Trigger

Photographs are widely relied upon to record the world. They’re produced to be the keepers of happy memories, the sources for news, a way for people to see with their own eyes that what is said or written is true. Witnessing, proving, illustrating, and capturing elements of events in the world out there are all things photographs can do. But in recent decades, through digital circulation, photographs arguably increasingly serve to create the world as much as to describe it.

In an article on digital photography in everyday life, media and information scholar Edgar Gómez Cruz argues that ‘photography has gone from being a medium for the collection of important memories to an interface for visual communication. For’^{Edgar Gómez Cruz, ‘Photo-genic assemblages: Photography as a connective interface’, in Digital Photography in Everyday Life. Empirical Studies on Visual Material Practices, ed. Edgar Gómez Cruz and Asko Lehmuskallio (Routledge, 2016), 228–242.}  professional photographers and artists, photographs have arguably always functioned as interfaces for visual communication. However, the ways photographs can be distributed on and through emerging technologies is rapidly reconfiguring the construction of photographic meaning, putting the audience on an equal footing with professional creators and transforming a medium of broadcast into one of recursive remediation and exchange.

Photographs now also serve as vernacular languages on the internet, with the visual literacy of print increasingly replaced by a new visual fluency as some of the distinctions between the roles of maker and viewer further erode. By sharing images across digital networks, adding them to a continuous flow of images, we all participate in transforming what photographs can do and how they may amplify messages and meaning.^{Christopher Pinney, ‘Photographing; or, The Future of the Image’, in Citizens of Photography: The Camera and Political Imagination, ed. Christopher Pinney with the PhotoDemos Collective (Duke University Press, 2023), 49.} More explicitly and fluently than before, still images function as dynamic vessels of meaning, existing enmeshed within planetary-scale databases and travelling endlessly throughout communications networks. An image made on a mobile phone in Chicago, say, and shared to a social media feed might strike a chord for a Berlin-based viewer who, by reposting it via an app designed in Mumbai, propels it onward to re-emerge in unimaginable new contexts; as a meme on a Tokyo pop culture page; in a dataset used to train facial recognition systems in Lagos; or transforming an interior designer’s moodboard in São Paolo.

In 2022, while a student in the Master Photography and Society (MAPS) programme at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), Will Boase published a thesis [LINK] arguing that digital circulation was transforming photography’s role in the world. In response, MAPS initiated the Networked Audience research programme, which set out to explore how and where photographs travel online, and how these journeys transform them, their messages, the people they encounter, and their relationship to other types of imagery, including AI generated ones. The research programme was led by Will and MAPS senior lecturer Andrea Stultiens. Andrea brought her long-standing interest in the affordances of distributing historical imagery through online platforms to these moments, while Will expanded his ongoing research into experimental publishing, alternative circulation, and the potential of mobile phones to act as spaces for distribution and remediation of photography and visual culture. Over the course of its two-year duration, the program resulted in a host of moments of engagement with interested students, academics, and personal connections. Outcomes include essays, seminars, websites, and toolkits, and Will now continues his research as a doctoral student at Aalto University in Finland.

The individual trajectories culminated in two public symposia with contributions from international guests as well as MAPS students and alumni. The first symposium took place inside an exhibition in the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, presenting outcomes of a long-term and ongoing activation of a collection of colonial photographs initiated by Andrea. Some of these photographs, produced by Dutch traveller Paul Julien between 1932 and 1962, were widely distributed in print media for exclusively Western audiences. Through fieldwork and shares to social media that were part of Andrea’s research, this changed. People whose ancestors were photographed by Julien instantly corrected the misunderstandings added to the photographs by Julien himself. Together with heritage communities on the African continent Andrea produced visual responses to them^{.I wish there was color, I wish there was sound: Visual conversations in and on Africa, ed. Andrea Stultiens (Japsam Books, 2024), published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at Nederlands Fotomuseum, 31 May to 15 September 2024.} The symposium was conversation- rather than presentation-based, and centralised image objects that were brought in by participants and ‘circulated’ to the audience through live screening using a mobile phone camera. In a particularly striking conversation, museum restorators Virginia Morant and Milene Trindade spoke about the tensions they have to navigate between their enthusiasm for photographs and the restrictions associated with the visibility of original materials necessary for the sake of preservation and, sometimes, the integrity of the photographic object and its context.

This special edition of Trigger, published as a thematic online series on the website, continues these earlier discussions and expands them in new and intriguing directions.

An open call was issued among MAPS alumni, students, and staff, resulting in the contributions to this Trigger issue. They range from an exploration of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, which reconstructs and makes accessible the national archives that were destroyed in 1922, to reflections on nostalgia and temporality inspired by a trio of Instagram pages memorialising the post-Soviet era in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Across contexts and platforms, this publication addresses the ongoing transformation of photography from the perspective of viewers who are also now makers and publishers. Along the way, each contributor formulates their own response to what it means for audiences when photography is understood not as a means of inscription but as a medium of exchange.

The publication exists also as a bot to be accessed mainly through the Telegram app (though it will also open in a desktop browser). The development of this digital component was supported by the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University. Telegram was chosen as a platform because it enables direct-to-reader publishing and allows reader response, and because of its popularity in Finland. We recognise that it’s a politically problematic platform, but we believe that to reach new audiences we must go where those audiences are. As with much of the digital world, our use of this platform is pragmatic and limited, and does not imply any support for its owners.

As you read the articles contained within, we invite you to look not just into the screen in your hand, but also at it. Consider the implication of the device that delivers these words from their writers, via a Belgian editorial team and Telegram’s murky Russian networks, to your screen, which was likely assembled on a production line in Vietnam or China and whose use profits shareholders and tech oligarchs in America and Europe. These little screens epitomise not only the mainstream media format of the current moment, but also the economic systems that this media format has enabled: globalised trade, frictionless commerce, and surveillance capital. As the guest editors, we (Andrea and Will) would like to thank Fotomuseum Antwerpen (FOMU), KABK, and Aalto University for recognising the urgency of this topic, and we extend our gratitude to all of our writers for joining us on this adventure. If you would like to add your voice to the discussion, simply hit the contact button at the bottom of any page to access the Telegram channel chat.