Assume the Position

between the lines of photo criticism

However vital the subject, emoting on the page risks prickling, especially when authors wear their hearts on their sleeves and affront our benevolent apathy. In “Against Illusionism” international photography critic Jörg Colberg seeks “a valid and searing indictment of much of what ills [sic] the world of the photobook,” i.e., a place now known as photoland.* With a physicist’s flair like a wink to a past regret, Colberg presents his argument as a gedankenexperiment, or “thought experiment,” a wonderful term blending concept with method, introduced into the German language during the 18th century and later made famous by Einstein. 

Photoland. Under arrest.

For his thought experiment, Colberg defines two fundamental parameters: the first set by Dutch artist Renzo Martens; the second drawn from his own experience with what we shall call photoland in real life or PIRL, conforming to a critical discourse drunk on acronyms. Colberg quotes Martens’s explosive phrases about paying the bills with segregation and war while the happy few loll in the opulent delights of illusionism. In his PIRL library of experiences, however, Colberg collides head-on with those very pleasures. How? Gucci’s deer-in-the-headlights advertising supports Aperture, which publishes fashion quality bluffers inside its covers. After sloshing through the glossy visuals, what are Aperture’s readers going “to make of” what might be William Camargo’s blisteringly sad portrait of gentrification, if only we could see the picture, to which there is no direct link. Then another one of PIRL’s bitter ironies writes itself into Colberg’s gedankenexperiment when he realizes that Aperture is not selling Gucci to “the likes” of him forced to “begrudgingly shop at Walmart,” like an unwilling supporter of the billionaire class as it exploits thousands of minimal wage workers. Still, Colberg cannot shake the feeling that just by reading the magazine he inhabits the same ideological space, the same “white cube” of gallery walls and expensive page borders, where resides or so he assumes Aperture’s affluent readership. He knows what he cannot buy. Another world, but blurry, like staring through a snowy window or one of Sisko’s visits with the Prophets.

Living in the same photolandian mindspace presumably dreamed about if not shared by those who carry Leica Qs costing thousands of dollars in their LV handbags, is this not a heavy burden, intellectually speaking? If we think this semi-unconscious conundrum is not slowly devouring our realpolitik, time to pay attention. Colberg knows this, and wants us to know it too.

Again the critic quotes Martens, whose words encode the encryption key to his thought experiment. Art will go “beyond the production and display of mere images” when it “takes responsibility" for entangling itself in a society constructed by “capital and exploitation.” From this truism Colberg concludes that art will not disentangle itself as long as Western photographers continue to publish “books for other photographers and wealthy collectors, but not for the people who find themselves in the pictures.” Although it’s possible that the pictured people cannot afford to buy photobooks and might not care if they could, with a sense of fine irony Colberg confesses that “it’s just so hard to get out of the white cube” even as “the problem is widely acknowledged” by those very White cubists.

At a suffocating PIRL moment when our ideals mash up unfavorably with our realities, Colberg throws us a lifeline, a reportage about a “group of photographers, researchers, and activists” who have created the Archive of Public Protest (APP) in Poland. Photographers produce photographs that are freely disseminated, online and in newspapers, to counter the disastrous effects of Poland’s repressive rightwing government that we, in the West, ignore while we “maintain the comfort of the freedom that we currently still enjoy.” For Colberg, and he hopes for us, the artists of the APP will survive, transcending their trashed “civic life” and the slow destruction of Poland's democracy, while showing us a way out of photoland's white cube. If the APP “can teach us something beyond what it means to be a well-engaged citizen who embraces solidarity with others, then it’s that photoland’s illusionism is a choice and that rejecting it is an option, however arduous.” 

How strenuous is this renunciation? Is it more or less problematic now that Putin has invaded Ukraine and threatens nuclear war? Although people from minority and economically disadvantaged communities suffer daily from police violence in so-called democratic societies, Colberg knows that the comforts of bourgeois life have rendered photoland’s occupants unconscionably complacent. When confronted with incontrovertible proof of genocide overseas, over which they have have no control, and apathetic about their own government’s repressive practices, photolandians thumb through photobooks that “are luxury objects themselves.”

Photoland. Guilty, as charged.

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* We write photoland with a lower case p because to use the majuscule is to imply a monolithic locus when, in reality, photoland is a mangrove populated by diverse elements of the photography industry, from commercial and fine art to documentary and photojournalism, each with its written and unwritten rules and often ignored codes of ethics. Although Colberg notes that “photoland has become a niche” in “the larger world of art,” given the expanse where the art and photography industries intersect, let us not assume he uses the term to refer only to a specialized market of academics producing limited edition photobooks from their position of intellectual and economic privilege.