On April 15, 1874, Nadar’s studio was the scene of great tumult. The cause was a few dozen paintings which were now being accorded a special exhibition after repeated rejection by the Paris "Salon." For the critics present at the occasion, the situation was clear: These could only be the works of madmen, of dilettantes and anarchists out to rock the foundations of culture. One of them mockingly referred to these "impressionists." The rest is legendary.

That the birth of modernist art literally rests on the foundations of photography is hardly coincidental. Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Sisley: all belonged to a generation of artists who were no older than photography itself, and whose aesthetic ideas and visions had been lastingly influenced if not concretely inspired (as in the snapshot compositions of Degas, the blurred effects of Monet, and so on) by the new imagery of this medium.

But we should take a more basic look at the situation. To the 19th century art world, photography was nothing less than a virus, an heretical intruder threatening to disrupt the system and upset the balance – and to do this in a fundamental, ideological sense. While all previous aesthetic concepts had concerned themselves with a basic idea of beauty, with the presentation of the true or the divine, the harmonious or the decorative, photography suddenly posed an utterly different evaluation: a picture was no longer "good" if seen only as "beautiful", but now had to offer something new, something surprising, something improbable – i.e., it had to include what we have come to call information. Beauty became a synonym for redundancy and a function of information; and in the absence of this function, it became a euphemism for boredom.

Photography thus affected – in Thomas S. Kuhn’s sense - an aesthetical paradigm shift, a reorientation away from a beauty principle towards an information/innovation principle. And while initially it was less the photographers than the painters who embraced this new principle, the revolutionary, paradigm-constituting rôle of photography in the entire system of the visual arts is indisputable: photography has informed art with the criterion of information.

Those modern currents in art which derived from Impressionism – Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Expressionism and so on – can be regarded as specific information strategies which ultimately culminated – this is the inner logic of the modern – in a meta-strategy, in concept art, in information about information. What follows here is an examination of various structures and strategies which in my view merit special attention, considering the current situation in photography. Further, I shall elucidate some developments which I consider to be a significance in the transition to a communication society.

1. The Photographic System

Art is a form of communication which can be presented and analyzed as any other form of communication, using the three-part model of sender/medium/receiver. Here, however, I prefer to speak of the production, distribution and consumption of information, in order to indicate that the problem of information may be regarded as part of a comprehensive information economy. If by cultural history we mean, in the broadest sense, the substitution of material with intelligential resources (a process, by the way, whose present acceleration has been underrated by the Club of Rome, whose predictions have proved wrong), then an information society is obviously less concerned with material production than with information management. The production economy thus becomes a mere element of the information economy – and the present "affluent society" clearly reveals the problems consonant with our current transition period. The amount of raw materials wasted (e.g., crude oil) is thus the result, basically, of an anarchic and witless information economy in which products of cheap information (plastic cups, say) consume what can be saved through valuable information (say, atomic energy).

1.1. Production. The creative process, here understood as a process of information production, is usually determined by four factors: the producer (photographer), the productive apparatus (hardware/software), light (a specific energy) and the object (matter).

As opposed to the traditional image-maker, who was himself able to form his productive means, the photographer (and in fact every maker of technical images) has become a mere user of the technical means made available to him. Vilém Flusser has described this relationship as a process of mutual feedback between the photographic industry and the photographer: The camera is programmed to produce the types of pictures which correspond to certain general conventions – with those general conventions becoming more exact and differentiable through the feedback process itself. They constitute the code, in other words. Because faulty results (those deviating from the code) are almost always the result of faulty use of the apparatus (deviation from its program) by the photographer, room for manipulation must be reduced as much as possible – i.e., replaced by an automatism. The perfect apparatus, then, is one through which the depiction of the code is utterly regulated by means of the automatic program – and which therefore no longer requires operating instructions. (The length of the operating instructions is inversely proportional to the degree of automation of the apparatus.)

1.2. Distribution. We can assume here that those four factors above ultimately produce a photograph. We can call this photograph Information X. Let’s further assume that this Information X was produced not to fulfill private purposes but for public consumption.

The photographer now engages a medium to introduce that information to the public onto introduce the public to that information, that is, for example, a magazine or a gallery. Two effects obtain. First, aesthetic information is transformed into aesthetic-political information, and second, the context and background of the medium itself will spotlight but ultimately outshine the information: the information is informed by the medium through which it is distributed.

1.3. Consumption. What ultimately reaches the public – the consumer – is no longer Information X, but a mutated Information X’. Now the critic’s job begins.

The critic is as much a consumer of information as any other receiver: consumer being one who "in-takes" (consumere) information and who distinguishes it from other pieces of information through identifying criteria. We do nothing less than this when buying a car or soap powder: we decide – according to our current criteria – what we find to be "acceptable." And because such decisions are not always easy, we consult test reports, for example; that is, we examine the evaluations of a critic – whom we quite rightly expect to divulge his criteria.

This is precisely the problem of photography criticism: in the indiscernible or the outright lack of criteria which go beyond the like/don’t-like horizon of the average consumer. This applies as well to other fields of art, as Georg Jappe ascertained in his evaluation of the reviews that appeared in connection with "documenta 6". Most critics are de facto privileged "average consumers": privileged, that is, to publicize their averageness.

The usual critical methodology consists in (roughly speaking) comparing the work at hand with other work and basing a value judgement on that comparison. Emblematic here is a limitation to a single critical dimension, one of "breadth" – as is usually found in consumer product tests which, however, seem at least to be more objective. Because the art critic is not only continually seduced into reiterating a preformed value judgement, he is also less well-informed – compared with an electronic storage system, for example. An automation of this kind of criticism, using content analysis programs, for example, might be desirable, and will doubtless come at some time in the future.

Otherwise, criticism must deal with a second dimension, one of "depth" – where, deducing from work X’, one arrives at work X, from which the artist’s own criteria, the context of production and his cultural background can in turn be deduced. Here too must the critic examine previous criticism and the criteria behind it which are valid – since he is the taillight of the photographic process: the first critic is normally the artist himself, who verifies his work according to internal criteria; the second critic is the medium which either publicizes or rejects the work; and the third critic, the reviewer, must examine these various processes of sorting and filtering in order to explain them to the ordinary consumer.

1.4. Vectors of the Photographic System. The photographic process is thus a self-conflicting communications system regulated by divergent interests and aims in which production, distribution and consumption are rival subsystems connected through feedback processes. Some typical interests and directions of those subsystems can be described as follows:

• The production process (the creative process) involves a) the realization of the intentions (problem-solving) of the photographer in or through the product; b) use of the media to transport the product, in order c) to influence the receiving public and embed itself in the public memory.

• The distribution process (the medial process) involves a) the realization of the aims of the medium (profit, prestige, etc.) by means of the photographic product, in order b) to fulfill and/or to manipulate the expectations of the public.

• The consumption process (critical process) involves a) the comparison of the product with other cultural products and b) the examination of the various paths taken by the product, all the way back to the context of its production.

In a dynamic model where information is not only schematically produced, distributed and consumed, but is also formed (informed) in order ultimately to flow back to its starting point, the criteria of information are also subject to continual infection and mutation according to the distribution of power within the system. Criteria are thus a function of other, yet more powerful criteria. A mass-produced illustrated magazine, for example, depends on an analysis of its readers and its advertisers, and it operates – with limited elbow room – as a function of the criteria of those readers and advertisers.

A conclusion commonly drawn from this is that, because the communications system is ultimately determined by "the marketplace", it gradually sinks to ever lower levels of information, until it ultimately drowns in a kind of general idiocy. The logic of this mass-market idiocy can however be contradicted, as long as we can presume a decentralized communications system in which the information producer is not a direct function of a specific medium, and the medium is in turn not a direct function of a specific public – and in which the interchange among various information levels (e.g., the levels of "art", of "sub-aesthetics", of "commercial aesthetics" and so on) moves in both directions. The political aspects of the communications structure will be noted later. It should be established here, however, that the information producer can also produce for an "anonymous market" which then becomes a function of his products. This is called an authorial strategy. While the ideal commissioned photographer is characterized by his acceptance and internalization of his employer’s criteria, what typifies the ideal auteur photographer is his creation of an information strategy based on self-determined criteria.

2. Current Information Strategies

Communication is an exchange of information. As I have already attempted to establish, this exchange occurs within a horizontal (according to the communication participants) and a vertical (according to the levels of information) analyzable system whose currents are regulated by criteria which in turn are determined by the aims, interests, motives and so on of the participants. The realization of such aims, through corresponding criteria, may be called a strategy. Information strategies, then, are procedures related to the production, transmission and criticism of information. These procedures, as we have seen, must be examined for each individual communication sector. What follows here, then, is an examination of that area of photography distributed as "art".

2.1. Photographism. If we recall, Documentary Photography experienced an astonishing renaissance in the mid-1970’s, astonishing less for its practical than for its programmatic statements: "Photography was invented," said German photographer Michael Schmidt in 1979, "so that reality could be depicted precisely and in every detail. No other medium – except for those that are based on the invention of photography and its techniques (e.g., film and television [sic!]) – is capable, through its techniques, of documenting reality as it is as well as photography." Schmidt argues that the possibility of reproducing reality with such objectivity requires a special ethic and aesthetic determined by that reality. "In order to guarantee the greatest degree of objectivity and in order to make my photographs credible and honest as documents (facts), I prefer a diffuse (neutral) light, that is, a picture without distinct shadows." And finally, "I subordinate myself completely to the objects I photograph. Only through allowing them to reproduce themselves can one recognize their meaning and their ends." Doubtless: that is a hard epistemological nut to crack.

Three years later, this creed was finally gone – along with its liturgy. "Objective" was converted into "subjective documentarism" – contradictio in adjecto because "to document" is an act of proof or proving which requires – unless I am out to prove only myself - conventionality and methodology.

A note here: If I define the information content of a photograph as the difference between what I know and what I do not know, I receive a relative and dynamic quantity which can be viewed in terms of content, space and time. The content dimension (as a basic category) would include such elements and structures of information which deviate from the patterns stored in my brain, and which can be integrated there as "the new." The space dimension would mean that a piece of information at Place Y may be redundant at Place Z because it is known there, and vice-versa. The leveling or balancing of these different informational spaces is the purpose of reportage photography (reportare, to carry over, as to another place). The time dimension expresses that an informative product today can be redundant tomorrow (when it has been completely "consumed"), whereas conversely, a redundant product today can be informative tomorrow (when or if it has survived "consumption"). This is the essential function of documentary photography.

A photograph meant to be a document in the strictest sense best fulfills its functions of carrying information tomorrow, the more ordinary, conventional and redundant it is today – i.e., the more authentically it reproduces the general code. This is however precisely what prevalent documentary aesthetics in photography does not want. It is the strictly scientific or the naively inadvertent, the private and amateur snapshots, the trivial and the everyday photographs which must be viewed as the more genuine and the more credible of documents.

The more "artistic" that Documentary Photography became in the early 1980’s, the closer it approximated the mannerisms of Subjective Photography, even while Subjective Photography began to move towards a more naturalistic form of depiction. The result of this convergence of approaches and aims was a concept I wish to call Photographism, because – as opposed to Extended Photography – it is characterized by a strictly immanent attitude concentrated on the techniques and programs of photography. (For example, facing the question of "a documentation of XY", the photographer generally eliminates any technique other than – and possibly more effective than – photography itself because it is less the thing itself than the technical method which concerns him.) However, when the technical apparatus is not an option but an obsession, its user becomes – as Vilém Flusser has said – a Functionnaire of the apparatus whose "freedom" consists only in the "personal choice" he can make regarding the desirable or fascinating objects in the visual world which he may wish to photograph. In the long run, his anecdotal and impressionistic gestures can only be consistent in so far as they are concentrated into "a personal way of seeing", and ultimately into "a personal style." However, style – a concept of probability and predictability – lives on its modifications and its breaches of etiquette, so to speak, i.e., from those informative moments when the expectations that style creates are thwarted. Here rests the dilemma of Photographism. In order for me not to drown in the sheer infinitude and arbitrariness of visual possibilities, I must stylize; however, once I "have" a style, every deviation from it is one step backwards. And this is all the more so now that photographic technique has begun to prove itself aesthetically exploited, redundant and exhausted.

In terms of photographic history: With photography having "inventoried" the visual world (Documentarism), having "investigated" it (Visualism), and finally having "inquired into" itself (Conceptualism), Photographism today represents the aesthetic of a largely exhausted visual technique arising from a largely exhausted photographic strategy.

2.2. Extended Photography. What then are the extending contemporary strategies, and into what context are they to be put? After the Conceptualism of the 1960’s and the 1970’s, the clear movement towards a more comprehensive, project-oriented, staged approach became visible. This approach nearly erased the line between "artistic photographers" and "photographing artists." The question, typical of the 1970’s, about the origin of a specific strategy – be it artistic or photographic – has thus become irrelevant. Today, the central questions are as to the aims of a strategy and what horizons it possesses.

2.2.1 In the production sector, we can differentiate among three strategies:

• First, staging the object, the construction and arrangement of the subject of the photograph. This strategy includes everything from "arranged" still-lifes to a self-staging with the photographer himself as his own subject, whose activities are thus extended in various directions – as constructor, director, dramaturg, stage designer, actor, and so on.

• Second, staging the apparatus, in the sense of using it against or contrary to its intended function (its functional program), and in the sense of extending and programming its function through computer-related techniques.

• Third, staging the picture itself, that is, the transferring and integration of the camera output into a new structure. The production process after taking the picture comprises, in this strategy, at least one further step, involving the integration of the individual photograph into a more complex "visual organism" (sequence, tableau, etc.), combining it with other media such as text, drawing, painting, etc. (collage, montage and so on), or transforming it into a three-dimensional object (photo-sculpture, etc.).

All these three elementary strategies are related to the factors of production itself, and they result in a multitude of combinations, connections and intermediate stages – as witness the work published in this issue.

2.2.2. The central distribution strategy is, by analogy, staging the medium: the ways in which the producer himself forms, constructs or arranges the channels of distribution. Examples would be auteur magazines and books, producers’ galleries, photo-performances, etc. The classic division of labor in the communications system is denied, and the auteur creates and determines his own audience. Obviously, this is eminently a political question: thinking not only in terms of production processes, i.e., aesthetics, but also in terms of public-political categories.

2.2.3. In the consumption sector, it is a question of the author as critic – as a "critic of consumption" – in the sense of his recycling or revitalizing consumed information. By analogy again, this could be called staging the waste (Abfall), a reintegration of "waste" information into the communications cycle. ("Information waste" is here meant as that which communications cannot regenerate by itself). Such an "ecology of information" strategy can now be viewed relative to three standpoints. First, I can reintroduce information which has fallen out of the communications cycle (e.g., I can analyze a photo album from the 1940’s for its social-historical aspects); I thus produce new information from this "waste." Second, I can be seduced by the criterion of "waste" itself (e.g., I can collect photographs on tin cans); I then produce no new information but only conserve the waste itself. Third, I can put various forms of waste together which, while being informative, are without any information criteria (e. g., I can stick the tin can label into a photo album); I thus produce kitsch.

3. Perspectives for a Communications Society

Clearly, the strategies of Photographism and of Extended Photography are characterized by two fundamentally different methods of information production. The one consists in exploring the world from a "subjective" view in order to depict information and to press the button at "the decisive moment" – whatever, whenever that may be. This is the method of discovering, or finding (a word originally meaning "to step on something," and which thus clarifies the classical rôle of the photographer as a casual stroller). The second method is one of inventing, or staging, a method which may lead us beyond mere production into new areas of concerted action – where "new" of course is not meant in the sense of an historical "novelty." After all, the Impressionists also staged their medium, and the Dadaists recycled waste. "New" is here meant strictly in the sense of the possibilities of Extended Photography as it relates to the future form of society: as strategies projecting into the information society.

What does "information society" mean, in the end? At a minimum, and based on our model of production/distribution/consumption, we can state three components:

• First, production would have to be economized in such a way that the use of energy and matter (limited in quantity) would largely be replaced by the use of information (unlimited in quantity). In other words, information is the primary factor of production, and it reduces all other factors to marginal values.

• Second, distribution would have to be democratized, allowing every member of society equally to send information to and receive information from every other member of society. This implies that the current sender-receiver structure (one-way communications) is replaced by a dialogical structure.

• Third, consumption would have to be criticized, allowing information waste to be utterly destroyed (erased) or to be reintroduced into the production process (recycled). The consumption sector thus acquires a regulating and controlling function in order for us to avoid drowning in surplus information.

In such a society, production, distribution and consumption ultimately lose their institutionalized character and become integral parts of functions and of relationships. In situations where everyone is equally active as a producer, a distributor and a consumer, institutionalized competence in the form of specialized distribution apparatus is superfluous. It would seem more sensible to call such a society not an information society, then, but a communication society – and, to call the artist not an "informer," but a communicator.

3.1. There is little doubt that information will largely replace the use of material and energy. (Statistics point very clearly to this. Turnover in the base industries of steel and oil production will be surpassed by the computer industry by the end of this decade, all else being equal.) Among other things, this has two consequences as regards image-making.

First, with the (theoretical) replacement of silver-based photography by electronic, digital image-making, the old question of photography’s "realistic character" will ultimately be resolved because it will be possible to generate and regenerate literally every conceivable – or inconceivable – picture through a computer terminal. And, we shall in no way be able to understand these pictures if we attempt to find a "reality" in them other than that of the "intelligence" in their programs. From one perspective, we shall no longer need to find pictures, since we shall be able to invent them all.

Second, the information potential of the future will not be deducible from single image-making techniques, but rather from the connections between the techniques – just as the intelligence potential of the brain is not in its individual cells but at the synapses between them. Photo-apparatus and synthesizers, video-systems and automated printers, scanners and electron microscopes will be able to communicate with each other, to translate, control and manipulate each other, and thus to penetrate every medium and apparatus-immanent thought. This is the second perspective: we shall not be interested, in the future, in artistic disciplines or in their categories, but only in the strategies for their realization.

3.2. While the conditions of production in the communication society will prove to have aesthetic consequences, the conditions of distribution will prove to have direct political consequences – because, aside from hardware and software affecting the structure of a communications society, the organization of the network (be it a cable or a satellite network) is the third important factor. The essential question is whether the communications network remains primarily a distributive system, or whether it is extended into a universal dialogue system (whose central criterion would be that it does not contain information which is meant to function only "receptively"). Should such a network be built, then the question of the individual as auteur arises: the individual as communicator in the true sense of the word, one who receives information and who produces new information from it and dispatches this new information to other communicators, who in turn rework and redispatch that information, and so on and so forth. This would be – Orwell and Huxley notwithstanding – the third perspective of the communications society.

3.3. As concerns the conditions of consumption, learning a "criticism of consumption", this question must remain open: whether such a criticism can be transformed from an exemplary to a general capability – that is, whether or not we can all learn to deal with the quantities of information produced by the society, on an individual and on a societal level. This has ceased to be an aesthetical – or even an aesthetic-political question, which is the major reason it is less open to an answer at this time. The question itself shows, however, that information recycling is emerging as a problem of artistic energies, that production and reproduction are increasingly understood as equally important cyclic functions – and, this not only in the form of the "post-modern" information cannibalism that the art market presently enjoys, but rather: critically viewed, from a distance.

Photography – this was my opening thesis – threw the art system of the last century into a crisis involving two contrary criteria, where ultimately, "beauty" was subordinated to "information." Photography destroyed some parts of that system and gave birth to new ones. Above all, photography informed culture so totally, so globally, that we can call it, essentially, a photographic information culture. Today we are experiencing a similar shift: the transition to a computer culture. Where photography once brought Traditionalism to its end, computer technology is similarly entombing the ideas of Photographism – and much more, in fact – in order to allow the penetration of a new paradigm, a new base criterion. We could continue to call it "information", but it will be something very much different than it was in the past. In the same measure that photography, an analogous technique, is controlled by the computer, a digital technique, in this same measure that analogies are hacked to bits, so too will it make no sense at all to ask for information "about" something, or to differentiate between image and reality, authenticity and fiction, true and false. The aesthetics of future information is pure invention.


© 1985 Andreas Müller-Pohle. First published in European Photography 21, "Photography: Today/Tomorrow", vol. 6, nr. 1, January/February/March 1985. Translated from the German by Jean Säfken