Interview with Mladen Bizumic

Tom Winchester: Your work understands photography as always changing. In the introduction to your doctoral dissertation, Photo-Capitalism: On Social Relations in the Production and Distribution of Contemporary Art, you identify light and viewability as defining characteristics of photography. How did you arrive at that definition?

Mladen Bizumic: It’s a fundamental question that I’ve been trying to come to terms with for quite a long time. It’s a discipline of indexical depiction that, to an extent, is about light and looking at something—let’s say a physical imprint—of some kind that can be preserved and seen at a later point. That being said, it could easily be said that what photography is not so easy to define because the above definition doesn’t necessarily cover every type of photography from daguerreotype to data images. In terms of that definition, for my dissertation, I needed it in order to define my major topic (photography) and to show its incredibly wide range of material diversity.

What is it, essentially, in us, as humans, that we want to depict the world in that way? Why do we desire technical image making, simulations, photography? To me, that’s even more important. And that’s, to a large extent, what my thesis deals with: the multiple different ways of using photography culturally, economically, and artistically.

I really hope that other people will come up with other definitions of what photography is. It’s never fully answered.

TW: You include an aphoristic manifesto that reads, “No software operates without the hardware that supports it. No digital images appear without a display medium. There is no art photography without the industry of photography. No Kodachrome film without the Kodak factory that produces it.” It’s a manifesto about the formal qualities of photography, but it also takes on an existential tone.

MB: My intention was to describe a field that has gone through huge changes over the last twenty years. Interestingly enough, the year 2000 was the most financially successful year at Kodak. The 1990s were essentially all about digitization. Analog was on the way out, but digital wasn’t yet good enough to replace it fully. The mainstreaming of digital photography really happened with the smartphone. You see how one historical period is ending, and we are witnessing this.

I used to shoot using films that have since been discontinued. So, as a practitioner, I have the personal experience of not being able to produce the work that I used to produce, and I started to implement those materials. I started using them not as materials to depict something, but as materials to show relics of a bygone era. It’s not a nostalgic thing; it’s just the reality that I’m experiencing as a maker.

In addition, there is a value in keeping certain types of technical image making alive. Once extinct, these “languages” will be gone forever. Wouldn’t it be great to consider art as one of the last fields where the art of analog photography is kept alive? Consider painting in the 19th century; its function, meaning and effect, due to the mainstreaming of camera, was completely reinvented. There would be no modern art, as we know it, without this transformation which was triggered by the camera. I see something similar happening now with the replacement of chemical photography by the smartphone. It’s in zombie-like state, simultaneously alive and dead. But its effect is different: it is about social history, materiality, and industrial legacy.

TW: You write about capitalism’s influence on photography, but you don’t seem to view it as self-evidently bad or corruptive like, for example, the postmodernists did. It’s like we’ve become desensitized to the fact that photographs are commodities.

MB: In Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, one interesting thing is that he is absolutely mesmerized, and cannot believe how fascinating capitalism is. Commodity fetishism is one of Marx’s ideas that can apply to photography. For example, you have a piece of wood, you modify it, and you make a table. That table is worth a lot more than the raw piece of wood. The same thing can be said of photography: you have material, you can produce it, you can print it, and it’s worth a lot more. You transform it. There’s a process of value transformation. He says something magical happens there; something happens with this material being transformed and becoming something else. The value has transformed. He calls that commodity fetishism.

It’s extraordinary that we do this all the time. I don’t want to mystify the market. I really want to understand it. I want to understand how people operate in that world, and how it affects the context of art. In my opinion, it’s naive to say that it’s a terrible system, and that we should destroy it and build a new system. I’m not saying that system isn’t able to absorb any form of criticism. That’s where the fascinating thing is; it is informed by criticism and has an ability to keep on transforming and becoming something else somewhere else. Without doing that, we risk being completely utopian.

The world is much bigger than a picture of it. I think the problem with postmodernism is that somehow, to a large extent, the images of the world were confused with the world. I think it’s important to understand how the system of capitalism really operates, and how it affects social relations in the context of contemporary art.

TW: You make a correlation between the increasing value of analog technologies and physical objects with the spread of digitization.

MB: With the increased level of digitization, analog objects do come back as depictions: they’re uploaded, and they circulate in the digital sphere. Now, they become known as something that, perhaps, they were not known as in the past. They come back as reproductions, and the physical objects come back as relics. They come back as something that has an aura. And that aura is a different type of aura: they come back with a social history. They carry a social history within them—and this is something to do with the art world, today, which largely deals with social practices. Therefore, these objects come back, and they function within this particular field, now, as objects of qualities that, maybe, were not so visible in the past. They were unseen.

What I like to do, as an artist, is to represent the underrepresented, or see the unseen, or something that was in the background I would like to suggest should be in the foreground. Yet, I understand that aura, in Benjaminian sense, is connected to a place. But objects can have an aura as well, and that aura needs to be contextualized. Otherwise, there is no aura. The infrastructure that produces that aura is the art world, and the art world loves to do that. Maybe we need to demystify that. I like to criticize that art world, and talk about all its problems, while, at the same time, I love it because the art world is open to accepting that form of criticism. That is the whole beauty of the art world.

TW: What do you mean by, “The dematerialized, digital commodity and the auratic photographic object are, in fact, versions of the same thing.” Are there differences between the two?

MB: It can be argued that they are versions of the same thing. An interesting thing about data is that an image can function as a file, and that file can be realized. It’s invisible; it’s in there somewhere; we know it’s in there, but it’s invisible. That file can also be printed, and then it becomes a physical material, which has a very different presence in space, and it operates in a very different field as a physical object. So, it’s a version of the same thing, and they operate in the world separately, and differently, but they are still connected. They’re unified by this difference. So yes, they’re different versions of the same thing.

TW: NFTs are digital commodities; digital assets. You make the point that they act, and can be treated, in some of the same ways as the old, analog system.

MB: In a speculative sense, NFTs are largely based on the traditional idea of something being unique and rare. Of course, that’s something that’s borrowed from the traditional art world. The difference lies in how we relate to each other. It’s about social relations. There’s a new type of social relations forming, and they are hidden behind this cultural moment. For me, the art which exemplifies that is the art that mirrors this reality.

TW: You tell the story of photography by focusing on the people who’ve been influential in its development. In your interviews, you ask personal questions. You ask them about them. Even the way you write the interviews is very personal and colloquial. They read like the conversations between old friends.

Your interview with Joan Levin Kirsch, the wife of Russell Kirsch, who developed the first digital scanner, tells of how the idea for a variable pixel shape was inspired by medieval mosaics in Ravenna, Italy. You tell the story of how the idea came from Joan’s suggestion. 

MB: For me, that was an extraordinary discovery. Joan and Russell Kirsch, they used to travel a lot, and one of the things that Joan had a real passion for was visiting art historical places. When they went to Ravenna, they saw the mosaics, which are very well preserved, and Joan said, “Russell, when you and your team were designing the pixel, you decided to have a square. Why didn’t you think like those smart people, back then, who came up with multiple different shapes of stones to create a much more effective way?” And Russell answered, “We made a mistake. Let’s redesign it.” That’s how they came up with the variable pixel shape.

This was in the 1990s, when there were a lot of problems with pixelated images. Russell came up with this new thing that was shaped differently, and had multiple different shapes of the pixel, and it was much more effective. Of course, the technology has improved since then, but their reference for redesigning the pixel came from seeing something that was created 15 or 16 centuries ago.

A lot of things that happen in art are very intimate. Some of the most extraordinary, important things were from intimate encounters while going on holiday. Some of the best ideas you get come from when you rest, and you don’t think about it all the time. It’s so interesting to talk to these people because they tell you about all these moments of discovery. As an artist, I’m much more interested in a dialogue than a monologue.