AKR: This is your first solo show in Nordic countries. You’ve become known as a photographic artist who doesn’t take pictures yourself, but tirelessly explores Internet photo sharing sites and image archives, on which we – so-called ordinary people – are uploading our images. This time you focus on photos which are related to internet’s consumer to consumer marketplaces. What fascinates you in them?
PU: I’ve always been interested in the stuff that society makes as a way of understanding the world. As a kid, walking through a department store was like walking through a museum for me. I found it fascinating – the aisles of ceramic figurines, of little pets for sale, of bras and underwear, hardware tools and sports equipment... I think that’s where it started for me: trying to understand something about the world through the things the world has to offer. As a kid this was much more interesting to me than walking through a museum with curated objects that art historians thought were interesting.
AKR: In your earlier works you already used consumer marketing material focusing on imagery in mail-order catalogs, and later websites, that elicited desire through the objects for sale there. When the internet became available for common use in the late 1990’s and early 2000, was it immediately clear to you that this was a space you were curious about?
PU: Yes, and it sort of happened organically that I began to use the internet. I was interested in consumer psychology of subjecthood – individuality and choice as it was played out in those consumer marketing images – and yes, how these contexts used objects to elicit desire. But when Craigslist and eBay became places where people could sell those same objects, everything shifted. Suddenly, those perfect images of perfect objects for sale became pictures of the same objects, used and rejected, for sale. I was captivated by the idea that the promise of the new object was revealed to be an illusion – all these unwanted objects, sitting deflated there. Yet there was still some perceived value in them because people were selling them rather than just throwing them away. And in these images, there’s always something that isn’t intentionally being offered by the person posting the photograph. That unintentionality is what’s so interesting to me about these images. Unlike the consumer marking images that reveal constructions of desire, these images reveal the psychology of the people who took them. They reveal something that is really, um... I hate the word honest but there is an element of humanity in these images that one would not find if the people posting them were aware of somebody looking at them, searching for something interesting beyond the object being sold.
AKR: I agree with you. During our conversations you have often talked about that unintentionality. You mentioned that you are not so interested in the filtered and polished photos on social media, but in the images that one could perhaps call “poor images”, or images that are not so much paid attention to. It seems to me that instead of being interested in what images are originally meant to depict or be used for, you are interested in what they were not originally intended for, and what these images manage to reveal about our society and our actions without the photographer intending to point to that. It’s fascinating, how images operate.
PU: Right, people on photo-sharing and social media platforms care about their images – they are very conscious of other people looking at them. Images of things for sale on consumer-to-consumer platforms are different. Nobody cares about those images. They are purely functional, utilitarian. They are “poor images”, referring to the definition by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl, as in low res, common, broken, rough edged, not perfect. But they are “poor” also because they have no value other than to be an informational carrier for the object that’s pictured in them. There is no other intended meaning in them.
I specifically look for things in those contexts that aren’t what the images are there for. Once you start looking, it’s hard not to see a certain kind of domestic intimacy. For example, TV’s are often placed in people’s bedrooms, so there’s often a reflection of their bed in their screens. There is something strange about being deliberately invited into these very private, intimate spaces by people willingly offering them up through the public posting of their photographs. These are spaces one wouldn’t otherwise have access to. Which is a very photographic thing, right? Photographers give their viewers access to something that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
AKR: Yes, that’s true. Your work could in fact be described as documentary photography, and you as someone who works on documentary imageries. We have been talking about the value of the images, too. I don’t mean copyrights or ownership of the images, but the multilayered value which is created in the relation between things and photographic images. Can you tell me more about this?
PU: I think what’s interesting about these specific kinds of images is that value is placed along a continuum. A new object projects a lot of value; an unwanted, used, object projects valuelessness. Yet people still see some value in the object they owned even if they don’t want it anymore, even when in most cases the object is useless. Whether its emotional, monetary, or one’s labor, this invested value can’t just be thrown away. You can’t throw away a little ceramic bunny that you projected love onto for twenty years. You can’t smash it and put it in the garbage, because even if you don’t want it anymore, for you, and only you, it has some kind of value. I guess there’s a kind of affirmation in someone else finding value in it as well. You can see this care for the object, this holding on ot value despite all signs pointing otherwise, in almost all the photographs of things for sale in these spaces. And that’s where the value of the photograph is for me.
So, if for the seller the photograph of the object is only a vehicle to transmit the value of the object, there is no value in the photograph itself. I invert this. I’m saying that there is no value to the object, but the photograph is valuable because it really tells us something about who we are, what we value, how we see what we value, and how we share or communicate these things. The way people arrange things in photographs; the way they turn them around and show you all the angles; if they have 20 remote controls for sale, how they lay them all out so perfectly and then take a photograph. We find them on tablecloths alongside stacks of the monthly bills, on quilted bedspreads with folded laundry next to them, on couch pillows with last night’s movie pop-corn snuggled in the crevices, with hands for scale, or pointing out the defects, with bitten fingernails... or fancy manicures.
I often think there’s a subconscious urge to connect to others by revealing something personal in these photographs. I find these images valuable as a kind of reflection of who we are collectively. Consumer-to-consumer platforms are a monumental archive of humanity at this moment, though no professional archivist is looking at Craigslist and eBay and collecting photographs as an archive of our time.
AKR: Like other archives, they are individual actions shaped into a collective form.
PU: Yes, and what I find interesting is that when you can find multiple images of the same thing, photographed in the same way, for the same reason, it’s the individuals that are generating and shaping into a collective form.
AKR: That individuality in respect to collectivity is something you have been interested in within many of your works already, starting from Suns from the Sunsets from Flickr. You began this project in 2006, searching for the most photographed subject and it turned into an ongoing project where you download and crop the sun from thousands of images of sunsets. Your titles reflect this idea of collectivity, recording the number of search results for each installation. In 2006 this was 54 thousand, and the last I saw, it was up to 48 million. Do you think that it’s also a part of these projects? Because it’s definitely related to how people act individually, but then it becomes a massive collective action online?
PU: Yes, definitely. Suns from the Sunsets from Flickr has a lot to do with thinking about collective vs individual practices in photography, and the idea of scripted photographs – how people follow a script to make the photograph that everyone knows – and how people claim ownership of those photographs. I think everybody has taken a photograph of the sunset, and one of the things that is so powerful about that is our participation in this collective ritual practice – that we all do this; we all worship the sun, we all love that moment just before the sun goes down... Maybe because we know it’s going to come back up again. The “suns” project is a lot about what it means to be an individual and claim authorship over that kind of an image at the expense of understanding it as being a part of a ritual practice that is collective.
The work I make using Craigslist is the exact opposite. Nobody is claiming authorship in those photographs; nobody cares about them; they are just going to be trashed after the object they represents disappears (sold, or also trashed). But it’s in those images that one can find individuality. Here, you see the messes, the unmade beds, the piles of dirty laundry on the floor, sometimes pets are around, sometimes kids playing games, sometimes people are reflected, sometimes with no clothes on. The TV might be in the middle of everything, or alone in the basement. It’s the opposite of the sunset pictures for which people claim authorship.
AKR: I like the way you compare the Suns-series to the Craigslist-project. Both series are indeed about ownership and the relationship between individuality and collectivity, although the attitude of the photographers and the reason for taking photos and sharing them on the Internet is completely different. Both the Suns-series and Craigslist-series are also ongoing, which is the case in many of your series. From todays’ perspective they seem to be already kind of documentaries of eras of certain technologies. The technology is changing fast but also the online platforms and the way we are using them are changing. Just like nobody is using the landline phones anymore, the same goes for many photo-sharing sites.
PU: Yes, for sure. I am quite dependent on these technologies to make my work, and when they shift, my work shifts. Flickr used to be the place everyone shared every kind of photograph on, but after Instagram, Flickr has become more of an amateur photographer stock site – so many technically proficient images!
About 10 years after I began using Flickr, I noticed there were thousands of full moon photographs - very detailed and technical – on the site. They were basically all the same – the moon is always facing us with the same face - but people get very excited about being able to take a very detailed, clear picture of it with a good camera and lens. And even though one can download the largest existing image of the moon for free from NASA’s website, many of the Flickr photographers add a “rights reserved” license to their full moon images. My project, Everyone’s Photo, Any License, questioned what it means to have the ability to take a photograph of the moon, to own the image of it in an almost colonialist way, to claim authorship of something that is so pervasive and derived purely from the privilege of access to equipment. But the moon is also fascinating as an object that is maybe the only thing left in our world that we can only see due to the reflection of natural sunlight.
AKR: Your exhibition takes place in Helsinki at the darkest time of the year. At this time of the year, we probably see more images of the sun through screens, in the artificial light, than the real natural sun with its own light.
PU: Right! So much of what we know about the world now – nature, histories, the places we will travel, our own identities – is coming through this invisible screen, subliminally washing us in screen light. We see images of sunlight as screen light, and we still think we’re looking at sunlight. You don’t really notice the screen until it brakes. There’s a kind of relationship here to the body: we basically don’t think about our bodies when everything is going well. But when something is off – we get a cold; we break a leg – we become acutely aware of the body. Otherwise, our bodies are kind of invisible to us. So, I was thinking about broken screens as broken bodies, and as such, they reveal the physical navigation necessary to deal with them in the world. It used to be that you’d see old CRT-televisions out on the sidewalks. People were just throwing them out to get rid of them (after no one wanted them on Craigslist). But they are toxic. They have led and other toxic stuff in them. It’s now illegal to just put them out. So now people have these things in their basements – these big monstrous TV’s that weigh a ton. They are part of a massive surplus of objects that are obsolete and that we can’t manage. Apparently there’s something like 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste every year and only 12% of this is recycled. Much of it is toxic, and most end up in landfills.
AKR: All this is also related to class hierarchies– not only to how images are used but also to hierarchies and inequalities in consumerism. Images online can be accessed and are circulating globally, and objects and resources are circulating globally as well. Unfortunately, this latter circulation does not add global accessibility but inequality.
PU: Yes, it is interesting to follow the trajectory of these objects, from production to trash – to look at the material sources – minerals from Africa, shipped to China, consumed in the U.S., then shipped back to Africa or China as waste. There is a geographical/class issue, but this is all so invisible on so many levels, and especially to most consumers. You can really see class in the photographs that I’m finding. The sellers and buyers of broken TVs, uses electrical cords, used remote controls, monitors keyboards... they are all in fact part of this e-waste eco system, and they are a part of it because there’s some minor profit in it for them.
AKR: For this exhibition you made an installation of screens using the structure of a “frieze”. As already mentioned, today screens are fundamental for us to communicate with the world, gain information and to produce knowledge. Our everyday life is based on the transparency of screens. But in your “frieze of screens” there is no quality of see-through. It looks more like a frieze of abstract paintings.
PU: Well, in some ways they look abstract, but they are not – they are direct representations of screens, and some are actual screens. On the other hand, one could say anything we experience on a screen is abstract – except for its effect on us. Everything is a simulation, except the concrete material of the screen and its light. Maybe there’s kind of an abstraction through all our experiences right now – feeling connected, but not really connected. I can’t help thinking that there’s an alienation here, born out of industrialization and modernism. There’s something interesting about the fact that the screen’s breakdown mimics the formal aesthetics of its modernist predecessor. Screens are windows – when they are working, they tell us stories. But everything that comes out of a screen is made up of horizontal and vertical components – its resolution, the pixels, the numerical code. Breaking the screen down is like seeing the DNA of modernism. My frieze, like all friezes, tells a story. This one is about light, surface, and reflection, through these abstract/not-abstract elements that are the components of industrial technology.
In these images light is either in front of, inside, or behind the screen. To me this is kind of a contemporary tale of our experience right now. The screens proceed from light to dark, from hand-made marks on screens (to show where the flaw is) to flashes on screens, because there’s no light left inside the screen, and then back again. I am also thinking about the recursive quality of a fugue motif, with multiple layers that play in dialogue with other parts. And about the psychological sense of a fugue state, a disorientation, loss of identity, and wandering about. For me, this disoriented state-of-being aptly describes our current experience – the replacement of sunlight with screen light, and the experience of nature subsumed to the patterns of web platforms and screen space. It’s amazing how quickly we adapt to new things, but there’s a cognitive dissonance, I think, in experiencing everything online.
AKR: I have one more question, which is related to the way the audience is guided through this specific exhibition in Helsinki. The exhibition starts in a room which is full of pure sun light mediated through artificial screen light, then it wanders through the different fr(i)e(e)zes and ends in the room where white ceramic cats, sourced from eBay, sit on their shipping boxes. We love cats on internet, that’s for sure. Can you talk about these cats sitting there as material silent objects?
PU: Well, the cat has a ubiquitous presence on the web (nyan cat, lolcat, keyboard cat, grumpy cat, pusheen cat, emoji cat) – it’s fodder for all the stupidest and weirdest memes. But they also have a reputation of being aloof (unlike dogs), and cats are wild animals who we have little control over (also unlike dogs). Maybe because of this, we keep them indoors – which is analogous, in some ways, to putting them on a screen, or inside a photographic frame. So, I was thinking about this in relation to ceramic cat figurines because in some ways, the creation of this static object is the ultimate step in our urge to control or contain something we can’t. I had a ceramic cat when I was young, like 7 or 8, and as a kid it seemed to embody something so perfect (even though I also had a real cat who I loved). Searching on eBay, I just couldn’t believe how many “pre-owned” ceramic cats there were for sale. And the photographs of them are amazing! Different angles, different contexts, great setups, dismal setups, all very domestic with descriptions like “take this sweet kitty into your home and love it” or “this cutie will warm up your life”. These are pictures of hard, cold, shiny objects - opaque pigment on fired clay, reflective, and ghostly. As objects, they only reflect all the emotion projected onto them – they won’t/can’t absorb anything.
They come from all over the world and, hre, they sit on the white labels, on the boxes they came shipped in, like sitting on little squares of sunshine – the box as container of exchange, and of location – each haves the sender’s and my address on them. When you walk into the room, they are all staring at you, reflecting your gaze back... a small army of ghostly cats.
So in the exhibition I was thinking about a dialogue between the sun and the moon, where the sun is projective, and the moon is reflective of the sunlight. And I realized that the cats are like the moon. They are kind of cold and inaccessible. They are not romantic like the sun during a sunset. They are nocturnal.
The Finnish Museum of Photography K1
PENELOPE UMBRICO: Myydään kuvan mukaisessa kunnossa
Säljs i det skick som bilden visar / Learning from eBay
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