, society, and memory. With the development of smartphone photography, and the proliferation of smartphones, people now capture and accumulate tens of thousands of photos in their camera roll. An excess of private photographs to the point that none of these photos actually matter. They just sit there in the camera roll, without ever being revisited. Capture and accumulation without consequence, without meaning. But if everything is captured and stored, and this does no longer equate to remembering, how do we create images that matter?

The constraints that photography traditionally had - cost, film, development time, storage, etc. - the act of taking a photograph was a conscious decision. One had to choose what was worth capturing, because capturing was limited. This conscious decision conferred significance, it conferred meaning. Unlimited capture and storage removes the need for this decision, it removes intention, it removes consequence. This creates a gap in image culture. The absence of consequence in an act that used to carry consequence is the gap that removed significance from photography.

I want to propose contemporary painting as a solution, in a practice I call Camera Roll Art. The contemporary painter selects images from a vast personal archive of digital photographs - the camera roll - and commits them to paint. Images taken as part of reflexive accumulation rather than conscious decision. Authorship starts at the moment of selection rather than at the moment of capture. It starts at the moment the painter says: “this is the image I will paint.” Three key features define Camera Roll Art: the source is the personal unedited archive, the images are selected retrospectively rather than taken with painting in mind, and the painting preserves the logic of the original capture; e.g. the awkward crop, the casual framing, the mid-movement figure left intact rather than corrected.

Why painting specifically? Because painting reintroduces the very constraints that photography lost; the constraints that conferred significance. Painting is laborious, materially bounded, and finite. These constraints are not incidental to painting’s relevance in this moment: they are its relevance. The decision to commit a camera roll image to paint is the decision the camera roll itself cannot make. Painting reintroduces scarcity into a condition defined by excess. A painting is singular in a way a digital image could never be.

This is the first in a series of exploratory essays. As my research advances, more essays will follow.

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