Photography Is Magic

1
Essay by Charlotte Cotton

20
Artists
Asha Schechter, Charlie White, Sean Raspet,
Lucas Blalock, Michele Abeles, Marina Pinsky, John Lehr,
Jason Evans, Talia Chetrit, Shirana Shahbazi, Erin Shirreff,
Joshua Citarella, Phil Chang, Elad Lassry, Alexandra Leykauf,
Victoria Fu, Yosuke Takeda, Emmeline de Mooij,
Hannah Whitaker, Taisuke Koyama, Soo Kim, Artie Vierkant,
Owen Kydd, Marten Elder, Matthew Porter, Brea Souders,
Sara Cwynar, Anthony Lepore, Andrey Bogush, Stefan Burger,
Chris Wiley, Brandon Lattu, Lotta Antonsson, Anne de Vries,
Brendan Fowler, Daniel Gordon, Brian Bress, Nancy de Holl,
Rachel de Joode, Arthur Ou, Bryan Dooley, Leslie Hewitt,
Yuki Kimura, Batia Suter, Eileen Quinlan, Lucas Knipscher,
Farrah Karapetian, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Daniel Shea,
Darren Harvey-Regan, Phil Maisel, Sara VanDerBeek,
Bianca Brunner, Go Itami, Annie MacDonell, Jessica Eaton,
Amir Zaki, Shannon Ebner, Clunie Reid, Antoine Catala,
Annette Kelm, John Houck, Elisa Sighicelli, Florian Maier-Aichen,
Will Rogan, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs,
Nerhol (Ryuta Iida and Yoshihisa Tanaka), Matt Keegan,
Sam Falls, Lindsey White, Walead Beshty, Takaaki Akaishi,
Abigail Reynolds, Matt Lipps, Miguel Ángel Tornero,
Jon Rafman, Josh Kline, Timur Si-Qin, Letha Wilson,
Joshua Kolbo, Katja Novitskova, Kate Steciw, Carter Mull

349
Artists’ statements

377
Acknowledgments

378
Artist index

379
Reproduction credits
Essay by Charlotte Cotton
 MAGIC

Close-up magic—the kind of intimate, right-in-front-of-you sleight of hand that

brings pure wonder and delight—is the inspiration for this book, which gathers
the work and words of more than eighty artists operating in the related field of
photographic magic. The idea that close-up magic has bearing on the critical mass
of contemporary photographic art centers on their shared capacity to recalibrate
established creative forms in ways that relate to our collective present: to conjure
imaginative and open-ended experiences and trains of thought in the viewer.1
Magic in both realms is a multisensory experience that calls—instantaneously,
and without our consciously knowing it—upon our capacity to script our own
sense of visual reality.

Let’s begin by exploring the literal meaning of close-up magic, its characteristics and
contexts, and its effects upon the audiences that gather for intimate performances
each night across the globe. With their skillful dexterity and the subtle physicality
of their work, close-up magicians are different from the charismatic illusionists
who perform dazzling visual spectacles to large theater audiences. Close-up magic
is a much more intimate affair, often performed for a tightly knit sphere of fellow
magicians and small, discerning audiences. As the name of this form of magic
suggests, the viewers sit close to the table and the intensity of the magician’s rapid
prestidigitation. The typical tools of close-up magicians are decks of poker-size
playing cards, coins, cups, and balls. The magicians’ flourishes and misdirections
are played out on and above green baize tabletops. The “card masters” of magic
“flip,” “slide,” “load,” and “pocket” their ordinary, mass-produced decks of
cards; they focus their audiences’ attention upon “force cards” and they “false
shuffle.” The conception and authorship of sequences used in close-up magic
are acknowledged within the fraternity of magicians; each generation in turn
reconceives these tricks—respecting their origins, but testing how time-honored
maneuvers can be made to work their magic on contemporary viewers.

The art of magic is predicated on a dedication to practice: that is, repeating and
repeating each complex sequence of movements until it is embedded seamlessly
into the magician’s muscle memory. But the ostensible repetition of movements
or outcomes in the performance of close-up magic—the gestures the audience
sees, or at least perceives—is often realized by a series of different sleights of hand
with seemingly identical conclusions.2 The magician’s movements are skilled and
fast, but not faster than the eye can see—just quicker than the visual systems of
1
“What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of its effect but the magician’s ability to suggest
any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive and more of them quite obvious.” Adam Gopnik,
“The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life,” New Yorker (March 17, 2008): 56–69.
2
“The space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of MAGIC, a world in which everything
is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different
from that of the linear world of history in which everything has causes and will have consequences.” Vilém Flusser,
Towards a Philosophy of Photography (original German pub. 1983; this citation, London: Reaktion, 2000), 9.
1
the brain can understand given the distractions that the magician puts into play.
Magicians harness our human tendency to believe that we are at liberty to direct
our attention at will, and that we can visually and cognitively unravel a magic trick
and attain a state of clear perception. By our nature, we assume that if a repeated
action looks the same each time then it is derived from a repeated process.
Once we enter into the tantalizing psychological frame and physical space
of close-up magic—even while we are consciously suspicious that a trick is being
performed—our attention is deliberately guided by the magician into a realm
where the subterfuge can be camouflaged by carefully scripted dodging.
The audience in the nonsensical arena of close-up magic not only suspends its
disbelief, it plays an active part in the performance. As viewers, then, we feel
in control of our experience, set by the frame that the magician creates;
we automatically comprehend the experience as one that belongs to us.

A close-up magic trick can be heightened by magicians incorporating scripted

“mistakes” into their performances—with a master magician, no fumble,
no awkward exchange with audience members is likely to be unintentional.
These purposeful flourishes impart to the audience a perception of spontaneous
happenstance as the trick unfolds in real time. Most important, these “mistakes”
bring the act of magic into the present, and the sense that the progress of a magical
encounter is happening for the very first time. Magicians use language with great
specificity in order to direct and misdirect our attentions.3 In effect, the magic
begins when its mechanics and linguistic tools are integrated into the evolving
present of the imaginary correlations of a trick’s sequence.

It is important to remember that magic is not merely the sum of its technics
and orchestration. What the magician does is use his or her skill and tools to
create an arena within the viewer’s imagination for the magic to happen.4 The effect
of magic is in part after the trick, held in the stories we tell ourselves once the
experience is over. The audience turns magic into language and hence into meaning
and narrative, all the while knowing that it is impossible for language to fully
articulate the experience of magic and its playfulness—those things are defined only
temporarily in the presence of the magician. A magic trick, like all performative art
forms played well, creates the conditions for us to explore imaginative possibilities,
while sharing in a slice of the real.5 It is we who fill the empty cup, envelope,
or playing-card packet with the kaleidoscope of our temporarily collectivized
consciousness in the presence of magic.6
3
“Once a ‘natural,’ rather than ‘supernatural,’ basis for theatrical magic is established, its undoubted ability to radically
disorder our epistemological assumptions about the world can be understood in terms of the magician’s capacity to
establish and maintain a frame through which simulated power over natural causality is experienced as real. In this
sense, therefore, this form of magic is not only secular, but also simulacral. And it is the intentional presence and infinite
malleability of this reifying frame, whether in the form of narrative or other contingent means, that brings simulacral
magic alongside its sibling arts, and not least the visual arts with which it now shares more conceptual territory than
perhaps at any other time.” Jonathan Allen, Magic Show (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2009), 21.
4
“Magic only ‘happens’ in the spectator’s mind, everything else is distraction.” Jamy Ian Swiss, quoted in Gopnik,
“The Real Work,” 58.
 PHOTOGRAPHY IS MAGIC

The connection of close-up magic to contemporary photography is in the idea that

magic is something that happens in the viewers’ imaginations. Like magic tricks, the
works of art shown in this volume provide visual frames within which we are invited
to focus our attention. Photographic magic opens us to multiple possible meanings
of our visual world, and calls upon our collective ways of looking at it; it also offers
us ideas of what that visual world might imply about our contemporary condition.

Photography is a form of magic—or to put it another way, the photographic provides

cerebral experiences for the viewer that are equivalent to magic. Just as sleight
of hand facilitates, but does not fully materialize, the magical experience that resides
in the dynamic of our own imaginations, so too photography—when liberated from
a pedestrian definition as the sum of its mechanics and materials, its chemistry
and software—can spark the occurrence of magic in our minds. The artists
represented in this book reconsider photographic traditions and implement new
skills that have been incorporated into the contemporary photographic repertoire.
These photographic tools for “sleight of hand,” which derive from the span of
photography’s rich history, from analog through to its newest imaging technologies,
are all set within a framework of the present moment of visual culture.

Photography Is Magic privileges the potentials of ideas over the virtuosity of

individual authors or the perfection of techniques and mechanisms: as with
actual close-up prestidigitation, ideas are what ultimately allow the magic
to happen. The works shown here take into account the many ways in which
viewers relate to photographic media, materials, and image cultures in our
current media environment. They are potent in decidedly new ways, and
specifically because of the terms of engagement they propose: calling upon
our ability to construct meaning from our collective “muscle memory”
of making and consuming photographic imagery.

The artists featured here—like the magicians who masterfully tap into the
psychological and neural systems of the spectator—are astutely aware of their
viewers’ perceptions and trains of thought in ways that are grounded in our
shared visual culture. They not only acknowledge, but stage viewership at this
contemporary moment, in which there is unprecedented compatibility and
transparency between viewers and artists, a time unlike any before in history
in terms of our ability to comprehend, access, and use photographic tools for
capturing, rendering, and disseminating visual ideas.
5
“Magicians…engage [our minds] in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them
from becoming schematized.” Ibid., 67.
6
“The pleasure we desire from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty it can be clothed in,
but also to its essential quality of being present.” Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (original French pub. 1863;
this citation, London: Penguin, 2010), 2.
3
In close-up magic, the stakes are high in that the audience is often made up
of fellow magicians and discerning enthusiasts. Similarly, most of the artists
here operate in a circle of fellow practitioners with whose work they are in direct
and active discourse; they are navigating within the same image environment
as their near sphere of viewers.

Photography as magic is a protean idea, situated as it is in the experience of the

protean present. It is not a proposal for the future, nor is it a speculation about
the psychological or moral destination of new imaging technologies or the social
utility of photographic images. By the same token, the artists in Photography Is Magic
are not approached as the contemporary end to a linear, canonical history of art
photography, supplying a fresh vocabulary of stylistic surfaces to existing ideas.
Where we do see citations from photography’s past, they are likely premeditated
camouflages—misdirections, reanimations—essentially, knowingly made flourishes
that create these magical photographic experiences.

By considering contemporary photographic practices through the lens of magic,

this book has a particular take on the current state of photography’s presence—its
status as cultural material—within art. This is definitely not the full story of how
photography’s analog traditions and materials have been interplayed in recent
years with phenomena such as the newly acknowledged medium of pixel-based
software, the predominance of digital capture, or the possibilities of 3D
rendering. In this context, the ways in which photographic materiality can
be experienced—what it can represent and prompt—are at play in importantly
encompassing and expansive ways.7 There are nuanced reconsiderations
of that materiality—which of course constitutes an important part of the heritage
of photography as art—but clearly there are also equally valid and complex inquiries
into how to “materialize” contemporary photographic image culture, the scope
of which is set well beyond the confines of artistic practice per se. Among the
topics under investigation are: the extent to which technologies themselves are
“authoring” the images we see, how the movement and behavior of so many
of the images currently being generated can be considered forms themselves
within art, and how the pervasive automation of photographic rendering
has made software the dominant photographic medium.8

7
“Each practice exploring these questions hinges on an implicit definition of what the photograph’s material ‘is.’ These
investigations…considering the image’s material in terms of a container for manufactured desire (that needs not to be
photographic at all but simply ‘act like a photograph’) is a really inventive solution.” Lucas Blalock, in “A Conversation
with Kate Steciw,” Lay Flat magazine blog, March 5, 2012; www.lavalette.com/a-conversation-with-kate-steciw/.
8
“None of the new media authoring and editing techniques we associate with computers are simply a result of media
‘being digital.’” Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 148.
9
“If we think about photography as a limited mimesis, as a poor copy, instead of a good (or indexical) one, then the
photographer is not a cataloguer of fact, nor a purveyor of reportage, but instead is participating in this centuries-old
activity of drawing the world closer, attending to its conditions, to the terms of our looking, and, in turn, trying to keep
the picture collapsing into image.” Lucas Blalock, “Drawing Machine,” Foam, no. 38 (May 2014): 208.
In this period, when a critical mass of artists is widening rather than attempting to
isolate the idea of photography, the discourse is opening up, linking contemporary
artistic practice to much older, and deeply human, histories of mark making,
envisioning, and modeling new paradigms in ways that take into account cultural
changes of the moment.9 Only time will tell to what extent the works created
by the artists represented here will be assimilated into a discrete history of
the medium of photography (somehow separate from the rest of art history)
that is conventionally thought to begin in the 1830s and is housed in encyclopedic
archives. Or, indeed, how photography viewed as a subject in academia or
a discipline in art schools will be maintained or reshaped in light of contemporary
practices. The photographic works shown here are not in a state of limbo; they
are not awaiting the appraisal of the institutional structures of art and a future
designation of cultural importance. Part of their significance is in the purposeful
precariousness of their making and meaning,10 and in the rapidly evolving context
of viewership in which the artists create and operate. This accumulation of new
ideas and experiences of the photographic is generated through artistic practices
and motivations, creating imaginative possibilities from the contemporary image
environment at large.

Within this exciting recalibration of photographic ideas and materials is the use of
explicitly iterative processes: ideas repeat and morph over the course of the artist’s
practice. Photographic magic is an arena in which the meaning of an individual work
of art is invariably both contingent upon and equal to what is made before and after
it by its creator. This infinitely additive way of working has created a new conceptual
framework for artists working with photographic ideas. The contributions that
Photoshop software has made to this new frame are undeniable, especially in the
hands and imaginations of younger practitioners who may have little or no psychic
baggage of allegiance to photography’s analog past.11 Photoshop brings the practices
and lexicon of automation, repetition, and versioning to the fore.

It is no coincidence that this is happening in the context of a networked,

commodity-centric culture—where a wholesale movement away from privileging
the “source” or “original” is coded into every creative photographic gesture.
This opens up new directions for contemporary art photographers, who are helping
to define our image world and questioning it from within, and who presume that
their works are experienced from the vantage point of this image-making epoch.
The conventional strictures of the marketplace have included a preference for
10
“Precariousness is the centre of the formal universe in which nothing is durable, everything is movement: the trajectory
between two places is favoured in relation to the place itself.” Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How
Art Reprograms the World (Berlin: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005), 49.
11
“Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of
phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will
lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating and they will remain reduced to the freak-show
position of most twentieth-century tech art.” Bruce Sterling, “An Essay on the New Aesthetic,” Wired.com, April 2, 2012;
www.wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/.
5
unique works of art, “signature styles,” and consistent methodologies that allow
viewers to distinguish one creator from another. Such conservative expectations
have done much to repress iterative photographic practices and discourses
concerning the inherent mutability of photography and its capacity for infinite
reproduction.12 It is around these unstable conditions of photographic properties
and behaviors—rather than its institutional characterization—that much of the
most pertinent contemporary art photography now pivots.13

CONSTANTS BECOME VARIABLES14

The great majority of the photographic works represented in this book were
made since 2010. Collectively, they provide a timely narrative of art photography’s
relationship with the technologies of contemporary image culture; they also
implicitly show us the critical positions that artists are adopting within media
systems. Ours is a cultural chapter in which the actual and symbolic impact of digital
hardware and software—the tools that create the preponderance of today’s images—
begins to shape the story of the small constituency of contemporary art photography.

The previous episodes of this technological narrative of photography—a story that

began in the 1990s—were strikingly different from the events that are unfolding
today. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the end of the twentieth
century was dominated by concerns about the supposed impending obsolescence
of photography’s analog apparatuses and materials. Serious questions were
raised about whether the hard-won identity of the medium of photography—
as able to transcend its mechanics in the hands of artists—could be sustained
in the monolithically (and all too democratically) automated character of “the
digital.” The governing desire of most established art practitioners was to locate
the best ways for the new (at least new to art) algorithmic and pigment-based
rendering techniques to simulate the beloved heritage of analog photography’s
history of craftsmanship; many sought some sort of equivalence in aims, skill
requirements, and aesthetic ranges from the new tools for photographic capture
and postproduction. In the late-twentieth-century image environment, much
of the focus was on ways to use digital tools for what was an essentially static idea
of how photographic art could be made and read. And this fixed concept extended
the shelf life of an equally entrenched idea: that a primary role of the photographic

12
“Production thus becomes the lexicon of practice, which is to say, the intermediary material from which new utterances
can be articulated, instead of representing the end result of anything. What matters is what we make of the elements at
our disposal. We are tenants of culture.” Bourriaud, Postproduction, 24.
13
“The point for me is to propose and develop forms of post-representationalist photography and imaging wherein both
the materiality of a work and its ‘relations of photography’ are intrinsic to what the work is.” Trevor Paglen, in Julian
Stallabrass, “Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: An Interview with Trevor Paglen,” October, no. 138 (Fall 2011): 4.
14
“Once software enters the picture…constants become variables.” Manovich, Software Takes Command, 157.
artist was to subvert the common usage of commercially available photographic
technologies in a critical, rarefied, and quasi-timeless way to create enduring,
“final” object forms. This paradigm, it was thought, would preserve photography’s
place within art.

The decisions that photographic artists faced in the early 2000s, by contrast, were
about how to respond to the increasingly affordable, high-end digital photographic
tools, and whether to accept these technologies as the new default for creative
image-making. Digital capture, Photoshop, and pigment printing (to name just
three digital tools that directly and indelibly impacted artistic practices in the
2000s) were received in a variety of ways by deliberating photographic artists.
Digital hardware and materials were rejected outright by some practitioners in
favor of the perceived “authenticity” and photographic continuity (albeit now with
rather nostalgic, even mournful, undertones) of analog and chemical techniques.
Despite a great decrease in the manufacture of photographic film and chemical
papers over the past twenty years, the disappearance of analog materials has not
become a reality thus far. Other photographic artists embraced the narrative
potential of imaging software to construct pictorial alternative realities, often
provoking uncanny reactions in viewers, residual belief in photography as a
veracious medium was now dismantled. Perhaps most important, digital tools
and their outputs became naturalized into analog working practices and thought
processes: some artists committed themselves to learning these new ways of
working like a second language, while others collaborated with technicians in
revamped photo labs to ease the incorporation of digital materials and techniques
into their otherwise essentially unchanged processes.

These generalized reactions had particular resonance for students in art-school

photography programs in the 2000s (many of the artists represented in this
book are among that constituency), when there was still a pervasive pedagogical
view that artists operated outside the commercially oriented technological
developments and other mainstream possibilities for image-making. In the first
decade of the new millennium, many art schools considered their training remit to
be part of a trajectory that started in the 1970s, in which artists used photographic
tools (such as large-format film cameras) that were as yet technically unsurpassed,
and were decidedly separate from the burgeoning industry for digital capture and
postproduction tools that were being adopted by the image-making industries.
In the realm of art photography, pixel-based software and scanning hardware were
likely to be hybridized with photographic film and chemical papers, extending the
life but not fundamentally changing the parameters of photographic possibilities
in art-school and market models. Furthermore, art students, alongside artists
employed as lab technicians, were discovering that Photoshop software could
be used in more innovative and meaningful ways than merely simulating analog
retouching and wet-darkroom techniques.

7
Photoshop has a dual heritage. It was born out of software development and shaped
into a commercial product against the backdrop of professional image-making
culture of the 1980s. The “manual” interface of Photoshop’s filters and layers and
its step-by-step processes were set up to provide a continuous (although abstracted)
connection to the conventions of photographic methods. But Photoshop’s lineage
of code also features another aspect: algorithmic, strictly rule-bound procedures.
Significantly, these automated procedures permit any pixel-based element of an
image to be independently altered, with no material consequences to any other
image element. While this characteristic can be seen as a related but “hyper”
version of photomontage, or of compound-negative printing techniques,
Photoshop software’s inherent capacity to further liberate the photographic
from simulating the perspective of monocular human vision has brought about
a profound shift in the use and experience of the photographic in recent years.

Software has, in fact, altered every familiar relationship, every convention that
art photographers have developed—notwithstanding the “enduring” qualities
and default characteristics that historic photographic materials supposedly afford.
Every move made in the process of photographic capture, crafting, and formal
resolution is now about active choices. By the mid-2000s, Photoshop began to have
a genuinely creative impact upon artists’ strategies. At the same time, it was the
prevalent application being used throughout photographic industries, marking
practically all commercial images with its perfecting aesthetic. The distinctions
between the tools and material results of professional and artistic working practices
were beginning to be undeniably porous.

In the same decade came the technological advent that would so completely alter
the baseline of contemporary art: the surge of social media and mobile-technology
cameras—and with that, the ubiquity of socially networked photographic images
in mass circulation. The resulting changed environment calls so much about
the status of artistic photographic practice into question, especially in relation to
the networked production and access in the online image world.15 At this point,
the notion that art photography could be separated from the empirical mass
of contemporary image production simply by virtue of its craftsmanship, use
of particular apparatuses, or the viewing context of gallery walls alone began
to seem fundamentally beside the point.

15
“Staging different rates of circulation is one type of routine appropriate to art in digital economics—it’s a tactic
for escaping the ‘blind spot’ that results from moving along at the same rate as the market.” David Joselit, After Art
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 89.
16
“Unlike the previous mode of authorship, where the artist or institution defined context, the divide between artist
and viewer becomes negligible when users of social media are able to more powerfully define the context (and thus the
meaning) of an artwork.” Brad Troemel, “Art after Social Media,” in Omar Kholeif, ed., You Are Here: Art After the Internet
(Manchester, UK: Cornerhouse, 2014), 39.
These twenty-first-century factors mark the profound changes in the broad terrain
of image culture and, concomitantly, in the values ascribed to and the readings of
artistic photographic practices. The conventional distinctions between artists and
amateurs, producers and consumers of photographic images and objects have become
unclear in interesting ways; indeed, these terms themselves are now increasingly
mutable and capable of being converged. Many of the artists coming through
art-school programs in the past decade have chosen to face head-on the deeper
meanings and implications of this paradigm shift as it affects creative practices
and the circulation of their ideas.16 We begin to see the tangible implications
of operating in this utterly new media environment, where the origins, behavior,
and reading of the photographic have all been culturally upended.17

Purposefully destabilized photographic practices are coming into play, and

photographic objects no longer necessarily constitute the formal conclusion—the
end result—of artistic inquiries.18 This artist-led approach has been largely at odds
with the prevailing characterization of art photography in art institutions and
marketplaces. Not surprisingly, these established centers prefer a more stable idea
of photography’s cultural possibilities; certainly they have a vested interest in the
supposition that photographic art objects themselves can be somehow understood in
a different way to the lived experience of making and viewing photographic imagery.

Photography Is Magic highlights artistic approaches that may be seen as belonging

to the same system of image versioning and flux as any other authored
photographic idea circulating in the current image environment. The force
of the global developments that affect our image/media landscape are such that
the ubiquitous apparatuses and automated systems have now become constants.
Increasingly, contemporary art photographers are working with the possibilities
of creating variance within this visual system.19 They deploy destabilized practices
and explicitly iterative dynamics to create photographic objects and gestures
that are intended to be experienced in this moment of a decidedly flattened—even
horizontal—image hierarchy. The systematized “rules” of contemporary image-
making have become the terrain that artists are using as a site of play, proving how
far they can go in creating contemporary experiences of photographic magic that—
in the vein of real magic—are orchestrated very precisely for the present moment
and contingent on activating viewers’ experiences and assumptions
of the contemporary visual world.
17
“Culture and language are fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same image-
creation tools used by mass-media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those images, and gain
free access to the majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning.” Artie Vierkant,
“The Image Object Post-Internet,” 2010; http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html.
18
“The artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends
and reinterprets preceding narratives….The artwork is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain
of contributions.” Bourriaud, Postproduction, 19–20.
19
“Previously the tool was the variable and the human being was the constant, subsequently the human being became
the variable and the machine the constant.” Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 24.
9
The artists represented in Photography Is Magic are firmly embedded in our
image-making and image-disseminating culture. That position is important to
acknowledge for what it is: a vantage point from which close attention can be paid
to the incipient nature of our visual processes. To different degrees, all the artists
represented here make it clear that they subjectify the photographic systems in
which they operate.20 The modes of subjectivity vary, from the visual signs that
perfecting imaging software is being “incorrectly” deployed to tactics of layering
and juxtaposing visual materials; from intentionally confusing the boundaries
between images and ostensible subjects, processes, and media to the emphatic use
of repetition and versioning in the development of an artistic idea. What all these
practices have in common is an immeasurable quantity of active choices being
made—in a subjective and nonlinear fashion—by their creators. These subjective
choices share the same nonhierarchical characteristics that derive from the
patterns and processes that systematize contemporary visual culture. We can
now recognize individual artists’ signatures through their repeated navigation
and articulation of the dynamic behavior of photographic culture at large.21

CAMOUFLAGE

One of the areas that most obviously shows the difference between these
artists and their forebears is their interaction with photography’s analog past.
Analog photographic notions—both materials and mindset—staccato through
the image sequence of this book. But this presence of analog does not imply that
photography’s history provides an enduring gold standard to which contemporary
practitioners are held. The use of analog is much more agnostic and strategic
than any attempt to nostalgically recall the past as a legible contemporary mode.
To draw a connection to stage magic: a century ago, a magician’s top hat and
coattails constituted the adopted signs of genteel respectability in the fashion
of a gentleman’s evening attire. When a magician wears this costume now, it is a
reenactment of the uniform (or camouflage) for creating an illusion, a culturally
loaded ideogram of the past. Just so, the artists represented here are using historic
analog tools in the image environment of the present, making intentional choices
to confound the default idea of what constitutes contemporary photographic
technology by reactivating the medium’s heritage in the present.

Today’s climate—with its acquisitive drive, stimulated partly by the built-in

obsolescence of so many manufactured products—privileges the idea of technology
at the center of a forward-gazing tale of invention and innovation. The use of
analog photography in contemporary photographic practices is like the specter at

20
“In our day-to-day lives, omission, repetition, and juxtaposition become the primarily creative gestures or points of agency
over an otherwise highly prescribed matrix of use.” Steciw to Blalock, “A Conversation.”
21
“We identify emotionally, subjectively—and yet at one and the same time we evaluate politically objectively in relation
to society.” Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2008), 35.
the commodity feast, prompting us to think about technology not in terms
of what is commercially new, but in terms of what is still useful and meaningful.22
The contemporary presence of analog tools and mindsets contradicts the idea
of technological invention and also the expected relationships between apparatus
and image. We see, for example, artists using classic “in-camera” techniques—
the alchemy that can happen at the moment of image capture within the machine,
not immediately seen by the photographer—with digital tools, outwitting default
settings to create the improbable.23 In a double-back, there are also contemporary
artists using classic SLR cameras and precise lenses to create intensely information-
laden and layered images of details from the real world that mimic the filter settings
of Photoshop, revealing just how much our visual antennae have been shifted
by the aesthetics of software. In both of these examples, digital thinking
and image aesthetics are being retro-fitted to the idiosyncratic tools of analog
and its spirit of experimentation. Such approaches breathe new life into
the instruments of photography’s history and of its present, and remind us that
the creative desire to push the possibilities of image techniques is nothing new.

Black-and-white photography is present, too, in Photography Is Magic, rendered by

algorithmically switching almost entirely chromatic digital capture to monochrome
printing methods, or by seemingly ingenuous uses of traditional analog roll-film
and gelatin-silver papers. The character of black-and-white photography has
always been one of abstracting and distilling frames from real time; now it is being
consciously repurposed in the context of the twenty-first century.24 The experience
of contemporary black-and-white photography is beautifully slippery, coded as it
is with both the past and the present of photographic ideas.25 In today’s context,
in which the systems of software take on the role of medium, black-and-white
becomes an ideogram of photographic practice: an almost symbolic “material.”
The presence of black-and-white photography—like the top hat and tails worn
by an illusionist—directs the viewer toward thinking about the persona and
motivations of the maker as a recognizable entity, shaped by and adhering to
the historic conventions of a creative discipline. The use of such classic analog
techniques implies that this creator is a “photographer”: an embodiment of
craftsmanship and devotion to a defined set of materials and techniques.

22
“By thinking about the history of technology-in-use a radically different picture of technology and indeed of invention
and innovation, becomes possible.” David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900
(London: Profile, 2008), xi.
23
“[Tools] can perform complex work only because we have, as adults, learned to play with their possibilities rather
than treat each tool as fit-for-purpose.” Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New York: Penguin, 2009), 273.
24
“Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction
of new technologies.” Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Collide
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), 14.
25
“Analogue photography can be something else…it doesn’t have to be intrinsically bound to the visible world…it is full
of possibility.” Jessica Eaton, quoted in Dyanne Smith, “The Perfect Playground,” British Journal of Photography
(March 2012): 45.
11
The donning of an old-time magician’s costume, or the co-option of the
photographer’s historic means, is only one form of readily available camouflage.
Artists in Photography Is Magic adopt other classical guises—borrowed from other
media: painting and sculpture—reconfigured into characterizations, liberated from
the bounds of time, within the flattened hierarchy of contemporary creative roles
and identities. The notion of contemporary artists being sculptors, painters,
and photographers in a traditional sense is an impossibility—because the very idea
of separate disciplines of art is now defunct. Photographer, painter, sculptor: all three
of these terms are highly abstracted and unfixed; they are forms of camouflage that
provide artists with temporary positions and relationships within the history of art,
but pointedly staged in the context of the present.

The momentum of the artists under discussion here offers a shift from photography,
painting, and sculpture as stable nouns to dynamic adjectives, concerned with the
possibilities of our mercurial contemporary image environment. Thus, in what
we might now call this postdisciplinary age of art, we can begin to consider how
the history of art is animated in the present in consciously deployed gestures of the
photographic, painterly, and sculptural. The lexicons of these creative fields become agents
of creative originality—ways of selecting, combining, and subverting visual language.

There are many examples in this book of Photoshop’s painterly filters—its “manual”
settings—being used with such creative originality.26 These painterly approaches
use software as their material, placing computational devices at the aesthetic center
of the works and allowing them to function as contemporary marks of artistic
creativity.27 Viewers engage with this when Photoshop’s filters and layers
are visible and pronounced: manifest in formal alterations, combinations,
and contradictions28 that are rendered out of the algorithmic settings of “paint”
and “ink brushes” and photographic “fades.” Such options bring the material
possibilities of software into focus, essentially calling out Photoshop as a medium
in its own right, with inherent possibilities for creative subjectivity. The repetitive
use of generic forms of Photoshop’s simulation of “airbrush strokes” or “dodging”
and “burning” both constitute and transgress the traditional idea of painterly
and photographic authorship. Its practitioners consciously participate
in this realm of out-of-whack manifestations of automated imaging systems.29

26
“In the same way that all cultural images and objects become general…so too does the authorial stance of the artist
become general.” Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet,” 6.
27
“One must use not simply the delivery mechanisms of popular culture, but also its generic forms.” Seth Price,
“Dispersion,” 2002, 5; www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf.
28
“Object and image systems are entirely reliant on context and composition and are fatally disrupted by even minor
intervention.” Steciw to Blalock, “A Conversation.”
29
“The commodity is the form in which things come to be in the world. Beyond any concept of alienation in relation
to labor, we can see that our very social relations constitute the commodity’s material. This composition gives the
commodity a subjectivity that is not particular to any one of us, but is rather one in which we all participate in forming.”
Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), 104–5.
The notion of the “sculptural” in Photography Is Magic bears clarifying; it should
be distinguished from the trend in much art photography toward emphasizing
the simple physicality of photographic materials. It is of course true that the
tangible form of the photographic print has become much more charged in
this moment of screen-based image circulation. We have seen a resurgence of
“sculptural” installations of photography: undoubtedly responses—very literal
ones—to the renewed appreciation of photography as a material form. There
are numerous references to photography’s historic past in the broad spectrum
of contemporary art photography; these references range from a recharged use
of early nineteenth-century “proto-photographic,” lens-free processes to the
revisiting of photography-sculpture combinations that were popular in the 1970s
and 1980s. But the deployment of photography’s chemical roots and the structural
possibilities of three-dimensionality alone do not fulfill the fluid, imaginative
potentials of contemporary declarations of the sculptural and photographic. In the
context of Photography Is Magic, the characterization of the sculptor is as a renderer
of objects30—exerting control over images as materials and cultural artifacts. We
see this in Photography Is Magic in the preponderance of objects and forms made
out of images, at times seeming to encase empty volumes that are structured by
photographic materials. Similarly, the sense of the photographic as a dimensional
concept is brought to the fore by the increasing use of 3D-printing technologies,
and by photographic forms constructed not with a camera, but instead with image-
rendering software. Photography’s analog heritage and image-making’s digital
present are being conflated and used in ways that remove the once-essential idea
of the medium as a process of “capturing” a subject.

Thus our encounters with the photographic in artistic culture are undergoing a
profound shift. The binding together of image and object (or image as object) is a
fundamental cultural phenomenon that the artists represented here are consciously
designating and navigating.31 This is a field in which distinctions between original
and copy do not dominate and where images act as objects and vice versa,
comprehended through their ongoing state of circulation and versioning.32

CHANNELING HISTORIES

Many of the artists represented in Photography Is Magic are starting to be subject

to serious critical appraisal, much of it concerned with aligning their energies
30
“In this process they change the form of the objects. They imprint a new, intentional form onto them. They ‘inform’ them:
the object acquires an unnatural, improbable form: it becomes cultural.” Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 23.
31
“In a social system in which so much culturally relevant information is transmitted via images, it is in the form of images
that we most often encounter the objects of our desire…due to the object’s origins in mechanical reproduction, it too behaves
as an image unto itself—an image both of its representational intention but also its ideological function. Images
and objects function as delivery systems for commerce-driven ideologies.” Steciw to Blalock, “A Conversation.”
32
“Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of both its
materiality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its
copies.” Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet,” 3.
13
and discourses with previous movements of art history. Spurred in part by new
terms in art and media criticism, including “post-Internet” art33 and the “New
Aesthetic,”34 the story of modern and contemporary art is framed as one in close
conversation with the image environment of its time. Unquestionably, there have
been other points in history since the conception of photography where rapid
“image explosions” have occurred (consider, for example, advances in printing and
broadcasting technologies), and with them the experience of the visual world has
been altered in the course of single lifetimes. Artists have absorbed these cultural
shifts into the momentum of their practices, thus determining the dialogues and
interactions between imaging technology and modern and contemporary art.35
This is a manifestation of a profoundly human tendency, which is embedded in the
workings of our neural system: each time we call forth a memory, we neurologically
and psychologically remake and reposition it, and create new paths of accessibility
to that memory or idea out of the new relations that we have conjured.

Artists tend to interpret culture at large and the art of the past in a nonhierarchical
and expansive way, creating constellations of interconnected references.
The theoretical metaphor for this generative and constantly evolving idea of
knowledge is the rhizome—the model being the node-based plant that sends out
underground roots and shoots in all directions.36 In the field of creative media
especially, the rhizome has been a pervasive concept and is a useful metaphor
for thinking about dynamic ways to map seemingly disparate forms of ideas, their
meanings held in the constantly changing connections we make between them.37
The history of art circulates in this network of contemporary creative practices,
released from a fixed or traditional meaning, chronology, or status. When previous
art movements are “channeled” into contemporary practices, they are being tapped
to operate within the subjective maps of contemporary artists’ ideas.38

One of the most radical concepts of modern art that has been recently revived
in light of our image world is the readymade. Proposed by the artist Marcel
Duchamp in the early twentieth century, this incendiary idea defined artistic
authorship as the act of conferring or electing artistic status to ready-made

33
“Artist, curator and writer Marisa Olson’s use of the phrases ‘after the internet’ and ‘post-internet’ [began] in 2006…
Olson’s use of the term ‘post-internet,’ which implies an ability to stand outside the internet to some extent, contrasts
with more recent practices that have been associated with the same term, in which the artist, even art itself, is assumed
to be fully immersed in network culture and is no longer quite able to assume the position of the observer….Even the
term ‘post-internet’ itself has been redefined and changed; it has come to stand less for a clear demarcation of ‘before’
and ‘after’ than to represent a continuously evolving critical dialogue.” Michael Connor, “Post-Internet: What It Is
and What It Was,” in Kholeif, ed., You Are Here, 57.
34
“The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish passing objects and services that
have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic
has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro.” Sterling, “New Aesthetic.”
35
“This is one of those moments when the art world slides over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical.
This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a
while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen.
But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons.” Ibid.
objects, recontextualized to the physical and intellectual spaces of art.39 The use
of the readymade mode drew a dramatic distinction between the conventional
characterization of the artist as an embodiment of exceptional talent, creating
unique works of excellent and timely craftsmanship, and the notion of art making
as a conceptual practice that might involve only slight or even imperceptible
physical gestures (or none at all). The readymade is a resonant concept for today,
in the sense that many artists are co-opting existing object-commodities (including
photographic images) into their work—intact and unmanipulated. The historic idea
of the readymade would, indeed, seem to be a perfect fit with the approaches of
many contemporary artists—understood as the appropriation of commodity-objects
into the structure of art—if it were not for the manifestly dispersed and dynamic
nature of artistic practice in our contemporary image landscape.40 In an important
sense, every discrete act of rendering an object or image (whether industrial or
artistic) is now a manifestation of the endless circulation of the already made,
commodified, and systematized.

Another defining art moment that is often cited in relation to today’s seismic shifts
is the early-twentieth-century avant-garde movement of Cubism. A main tenet of
the perceived relationship between Cubism and contemporary artistic practices
is that both have been fueled by the phenomenon of mass-distribution media
of their day. The Cubist works that have perhaps the most enduring resonance
are the collages, in which newspaper headlines and printed advertisements were
pasted, layered, and visually suspended into single picture frames, creating a radical
and immediate experience of their present day as chaotic and multilayered. The
utter confidence with which early-twentieth-century artists conflated the “high”
and “low” of visual culture by collaging readymade materials remains a force to
be reckoned with. Again, of course, there are marked differences between artists
working in today’s media landscape and the Cubists, drawing upon their popular-
image environment for new materials to make art. The Cubists adopted the
momentum of the image culture at large from the vantage point of the avant-garde;

36
“The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing
memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus (original French pub. 1980; this citation, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 21.
37
“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances rela-
tive to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” Ibid., 6.
38
“We find ourselves at a similarly challenging aesthetic junction but also because new technologies again have created
new spatial and perceptual potentials that must be considered from the vantage point of the current artistic paradigm.”
Steciw to Blalock, “A Conversation.”
39
“To give a new idea to an object is already production. Duchamp thereby completes the definition of the term creation:
To create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative.” Bourriaud, Postproduction, 25.
40
“Nothing is in a fixed state, i.e. everything is anything else, whether because any object is capable of becoming another
type of object or because an object already exists in flux between multiple instantiations.” Vierkant, “The Image Object
Post-Internet,” 2.
15
this is a position that artists do not fully share in our era, which lacks the same
boundaries between art and the empirical mass of images in common circulation.41
On the other hand, the Cubist artists have been credited with a collective aim
to create work that had the power to recalibrate cultural perception by embodying
the frenetic visual tempo of the time; today’s artists might be considered as
constructing equivalent entry points with their work, interpreting existing
viewing behaviors into the dynamic of their practice.42

The avant-garde of the early twentieth century is a frequent point of comparison

with contemporary art photography also because of the plethora of experiments
with photographic apparatuses and materials that were happening internationally,
tapping into the essentialist and formally abstracting character of the medium.
On a general level, it is easy to think of current practitioners as experimenting
with the contemporary photographic toolkit—forming subjective and close
relationships with their materials that seem to mirror the practices of their avant-
garde antecedents.43 But abstractions of today’s experience are no longer the
preserve of artists alone. In our networked culture, creative play takes place on an
open field, and is not the preserve of an artistic vanguard, and subversion through
experimentation is integrated into the contemporary image system at large.

While the avant-garde of the early 1900s provides some material models for
contemporary art photography’s relationship with image culture, the theoretically
driven approaches of the late twentieth century offer others. We see something
of the spirit of postmodernism, for example, in the current simulation of the
daily language of image signs—the repetition of Photoshop color fades, online
graphics and ideograms, and the hollow forms of 3D-rendered objects. The often
intentionally ironic assessment of image-commodity culture that reverberated
through postmodernist art crops up in a different form today, in contemporary
photographic strategies of simulation.44
41
“Today, online, there is no home base: no building or context that contains and describes art in a way that uniformly
attributes meaning for all.” Troemel, “Art After Social Media,” in Kholeif, ed., You Are Here, 40.
42
“Artistic creation is more explicitly embedded in overlapping systems of circulating brands, images, and objects, together
forming an internet-enabled neoliberal ether….Not an airy declaration of independence, but a reckoning of one’s
immersion.” Connor, “Post-Internet,” in Kholeif, ed., You Are Here, 63.
43
“The discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people….Another more
balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making.” Sennett, The Craftsman, 7.
44
“By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is
inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a
material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions,
to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question
of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its
operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and
short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself—such is the vital function
of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death
a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the
imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.”
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (original French pub., 1981; this citation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1994), 2.
The infinite feedback loop between image and commodity was epitomized in
the mid-1980s by the loose grouping of artists known as the Simulationists.45
Their practices—which hovered ambiguously between critique of and desire for
commodity image culture—have resonance today, in substantial part because of
their adoption of a range of artistic positions within the increasingly market-driven
arena of contemporary art. As with all the historical movements cited in this text,
the parallels go only so far, but as artist-led strategies for engaging the complexity
and transience of artistic practice, these approaches continue to resonate
and be reenacted within the terrain of contemporary art.

The term that most clearly encapsulates the spirit of contemporary art practices—
their shared motivations and dynamics—is post-Internet. Its most common use
today is as a broad description of artistic practices that take for granted the
networked and integrated nature of the Internet.46 Post-Internet is of course not a
specific form of work—the loose definition applies as much to artists working with
traditional materials (such as photographic prints) as to artists using the vernacular
language of online culture; the term encapsulates both actual and symbolic
channeling of the pervasive impact that the Web, social media, and mobile
imaging technologies have had on the ways we make, consume, and understand
visual culture.47 Post-Internet is increasingly used to describe work by artists who
embed their practices in fluid versioning and scrolling information streams in our
commodified systems of communication, using the same iterative processes and
dynamic structuring of relations between works to the point that they become
inseparable from the systems themselves.48 Some of the artists represented in
Photography Is Magic are directly aligned with critical and curatorial projects that
are exploring the scope of this post-Internet environment. But in a more pervasive
sense, the term gives us dialogical permission to know that we experience these
artists’ practices by invitation: we have been asked to be present in the immanence
of the networked image dynamics of our time.

45
“The artists who lay claim to Simulationism considered the work of art to be an ‘absolute commodity’ and creation
a mere substitute for the act of consuming….The object was shown from the angle of the compulsion to buy, from the
angle of desire, midway between the inaccessible and the available.” Bourriaud, Postproduction, 27.
46
“The term ‘post-internet’ suggests that the focus of a good deal of artistic and critical discourse has shifted from ‘internet
culture’ as a discrete entity to an awareness that all culture has been reconfigured by the internet, or by internet-enabled
neoliberal capitalism.” Connor, “Post-Internet,” in Kholeif, ed., You Are Here, 61.
47
“Art after social media is paradoxically the rejection and reflection of the market. In practice and theory these two
seemingly divergent developments are reconcilable because each contains parts of the other. For all that is communal
about a decentralized network of artistic peers sharing and recreating each other’s work, the dispersion of this work
takes the shape of free market populism; of free exchange of information sorting itself out amongst those willing to
produce and consume it….This setup is not unlike that of the secondary art auction market, where art critics’ opinions
of the works for sale mean little to nothing and the bidding power of a room of collectors takes precedence.”
Troemel, “Art After Social Media,” in Kholeif, ed., You Are Here, 42.
48
“The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity
and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy.”
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007), 4.
17