the tumblr room
In these works, I want to capture something all too extraordinarily familiar but made material and public in large scale photography something exhilarating and new. As the title, The Tumblr Room, suggest, it is the intimacy of our revelations and desires in the social milieu of blogging, something so immediately in front of us that we no longer see it. As seen in these works we inhabit tumblr pages as we do real space, hence the Tumblr Room.
In these spaces of our ‘private’ desires we express ourselves through sharing images. Here ‘private’ desires create publics in electronic space.
The 35 large format prints present the milieu of a social discourse, of social grouping and trafficking in a very specific repertoire of heightened feelings. They present the social circulation and exchange of photographs, line drawings, text messages, software formats and protocols, the social discourse of a certain milieu which speak to intimate longing and desire.
The works of photography of ‘photographing’ the recordings made in this milieu, in these tumblr rooms, are the images of a sociality made through exchange. The works are the image of the attendant discourse and social bonding, the labeling, the feelings of the blogger, attendant to imagery. Rather than strip away and isolate the image, we see here that the image is not alone: it is a currency, and the blog form and the identities we foster there a modality producing axises of innumerable relationships.
The image repertoire can be seen today not as the image alone, isolated, but as a social currency that forms collectives and shapes desire and identity. In the milieu of social media, visual imagery is attended by annotations and exchanges. They are the currency of networks and social relations that form around them. In the tendrils of the network images of fashion, celebrity, pornography, anime are circulated to express a great many feelings of desire, abjection, fear, loathing, joy and a great many networks and social relations formed.
What at first glance might appear to be what we see on the internet on an everyday basis, is more than that, and exactly that. If for example, Richard Prince took away the tag of Marlboro, from the famed western cowboy, so we could see the cowboy, it is precisely that tag and other annotations that are of interest here. The viewer, the reader, the reading, all of it is presented in this work, all at the same time. It is a work about seeing, and reading as seeing and the emergence of the public image archive.
It is also, not least of all, a new kind of photography. This is a collection, a selection, a construction of beautiful works. A claim of what photography has become.
The image archive is now infinitely reproduced and owned by everyone. We use it to explore our private desires, one to one, one to many. This new sense and use of the archive, not the image alone, isolated and monumentalised, as in so much art practice, but the image annotated and publicly privately circulated, not possessed by a few, but by everyone and yet paradoxically both in the world of art and on tumblr owned, singularly.
This is photography, about a space and context, about a new way to present one’s collection of fears and desires, one’s self vis a vis that collection, privately and publically at the same time. It is about a social discourse that expresses how desires form publics in our new electronic spaces, how our new intimacy is lived in public. How we are always already photographed and how to see is to rephotograph and to be is to be imaged.
an interview with thierry mallet
where do they come from these images?
they are always and never anonymous. the one thing we can be certain of is that they are in circulation. and that those passing the images around, collecting, blogging them and rebloging them are deeply committed to them, communicate through them and with them. that is the aspect that the pictures present, capture, frame and that is how they are composed.
when you say composed, what do you mean by that?
composed in the sense of being seen and as such being framed. the works frame a context, the social online environment, the milieu which is captured by reading seeing the bloggers names, the comments, the number of likes, the testimonies.
you often talk about 'reading seeing'.
to see is to read, we learn to see, first through touch but soon seeing becomes so habitual that the cultural frame, our instruments and media, through which we see become invisible to us. we get lost in the figures and not the ground. so to see again, we must take a thing in from one environment and put it into another. you can take almost anything and put it in storefront window or gallery or museum or operating table and it is read seen again unless if course its the thing that belongs there. we look for the feeling of we've seen it but we've never quite seen it like this or here. william burroughs uses the term surprised recognition for this. you're surprised but it is in the realm of the recognizable. this can happen with shifts of scale, shifts of context, of tense, of orientation, of habit.
you talk about the shift of public private in these works.
how we see and read, how we write privately in a chat or on our blogs is very private or intimate. the screen gives us perhaps a certain courage and a certain shame, here all our emotions are more intense in the anonymity of the screen, our self loathing, our sense of grandness, feeling sexy or hurt, behind the screen, and we are all behind the screen now not only in social media but in our medicine, our warfare, our finances, our phones - the screen, the viewfinder is the instrumentation that gives us, through which we produce our realities.
interestingly you use the word viewfinder.
yes everything is on film now, meaning recorded, the desktop is a viewfinder, our phone, our credit cards, all of them give particular views of us, and give us views onto each other and our environment, our archives and knowledge databases. of course the viewfinder was once the sole domain of the camera. and it was the camera that produced photographs. everything today gives off recordings, and we are being recorded and recording continually, no place more so than in the context of the network. here we may feel entirely intimate and alone and so can express ourselves without reserve, at the remove of our presence. here we can be unleashed and unguarded, profoundly introspective, cruel and beautiful, cool and unfazed. alone to ourselves, behind the screen at times longing to be with others or being with others by exchange, this is the territory, the milieu i am photographing.
you say photographing
yes. absolutely. it is a kind of a reportage, and of course a certain kind of framing but deeply invested in a particular milieu. you must know the milieu, spend time with it, like being on location, involving yourself with persons and the scene.
what interest you to photograph?
the social discourse around the exchange of images, the comments and conversations around line drawings, photographs, hand written notes, graphic statements and designs. the look of the software format, the titles and social discourse of the entire milieu, which is always in the making exceeding itself. so you can say i am photographing the exchanges made in this milieu, the sociality of the milieu. kind of street photography and reportage because it is always changing, when one person comments or likes something, things are always coming together in different ways and at different angles, and in this spirit at times I also construct exchanges.
why do you make the photographs or recordings at a much larger scale in your prints?
to see this milieu. the scale monumentalizes the intimacy of the feelings expressed and the scale surprises us.