Picture Industry

An anthology to understand our complex contemporary image world

Curated by artist Walead Beshty, the exhibition Picture Industry reflects upon transformations in the production and distribution of photographic images as realized through its varied constructions of the corporeal, from its origin as a scientific tool and a means of cultural investigation to its phenomenological effects on the viewer. The exhibition complexifies traditional accounts of the medium, drawing on its application within science and the humanities to contemporary art, and includes works and photographic documents by over 70 artists and practitioners spanning the late 19th century to the present. It posits a provisional, alternative history of the optical image, breaking with both the technologically deterministic approach of aesthetic formalism, and the semiotic fixations of postmodernism, and on this basis reflects anew on the contemporary condition of image production. Picture Industry considers not only the materiality of images and the technologies that form their reception, but also the conflicted social history that lies under their surfaces and shapes our complex contemporary image world.

Picture Industry serves as a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition by way of an anthology of historical and theoretical texts, including reproductions of key art works and publications. It offers a resource to consider dominant threads in aesthetic theory, including selections from structuralist and poststructuralist explorations of representation, to German media theory, the study of cultural techniques, and the still-burgeoning realm of new media theory, which together offer a wide array of theoretical and methodological approaches to the world of images, and a sense of how those approaches have evolved over time. Rather than attempting a definitive history, the publication posits an alternative approach to the myriad questions and debates associated with representation, presenting its technological history as inextricable from the social history of media, and staging this through the complex and multivalent relationship between the photographic image and the body, whether the body of the viewer, or that of the image.

The publication brings together essays by, among others, Giorgio Agamben, Cory Arcangel, Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Ericka Beckman, Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi-Huberman, Thomas A. Edison, Harun Farocki, Morgan Fisher, Vilém Flusser, Coco Fusco, Tristan Garcia, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, Sigfried Giedion, Mark Godfrey, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dan Graham, Friedrich A. Kittler, Boris Mikhailov, Craig Owens, Erwin Panofsky, Seth Price, Siegfried Kracauer, Rosalind Krauss, Bruno Latour, Etienne-Jules Marey, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Hito Steyerl, William Henry Fox Talbot, Gilles de la Tourette, and Alan Turing.

Published with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and the LUMA Foundation, on the occasion of the exhibition Picture Industry at the Hessel Museum of Art (June 24–December 15, 2017). This exhibition is an extended version of that presented as part of Systematically Open? New Forms for Contemporary Image Production, the inaugural series of exhibitions at the LUMA Foundation, Arles.