Joanna Zylinska (2017) Nonhuman Photography. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Publisher’s website: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nonhuman-photography

Reviewed by Rob Coley

Choose Life

Critical writing on photography has long been a gloomy, melancholic affair. The most enduring articulation of this lugubrious tendency is made by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, a short meditation on photography first published in 1980 and still at the top of an all-too-short list of required reading on the subject. For Barthes, photographs that purport to capture moments of life in fact force us to ‘observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake’ (1993: 96). In what he describes as a ‘monstrous’ immobilization of time (1993: 91), every photograph forces us to confront a moment that has passed, that is no more, that can never be again. In these terms photographs bear testimony to human mortality, and so, as Barthes memorably put it, photographers are unwitting ‘agents of Death’ (1993: 92). Indeed it is the spectre of death that has governed the recent concerns of both scholarly and popular writing on photography, variously staged as obituaries for indexicality, for truth, for medium-specificity, for contemplative attention, and so on. It is, then, hard to overstate the intervention staged by Joanna Zylinska in Nonhuman Photography, a book that sets out to explore a radically different ‘photographic condition’, where the temporality of photography is in fact key to its vitality, and where ‘life itself is photographic’ (72).

From the outset, Zylinska makes it clear that this photographic condition can only be conceived by developing a greatly expanded concept of the medium, one that challenges and extends beyond the limitations of both representationalism and humanism. Quite apart from the usual concern with creative expression and social practice, this involves directing critical attention to ‘photographs that are not of, by or for the human’ (51). On one level this broadly speaks to what Trevor Paglen has recently called ‘invisible visual culture’ (2016), a world of satellite imaging, drones, facial recognition, artificial imaging intelligence, and so on, in which human agency and perception is at the very least decentred, perhaps even excluded entirely. Zylinska emphasizes that such imaging processes do not simply represent life – they mediate it. The book is, then, a series of prompts to ‘unsee’ a dominant mode of visuality that renders the life-shaping power of photography imperceptible (8).

On the basis of this initial premise, Nonhuman Photography offers a valuable contribution to ongoing debates concerning an increasingly machine-readable world and its so-called ‘new aesthetic’ (a term that remains pointedly absent from the book). Yet the real scale and significance of the photographic condition explored here takes us into more philosophically sophisticated territory. Indeed Zylinska insists on the need to reject any narrow conception of the nonhuman – insofar as it becomes reduced to questions of algorithms, networks, and surveillance – because in this context it is too readily assumed that the potentiality of photography is predisposed to exploitation by emergent modes of power. There is more to this potential, she maintains, and we need to affirm the liveliness of photography in order to grasp it.

Nonhuman Photography takes up and explores the media theory that Zylinska has previously developed together with Sarah Kember (2012). This is a vitalist or ontogenetic theory of mediation, inspired by the work of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Karen Barad, which contests the dualistic separation of human and nonhuman, nature and culture. Photography, in these terms, is a process of mediation through which it is possible to understand and express human-nonhuman entanglement as co-constitutive becoming. Here, by bringing these ideas into contact with canonical photographic theories and histories, together with some of its more neglected writings, Zylinska makes the case for a renewed focus on the ‘ontological singularity’ (7) of photography. In the first two chapters, this is articulated in a line of argument that leans on the Bergsonian/Deleuzian idea that ‘time, duration, and movement, stand precisely for life itself’ (70). What are conceived here as photographic ‘cuts’ into duration remain ‘connected to the flow of time’ (72), and Zylinska argues that it is only on the basis of a temporary photographic stabilization that we can recognize the vital process from which it is an interruption or cut. Photographic practice is, then, a form of cutting; beyond its representational function it articulates a non-anthropocentric creative impulse: ‘life is a creation of images in the most radical sense, a way of temporarily stabilizing matter into forms’ (75). Consequently, and contrary to any Barthesian dismay or mourning, photographs ‘still bear a trace of life’ (72-3).

This idea is explored in further detail in the third and fourth chapters, which develop a non- or posthumanist theory of photography with specific reference to the Anthropocene – the geo-historical period that provides an overall context for Zylinska’s considerations. Given the apparent complexity of the task involved in rethinking photography from an affirmative, vitalist perspective, it may seem like an odd decision to situate this discussion against the background of ecological crisis, extinction and ruination. However, over and above the etymological basis for designating the present era the age of the human, the Anthropocene also names a set of conditions that trigger an encounter with deep, cosmic time, one that precipitates a crisis of human subjectivity. It is in the context of deep time, and with reference to the recent media theory of Jussi Parikka and John Durham Peters, that Zylinska develops a geological concept of photography, where photography is understood as a natural phenomenon, ‘a light induced process of fossilization occurring across different media’ (104). In this particularly fascinating section of the book (entirely at odds with the usual squabbles over the newness or otherwise of digital photography), the technical invention and practice of photography is presented as a thoroughly recent iteration of more ancient material processes of temporal ‘impressioning’ (110). And while geological impressioning can be understood as the past photographing itself (108), Zylinska rejects the idea that such impressioning becomes a memento mori. Instead, she contends, these processes remind us of the sun, as the source of all Earthly life, meaning that fossilization and/as photography is an ethical injunction for responsibility toward life ‘in both its actual and virtual forms’ (127).

Throughout the book, Zylinska’s argument is interwoven with reference to the work of many different contemporary photographic practitioners, together with images from her own practice, which she describes as ‘a way of philosophizing with a camera’ (158). In chapter 5, in which she returns to the themes of evolution and extinction in order to critique the discourse of progress undergirding technological obsolescence, this is formulated in terms of a ‘shallow media geology’ (134), a method that informs photographic excavations of global, national, and domestic sites. Chapter 6 addresses digitality and archives, refers to Zylinska’s involvement in the Photomediations ‘open book’ project (Kuc and Zylinska, 2016), and sets out to show how – in its reproducibility and in its transcoding of light – photography is ‘always already digital’ (176). This is reiterated in a short conclusion that usefully draws together her account of photography’s material history in order to emphasize that an algorithmic, computational or networked mode of photography is better understood as an intensification of preexisting human-nonhuman entanglements.

If these last two chapters seem to shift gear, and act somewhat autonomously rather than as part of the more tightly constructed argument of the book’s first half, then this does nothing to diminish the overall status of what is undoubtedly one of the most significant books on the subject of photography to have been published in the 21st century. It is, though, necessary to highlight one area of apparent discrepancy that runs throughout the book. To take human-nonhuman relationality seriously there is, Zylinska argues, an ethical injunction to denaturalize what is otherwise taken for natural. This means being careful to ensure that we do not end up ‘repressing the strangeness of what is perceived’ (56). Yet much of her argument seems to rest on a similar repression of strangeness, both in terms of the photographic examples selected to bear out this argument, and in the way that these examples serve her theoretical investments.

Early on in the book, Zylinska explains how the rejection of a disembodied godlike perspective – abstracted from material entanglement – demands a process of ‘unseeing and unknowing’ (29) that is more disruptive than merely reflexive. Hence, some of the photographic work included here is discussed in terms of its power to disorient and disturb (119). It is this process of being ‘unsettled by an image’ that, for Zylinska, ‘signals the possibility of an ethical opening’ (144). Yet, her acknowledgement of the limitations of such methods notwithstanding, many of the examples fail to convince precisely because they are exemplars of a reflexive practice that is entirely familiar within the ambit of contemporary visual art, even if some of these works originate from outside of its institutional frameworks. Of course, this is hardly surprising given that the book is at least partly aimed at members of this community. It is also important to emphasize that, in line with the ethical position Zylinska sets out here and in previous writing, such works are privileged for their ‘minimal intervention’ (101) as opposed to a problematically ‘brazen’ (134) tendency toward grand (masculinist) gestures by theorists and artists alike, which capture the geological and cosmic in a regressively reconstructed God’s eye view. The problem remains, though, that Zylinska affirms the various powers of these photographic works in terms of their recognition function, their ability to reactivate an understanding of the nonhuman agency immanent to the photographic process, an understanding that was fundamental to the modes of perception generated in photography’s early, experimental past. In this context, it would seem that any disorienting or unsettling encounters immediately become objects of positive knowledge. Entangled darkness is subject to illumination.

One of the central, thrilling insights of the book is that a revised understanding of photography, one that extends beyond its representational qualities to recognize ‘all photography…as a cue for the goings-on of deep time, well beyond human control and human existence’, might ensure that the circumstances of the Anthropocene, and the humility inducing scales it demands we encounter, will not simply ‘disappear from our visual and conceptual horizon’ (126). What remains missing here, though, is any consideration of a more disruptive encounter with this horizon in which the human capacity to perceive and conceptualize relational entanglement confronts its own limitations. This would be to understand the circumstances of the Anthropocene as those which trigger an encounter with life that remains in some way inaccessible or recessive, life that cannot be rendered perceptible or thinkable but nonetheless remains materially foundational to both perception and thought (Thacker, 2010: 23). It is Zylinska’s determination to present her vitalist account in isolation that obviates any acknowledgement or examination of these contradictions. Though she refers to a plurality of ‘posthumanist perspectives’ (81) there is little engagement with the opposition here. Ultimately, the side effect of a need to inoculate against photography’s pessimism – its Barthesian obsession with death – is an allergy to the weirdness of life itself, where any experience of trauma or horror is understood simply as the recovery of humanism through the back door, a symptom of ‘species nostalgia’ (59) that serves to render epistemological and ontological crises in a ‘digestible’ form (88).

Zylinska is of course entirely right to point out that, in the more faddish responses to the concept of the Anthropocene, horror and solemnity are both prone to conservative exploitation as cynical sources of pleasure and relief, responses that are both ethically and politically paralyzing. Yet the ethical position she outlines here necessitates an unsettling encounter with strangeness, suggesting that such responses do not inevitably lead to apathy and incapacity. It is, then, unfortunate that where the book does offer strong intimations of something weird about photography’s zoetic ontology – as for example with Zylinska’s reference to the story of ‘Becoming Something’ by the artist Lindsay Seers – little is made of this. Instead, Zylinska wants us ‘to come out of the side of life’ (127), a life that is reassuringly knowable. Perhaps though, in the age of the Anthropocene, any such collaboration demands submitting to a stranger, cosmic vitality, a life teeming with potential for minimal photographic encounters to which it is nonetheless impossible to become inured. We might say that, for us ‘humans’, it is a responsibility.

References

Barthes, R. (1993) Camera Lucida. R. Howard, trans., London: Vintage.

Kember, S. and J. Zylinska (2012) Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Kuc, K. and J. Zylinska (2016) Photomediations: A Reader. London: Open Humanities Press. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/photomediations/

Paglen, T. (2016) ‘Invisible Images (Your Pictures are Looking at You)’, The New Inquiry 8 December. https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you.

Thacker, E. (2010) After Life. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Dr Rob Coley is a senior lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Lincoln. He is the author (with Dean Lockwood) of Photography in the Middle: Dispatches on Media Ecologies and Aesthetics (2016, Punctum).

Email: rcoley@lincoln.ac.uk