Unworlding Photography, an Excerpt From Sprouting-through

This text is an excerpt from a research publication called “Sprouting-through”, self-published in 2023. Written through the process of a seed, it touches upon the ambiguous nature of being more-than-human, art in the Anthropocene, artistic practice situated in-between self and other, human and non-human, inside and outside and other blurry boundaries. A mix of rooted thoughts and wilder poetics.

Dissecting one’s own discipline is not an easy task. Building is easier. Artistic practice is often considered a tool for world-building. The artist’s intention or role is sometimes attributed to speculating or imagining worlds, in which certain systems that make up our lives are changed, erased or new ones are built. Imaginative, generative, and creative powers of making surely cannot be disregarded, they stimulate, activate, and engage and can do so critically. Though when world-building comes into question, there is a need to proceed with caution. Because we do have a problem with imagination. Whose worlds are we building?

Unworlding or unbuilding is a term queer theorist Jack Halberstam uses for taking things apart and dismantling systems that make our lives. He argues that we need to unbuild instead of building worlds. While it might seem so, it is not an anti-utopian concept but requires delaying utopian world-building, to unbuild what is already there, to take apart our failures [1], understand and take care of them, before we move on to imagining. What does unworlding look like?

Whether it is human and non-human relations or the nature and culture dichotomy in my artistic practice I am most intrigued by breaking binary thinking. I love frameworks and fixed things just because I can bend them out of their form, from still to alive, from permanent to temporary, from fixed to fluid. I think that’s why I am so intrigued by the medium of photography, its boundaries, and the framework that just begs to be challenged. 

growth shape-shifts

and so do I,

and so does my work.

Not being fully aware of what I was doing, I started unworlding photography out of confusion. I was confused and stuck on how to approach ecological matters through photography. Art practice, as a man-made concept, can expose the consequences of anthropocentric living but falls short when trying to get to the core of being ecocentric because it cannot escape its own anthropocentrism. And so photography, being at its core an anthropocentric concept needs to be dismantled as an anthropocentric discipline and put together again through an ecocentric perspective to address ecological demands. What does it mean to dismantle photography as an anthropocentric medium?

Unworlding photography a lot of the time requires acting counter-intuitively. Photographs are made by humans, for humans. They are fixed and to an extent they are permanent. They are controlled: measured in terms of light, time, and sensitivity. With a few exceptions, photography is not a medium of co-creation with non-humans. To unworld photography is to act counter to all of these conditions.

I tend to go close, quite literally, on a microscopic level, because the closer I go the wider I understand, paradoxically, I can zoom out only while zooming in, to understand macro through micro, the world through a hand palm. There are ecosystems in our bodies, our balconies, our gardens. There are probably more non-human cells than human cells in our bodies. Ecosystems exist not around our borders and structures of what we deem natural, they are not exclusive. Everything is made up of alive entities, non-human others. By investigating conditions in which organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and plants live I want to actively involve the non-human other in the photographic process in order to question the image as permanent and still, therefore losing control over it. Photography is made of human control, to unlearn it as we know it, is to aim to lose that control. To try and give it away to beings that are predominantly considered less ‘complex’ or ‘sentient’ in the evolutionary hierarchy. I see interspecies co-creation as a way of unworlding because it takes apart what we know about creation and interspecies relations.

My attempt at relearning photography from a non-human perspective started with In a Pupa. Pupa is usually defined as a stage of a metamorphic insect’s life (such as a butterfly, a moth, or a bee) that occurs between the larva and the imago. It is when an insect is enclosed in a cocoon or a protective covering and undergoes internal changes, in other words, a transformation, to reach a new stage. Just like a seed, the cocoon is also a process. During this process, the very starting spark of unbuilding, I aimed to treat photography as if it was in a pupa: in a stage of transition, temporarity, and transformation. I invited bacteria and mold to find home on large film negatives and let them continuously alter the image. The images portray landscapes of the Netherlands, an environment said to be thoroughly controlled by humans. By growing various bacteria and molds on the film negatives, the control is given back to organic processes, and the image is repurposed to become a place to live. Like a speculative scientist, I assumed that microorganisms were eating away at the silver halide layer of the film, unworlding the world of the image on their own, eroding, cultivating, and wilding for it to never be seen in human-like stillness. The work comes together in one temporary, collaborative, bewildered matter which never looks or acts the same, where stillness and control are challenged.

My work with and through non-humans also continued by letting them grow from the anthropocentric knowledge we have on images or seeing in general by letting oyster mushrooms cultivate and grow from classic books on looking, such as John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, or Susan Sontag’s On Photography, among others. Existing knowledge became the soil for new knowledge, a man-made structure of thoughts replaced by organic bewildered growth. Letting an alive entity live and grow through these books became symbolic of how I treat knowledge on seeing in general: thoughts imprinted on me when I was acquiring them to know the image world grew into new precarious beings. What I once knew was composted into the soil for eco-centric ways of being and knowing, challenging my worldview and fruiting into a new, precarious one.

‘Introducing precariousness as the central position into my artistic practice means I must first question its very foundation, which is the medium of analog photography. Delinking from my basis includes not only acknowledging the toxicity of photographic chemicals, but also facing the racist implications of the medium itself; from the reason why photographic emulsions cannot register dark tones the same way as light tones, to the fact that photography was shaped by and in a world in which imperial rights prevailed over others.’ [2]

This is how Risk Hazekamp, an inter-dependent visual artist and researcher describes their research project, initiated in 2020, Unlearning Photography. In their work Hazekamp unworlds photography through cyanobacteria, the first producers of oxygen in the atmosphere. Cyanobacteria, once a source of life, is now considered an invasive threat to the environment due to its expansive growth, caused by human activity. [3] Working with human ancient ancestors cyanobacteria, Hazekamp unlearns ancient ancestors of photography, analog photography, which carries baggage filled with chemical toxins, race bias, and imperial attitudes. Hazekamp’s work does not represent cyanobacteria but works with them. Photography always deals with representation, but it's a fine thread image-making can walk on when addressing ‘nature’ issues , because the control of representation through image-making is always in the hands (as well as the gaze) of a human.

Hazekamp describes taking care of cyanobacteria cultures and the shock and confusion that comes from being unable to know how to take care of one’s own ancient ancestors, which I would experience when working with non-humans as well: there is this feeling of heaviness, the inability to accept failure towards another being but also a feeling for needing control, this human seemingly pre-programmed necessity to have oversight and domestication over non-human beings which is hard but necessary (going back to Harraway’s terms here) to stay with.

Organic photography is another part of Unlearning Photography Hazekamp explores while working with cyanobacteria, making photographic emulsions for anthotypes, images that are temporary, take hours, days, or weeks to produce in the sunlight, and start to fade away once they are revealed. Working with temporary processes unworlds contemporary image-making culture and art market conditions which are focused on the reproduction and permanence of images. It is a countering or alternative position that I (probably due to my intrinsic need to bend fixed things) am fond of and try to take as well. Quoting photography and visual culture theorist Ariella Azoulay, Risk Hazekamp sums up unworlding through one’s own discipline: ‘imperialism is not going to disappear without us unlearning our scripted roles as the operators of imperialism.’ [4] And although Hazekamp deconstructs photography from a decolonial perspective, counteracting the imperial attitudes towards nature such as the quest for discovery, domestication, and control despite all odds are equally big parts in this deconstruction, making this work so engaging and relevant source for my own practice.

When working towards the deconstruction of permissible methods in photography through an ecocentric perspective, as an alternative movement to traditional photography, there is a challenge of accessibility to these sustainable methods being used. By accessibility, I am not referring to the actual sources being used in image or print production but I am referring to educational resources to start engaging with these methods. To challenge some environmental impacts of photographic (darkroom) practices, a context-based practice is one that provides means to explore this deconstruction in an accessible way by, for instance, using materials found in the local environment and sourced according to seasonality. The Sustainable Darkroom is making these educational resources accessible to a wider scope of individuals wanting to unworld their practice or just experiment with it in an ecocentric way.

The Sustainable Darkroom is an artist-run research initiative, which aims to help equip cultural practitioners with new skills and knowledge to develop environmentally friendly photographic darkroom practices. The program is not tied to a place but is an ethos, a way of thinking and of understanding [5] or re-understanding image production. The Sustainable Darkroom is also a mutual learning program, which I consider to be a spreading source of photography-based wild and unruly growth through communal workshops, residencies, publications, and other open-source formats. Run by Hannah Fletcher, Alice Cazenave and Edd Carr, The Sustainable Darkroom spreads methods, such as organic photography, fostering a context-based practice for anyone wanting to unworld their own darkroom practice. Like a fallen fruit the archived knowledge is picked away by other critters and its seeds once again spread and cultivate throughout the ecosystem, or in this instance, a community, which is not tied to a place but rather a method, a method of unlearning and learning through their local environment. Although not to be explored in depth within this research, The Sustainable Darkroom’s publication, re:source, includes an array of content such as essays, recipes, experiments, images, and research from practitioners all around the world focusing on returning the photographic processes and materials back to its growing sources and is the most wide collection of sustainable photographic practice writing and documentation available to date. Similarly to Risk Hazekamp’s use of organic photography, Sustainable Darkroom’s publication "Re·source" explores the intricate connections between materials as resources, colonialism, and societal structures. It promotes the idea of being resourceful while also taking into account the economic implications of resources as a means of generating wealth. Furthermore, the publication itself becomes a resource to be spread by providing valuable information for those within a photographic discipline seeking to ‘learn to unlearn’ by learning about photography that is not just representation-focused.

Understanding failures, and taking care of them, before moving on to imagining is a transgressive act itself since it refuses the permissible mode of building structures on top of old, decaying ones without staying with the ruins. To unworld one’s own discipline is no easy task, but a necessary one. I want to continue to unlearn my own discipline which paradoxically becomes a discipline in itself, even if that discipline is one of uncertainty. Unlearning is a state of deconstruction which requires to be passed through and rearrange different modes of being and knowing in a non-hierarchical way: sensorial intertwined with the autobiographical, representational intertwined with autopoietic, kneading a practice that doesn’t infringe upon the idea of the disciplinary but is a discipline guarding its uncertainty and taking care of its failures.

Endnotes:

[1] Jack Halberstam, “Pluriversal, Bewildered, or Otherwise Lecture | Jack Halberstam: Unworlding” (The Cooper Union, New York, filmed February 15, 2022, Video of lecture) 31:02, https://youtu.be/h1QVGOGf1VM.

[2] Risk Hazekamp, “Unlearning Photography” ADMA, accessed November 12, 2022, https://www.adma.be/risk-hazekamp.

[3] Risk Hazekamp, “Unlearning Photography”.

[4] Ariella Azoulay, Hrag Vartanian, host, “Connecting Museums, Modern Art, Colonialism, and Violence”, Hyperallergic podcast, March 11, 2020 quoted in Risk Hazekamp, “Unlearning Photography”.

[5] Sustainable Darkroom, "About," accessed March 1, 2023, https://sustainabledarkroom.com/pages/about.html.

Ieva Maslinskaitė is part of »Guest Room: Michael Famighetti«.