A tsunami of images

(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Nicholas Mirzoeff How to See the World Penguin, 2015 Our concept of a "picture" has changed radically since digitalization took off around the mid-00s. With the internet – which gradually became public domain towards the end of the 90s – picture archives with the icons of art history, the film canon's great works and the central events of history have become available to almost everyone, all the time. When digital cameras made photography and video cheap and easy for just as many people, the existing amount of images in the world received new additions at a speed never before seen. The development accelerated further with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, where people can share photos directly from the camera or smartphone. 1000 billion images were taken and uploaded on digital platforms in 2014. 700 million Snapchat photos are exchanged daily. Every 300 hours of YouTube clips are uploaded every minute. In other words, images are everywhere, always, in such large quantities that it is completely out of reach for each of us to get an overview of contemporary image culture. For many, "pictures" are not even mentioned as something separate from you, or as a representation of something, because subject and object coalesce into a perishable self-making performance. How do we deal with this tsunami of images – this explosively expanding visual culture?

Jordkloden. That's what cultural theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff tries to answer in the little book How to See the World, which can be regarded as an introduction precisely to the research field "visual culture". His starting point is two photographs of the globe – or, more precisely, two images like related to the globe as a complete picture of the human race and its fate, directly or indirectly. The first is Blue Marble, taken by astronaut Jack Schmitt of Apollo 17 in 1972. The picture shows us, in its grand simplicity, a picture of the Earth, as it looked to Schmitt as he hovered around space, outside the space shuttle. When the photograph reached the public – it became the first page spread in many media soon after – it was the first time man had actually seen the globe from the outside. One saw, for the first time, how beautiful, but also how fragile Mother Earth was. This is the first and for the last time we have seen such a picture, because later such total photographs have always been montages of different pictures. Author Robert Poole called it "a photographic manifesto for global justice," for he – like many others – sensed the possible solidarity between all the people proclaimed in this unique image. 42 years later, we know that Poole's assertion of the image's solidarity-creating potential was not followed up. Not at all. As a counterpart Blue Marble Mirzoeff poses for another photograph taken by astronaut Akihiko Hoshide in his "walk" in space in 2012. Hoshide was then in the same situation as Schmitt, but unlike his predecessor, he was not so concerned with Earth. He turned the camera towards himself, creating, as Mirzoeff says, "the ultimate selfie". The picture is, says the cultural theorist, a revealing portrait of our self-perceived and narcissistic culture, where everything is to be documented. What the astronaut is photographing this time is, of course, himself and the situation around the photograph itself, since the space suit's mirror visor does nothing but reflect the camera and the space station in the background. What many would think was the most important thing – the situation on the planet – disappeared completely in the mirror.

When everything is available, and we can say and do what we want, we do not think that what is said, done and thought is shaped centrally.

Self-affirmation. We are not aware enough of the reality outside of us – whether it is the earth or other people it is talking about – but revolving around our own little world. This selfie world is corroborated by the digital culture's default settings, which are not designed to direct attention to something new, but on the contrary only confirm what we already know. When we shop on Amazon and browse the web, we gather information about our existing habits, which in turn are used to give us search results and advertisements as an entrance to more of the same – more of what we've already seen and known. Furthermore, we are connected to this world of images more or less constantly. "Since we once made a choice to go to the cinema or turn on the television, our devices now demand our attention with their beeps and trills," writes Mirzoeff. The ironic and basically tragic of the situation is, as the Hoshide selfie shows, that the traditional hero portraits of artists or royalty have now been replaced by the trivial and everyday. We create images that exclude a reflection on what images – or visualizing something – actually are and mean. Mirzoeff discusses a number of meta-images that just make imaging a theme in such a way that the viewer thinks about what cognitive and affective processes a visual representation initiates. Pictures, Mirzoeff believes, can help us establish points outside ourselves that can teach us how to think Blue Marble in its time, the horizon of the 70 number expanded. I Velásquez ' Las Meninas, (see picture) for example, we can learn something about the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the author claims. The painting is not a cultivation of the excellence of the monarchy – as one would expect, since it was the Spanish royal couple to be portrayed – but a problematization of the relationship between what we get look and we do for see. The royal couple is relegated to a mirror in the background of the picture room, which can either be a mirror of the same place we – the viewers – find us, or a mirror of the painting the artist himself is working on in the painting – which is turned away from us, which we cannot see . We find ourselves in a visual paradox that we ourselves have to ponder. If we are no longer concerned with selfies. Control Society. Mirzoeff's book is an eminent introduction to the topic of visual culture, and a great training in seeing, and becoming more aware of, the use of images. Each chapter has an interesting approach – including film history, war and urban planning – but it is only in the last chapter that he really draws attention. We live in the society that philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes about Postscript on the Societies of Control. The access to information and entertainment is almost total, and more and more are "freed" from ordinary working days and the workplace's physical framing of everyday life. The only problem is that there are default settings for everything, and all forms of communication are designed for a particular type of use – which results in synchronization and conformity of our world of life; how we think, act and feel. In addition, as we know in the post-Snowden reality, all too well, digital media is used to monitor the population. This is a two-edged sword that is further harmed by the apparent freedom we experience: When everything is available, and we can say and do what we want, we do not think that what is said, done and thought is shaped from a central point. "While we think of this as our world, it is one that is carefully policed ​​and filtered for us before we even get to see it," says Mirzoeff. Kontravisualitet. How do you act then? How should we be sober in our imagery? Yes – by establishing visual regimes that build an identity from the inside, or from below, if you will. By finding forms of visibility for what usually does not appear. Or establish forms of visibility that extend across hegemonic visibility regimes. Here Mirzoeff follows up his previous book The Right to Look, and thinks along the lines of the very applicable term he established there – "counter-visual". As an example (among several), Mirzoeff cites South African activist and photographer Zahele Muholi, who has made it his life's mission to display images of LGBT (lesbian, gay, and transgender) people in a culture where these are usually invisible. Such transversal visual lines also invite alternative alliances between citizens, who can work together to create new spaces and dividing lines between what we can see and do not see. "Today, we can actively use culture to create self-images, new ways to see and be seen, and new ways to see the world," says Mirzoeff optimistically. But it is an arduous job to make themselves and their alliances visible across established forms of visibility. Here you can How to See the World be an excellent tool for thinking about visuality, or visibility, in an overheated – and far from historically unimaginable – image world. Still, it is probably the concept of counter-visuality that is most interesting here, a term he – somewhat surprisingly – does not use as much in his new book. To explore this concept, his previous release is probably best.

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