Photography After the Human

Abstract

How can we visualise and subsequently reimagine the abstraction that is the extinction of human species while there is still time? The article addresses this question by considering the existence of images — and, in particular, light-induced mechanical images known as photographs — after the human. The “after the human” designation does not just refer to the material disappearance of the human in some kind of distant future, but also to the present imagining of the disappearance of the human world as a prominent trope in art and other cultural practices. Such “ruin porn” has some historical antecedents: from the sublime Romantic landscapes of ruined abbeys through to paintings such as Rotunda by Joseph Gandy, commissioned by John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, and depicting the bank as a ruin even before it was built. Yet the visualisation of ruins has gained a new inflection in the Anthropocene, a period that is said to be suffering from a dual eco-eco crisis: the current global economic crisis and the impending — and irreversible — environmental crisis. We can think here of the seductive and haunting images of Detroit, a financially bankrupt North American city with a glorious industrial and architectural past — but also of TV series imagining our demise as a species, such as History channel’s Life after People. By extending the temporal scale beyond that of human history and introducing the horizon of extinction into the discussion, the article denaturalises our political and aesthetic frameworks through which we humans see and understand ourselves. It also takes some steps towards imagining a post-neoliberal world here and now.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ This interpretation of “after” has been inspired by the Call for Papers for the 2015 conference “After Extinction” in the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

² Please see the artist’s website for more images from the exhibition and book project: <http://photography.tonglam.com/>

³ Some of the ideas developed in this and the subsequent section have been developed from the essay “The Life-making Power of Photography” I wrote for the art monograph edited by David Evans, Manuel Vason. Double Exposures: Performance as Photography, Photography as Performance.

⁴ As Naomi Klein highlights in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs Climate Change, many climate change deniers do not actually deny climate change as such, but rather adopt denialism as a stand because it supports their economic interests.

⁵ The potential nuclear annihilation of our planet, itself enabled by science, was arguably a predecessor of the science-backed theory of the death of capitalism, and everything else, in the Anthropocene. However, there was a certain reversibility to the arrival of the nuclear war — which today looks much more remote than it did in the 1950s and 1960s. The narrative about the Anthropocene, in turn, is premised on the epoch’s irreversibility, and on the “deep time” inevitability of the extinction of the human (and of the other species), even if efforts are being solicited — and made — to lessen the impact of climate change across the current human time scale. I am grateful to Gary Hall for raising this point with me.

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Joanna Zylinska

Joanna Zylinska is a cultural theorist writing on new technologies and new media, ethics and art. Joanna is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of five books, the most recent being Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2014).