Abstract
“Nonhuman photography can allow us to unsee ourselves from our parochial human-centered anchoring,” writes Joanna Zylinska near the end of Nonhuman Photography, “encouraging a different vision of both ourselves and what we call the world.” (p. 199) Nonhuman Photography is a timely and expansive reflection on this premise, refracting the medium through various new lenses, de-centering the human from its wide historical arc, and meditating on the visualization of both human life and its very extinction.
The book follows Zylinska’s prolific concerns with the anthropocene, biomedia/bioethics and media archeology more broadly. In particular, it can be seen as an extension of her concerns in recent books Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene and Life After New Media (with Sarah Kember).
Scholarly attention to the esthetic and narrative concerns of nonhuman mediamaking has begun to surface in recent years. Yet such work has been but a slow trickle in comparison with popular and journalistic ink spilled in the public and policy sphere, with most focused on shorter-term socio-economic ramifications of AI, automation or surveillance. With respect to photography, Zylinska attempts to broaden out of these concerns in both time and space, removing the human from the center of the roadmap via the Deleuzian notions of the human-nonhuman assemblage, and expanding the visible timeline via a deep time archeological approach, both of which naturally come with posthumanist echoes.
Structurally, she seeks to accomplish this by widening the categories of the object of research. Nonhuman photography here is categorized not simply as photos made by nonhumans, but also photos of uncannily nonhuman spaces (e.g. post-industrial landscapes), and photos made for nonhumans (e.g. computer-generated imagery read by another computer).
Zylinska deploys a compendium of artistic and scientific case studies to examine these categories from a wide swath of critical viewpoints. These include the following: the use of nonhuman photography to embrace more “ecological” modes of perception de-centered from human visuality (Chapter 1), the benefits of tapping into the timeless/always present nonhuman elements of photography for greater creative potential rather than resisting them (Chapter 2), a living history of ways in which we visualize a posthuman world (Chapter 3), the archeological role of photographs as fossils in a holistic light-induced process (Chapter 4), the ecological ripple effects of the “multiple deaths” of the photographic medium and its infrastructure over the decades (Chapter 5), the liquidity of the photographic medium and the pitfalls of our fixation with the digital divide (Chapter 6), and how we can change our roles as viewers and creators in response.
The book is replete with reflective samples of all three nonhuman categories that provide a compelling record of the two titular terms with respect to photography’s past, present and future.
Jana Sterbak’s “Waiting for High Water,” for example, offers an unsettling contemporary dog’s-eye view of Venice at the edge of climate-change induced inundation. In another, lidar laser photography, shot from helicopters, navigate earth patterns to reveal the previously hidden sophistication of Cambodia’s ancient Angkor Wat water systems. In yet another, the hybrid photography of Stephen Wilkes serves a de-extinction agenda by reconstructing wooly mammoths in convincing visualist form.
Other case studies are deployed to illustrate the overlapping nature of nonhuman photographic categories and critical concerns. James Balog’s Chasing Ice is an intriguing metaphor for the main arguments in the book. Balog’s project deploys “hacked” DSLRs, bolted into Arctic bedrock (at great human risk) left alone to take automated photos over several years. The resulting images offer a nonhuman vision of (human-caused) climate change—images in turn corralled (by humans!) into a conventional film narrative.
Such analogies service Zylinska’s thesis that, at its broadest, seeks to prove that “it is through this human-nonhuman agency and vision that photography functions as both a form of control and a life-shaping force” (p. 2).
The book offers perhaps the most far-reaching practical applications for true interdisciplinary classroom learning in its work on the creative role of nonhuman photography and its vociferous defense of the “liquidity” of the photographic medium. The two of these concerns are, of course, irrevocably connected.
With regard to the first, Zylinska seeks to dissolve the conventional photographer/camera and thus human/non-human binary in the photographic process since the medium’s inception, setting up photography (which nonetheless takes many branches later) as a “complex assemblage of perception” involving “various organic and machinic agents” (p. 14). Through this Deleuzian lens, Zylinska argues, it is revealed that photography, as a sort of flow, has in many ways always had a nonhuman component. Formative photographic philosophers have long struggled against the―notably Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. It was Benjamin who famously bemoaned, way back in 1936, that “(the camera) is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it … It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment” (Benjamin, 1936).
Zylinska’s seeks to reframe this tension by documenting in which the photographic process, since its inception, has inseparable from nonhuman forces. “Even those images that are produced by the human, whether artist or amateur,” she says, “entail a nonhuman, mechanical element” (p. 2).
As such, Zylinska responds to a long lineage of humanist critics such as Barthes, whose seminal critique of the medium tended to pit the individual against the photograph as death mask—in the first instance, by prioritizing the “life-giving” role of solar energy in the photographic process, and in the second, by noting the role of human-as-editor, though whose cut life is affirmed. “We can read photography as partaking of their vibrant and life-giving (rather than just life-conserving) properties,” she writes (p. 113), while noting in a variety of ways that “photography also incises time to bring forth things, here and now: it therefore makes life, and can make life better” (p. 97).
Not only does such a conception liberate us from the obsession with rescuing photography from ill-defined onslaughts (variously articulated as the digital divide, algorithmic photography, etc.), it also allows us to tap deeper into its creative potential by hybridizing, instead of opposing, our relationship to the machinic.
The six-chapter book is intercut with extracts and fragments of mixed media work by the author, her collaborators and others, much of it informed by her curatorial practice. This continual inflection between theory and praxis is a core part of its message and methodology, which ultimately seeks to illustrate a certain “mindful and corporeal embededness,” with the medium (p. 29); evidence, she argues, of its implicit liquidity, a concept brought forth by Zygmunt Bauman (2005) in Liquid Life and other works.
Her project Active Perceptual Systems, for example, uses a device originally designed for mnemonic development in Alzheimer’s patients to capture everyday images in semi-automated fashion. Meanwhile, Photomediations draws on public domain imagery (Flickr) and an interactive platform to encourage viewers to remix digital images and produce new for digital exhibitions, and iLife manufactures posthuman landscapes reminiscent of Google Earth satellite imagery from the tangible and elemental building blocks of a children’s diorama.
With this in mind, the traditional, linear format of the book seems oddly out of step with its core imperative. At almost every turn, the content screams out for an interactive, light-induced sensory experience. It should be noted that a companion website does exist, though it is not that apparent and of more of a supplementary nature.
All told, the research-creation interplay, and most centrally Zylinska’s own proximity to a certain “post-photographic” practice does deep work at de-centering critic, photographer and viewer from our “conventional,” “conservative,” and “humanistic” approaches to the medium (p. 37). Reflections on such work serve to bolster and concretize the book’s theoretical ambitions, which ultimately extend beyond nonhuman technicity to propose a new set of critical positions on the very medium itself.