Under the title Photography Is, Mishka Henner has compiled a book of 1700 English-language quotes that all start with ‘Photography is …’. The book with the meaningful yet meaningless title addresses the issue of what photography is over its 130 pages and some interesting conclusions have been reached from over one and a half centuries of reflections on photography. Not surprising in itself – what is more surprising is that no one before has bothered to make the effort to take all the sense and nonsense uttered by famous and not-so-famous authors over the years with all seri-ousness and put it together in a book.
The sheer volume and diversity of quotes are a great reflection of photography itself: sometimes intelligent, sometimes stupid, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, serious, funny, poetic, romantic – as diverse, different and contradictory as the people who utter them. Before the inven-tion of search engines, such an undertaking would have been, if not exactly impossible, certainly much more difficult. We can assume that the existence, and indeed omnipresence, of the search engine brought the idea within reach. In the age of the index card, it would have become a life’s work whose readers may well have wondered about the state of mind of its author, and not without reason.
Photography Is takes reflections about photography to the point of absurdity. The book is a criti-cal discourse on photography that contributes as much as it ironically undermines. Yes, you could say that it is more a book about the idiosyncrasies of the search engine – you could also call it
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Mishka Henner, Photography Is (2010)
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mechanical stupidity – than a book about photography. We simply keep on reading what the engine has found without any discernible order and when the sentences chosen purely on the basis of a simple grammatical construct are taken from their original context and placed in amongst a multi-tude of sentences with the same form, it is often hard for the reader to properly appreciate the giant leap that the invention of the search engine represents for mankind.
Literature, theory, history, journalism, advertising and law – all mean as much (or as little) to the search engine as instruction manuals and private correspondence. No comment escapes the jugger-naut that is Google, no matter how random or banal it is, and thus the accumulation of these quotes hits a new level in the photography discussion as a kind of commentary on a commentary – the search engine brings all sorts of aspects to the surface that are not normally considered in estab-lished discourse. Some ostensibly clever people have invested considerable time and effort trying to get to the heart of what photography is; the new technology shows that it is also everything else you might think of by showing you everything that it can find on the subject without any differentiation, as mentioned before.
By presenting us with nothing but the naked results of the machine selection and not indicating any sources, the initiator of this search process also triggers the question of the extent to which a quote is normally used in an academic context as an authoritarian cudgel. If we don’t know what was said by Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag or other less-quoted authors, we read the quotes differently than if we were being beaten round the head with the ‘official’ nature of the quote. In the collective wil-derness of banality, we sometimes believe we have discovered something noteworthy and intelli-gent, but then we’re no longer quite so sure. And the question of whether it is really of any use trying to couch an issue in one sentence suddenly becomes very relevant. Chastened, we must resign our-selves to the fact that the only effective and absolutely certain statement remains: ‘Photograph Is’.
Photography Is is issued as a print-on-demand book and can be ordered from the Blurb Bookstore: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1362817.
Translated from a German article, which first appeared on Fotokritik in March 2010 (http://fotokritik.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/photography-is/) and it refers explicitly to the dummy version of the book printed in February 2010.
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