NO LOOKING AFTER THE INTERNET

Abstract

What are the possibilities of learning from difficult images in an era in which digital technologies have made photographs of social violence ubiquitous? This article critically reflects on this question through an account of the curatorial experiments, dialogic contests and pedagogical failures encountered in organizing No Looking After the Internet: a “looking group” that has met since 2012 which invites participants to look at an image (or a series of images) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out loud together. Premised on the idea that it is not just what photographs depict that is difficult, but the interpretive process we encounter as viewers, No Looking foregrounds the latent knowledge that emerges from grappling with the photographic evidence difficult images offer us. Focusing on two sessions in which participants’ abilities to engage difficult knowledge broke down, the essay presents the first attempt at articulating a visual methodology that asks what we want from photographs in a post-internet age. In so doing, it builds on the psychoanalytically inflected work of pedagogical theorists Deborah Britzman and Roger Simon, which is cautiously optimistic about the spectator’s capacity for ethically engaging the suffering of others.

Acknowledgments

No Looking After the Internet was developed out of a curatorial residency at Gallery TPW R&D from 2012–2013, and I am hugely grateful to the staff there for their support of this project. I am especially indebted to Kim Simon for inviting me to experiment in public with her, and for her relentless curiosity and unwavering criticality along the way. Special thanks to Suzanne Carte, Emelie Chhangur, Sam Cotter, Elle Flanders, Jacob Korczynski, Sara Matthews, Alexis Kyle Mitchell, Philip Monk, Sharon Sliwinski and Leila Timmins for offering their thoughts, company and feedback at many of the sessions that took place there. No Looking After the Internet would not have been possible without the generosity of the many co-hosts and collaborators who invited me to host sessions, or graciously agreed to choose images to look at together: thank you to Deanna Bowen, Tom Clark, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Chris Curreri, Rozsa Farkas, Oliver Husain, Jean-Paul Kelly, Jason Lazarus, Annie MacDonell, Liz Park, cheyanne turions and Donald Weber for being willing to think and look out loud with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On the concept of the “unshowable photograph,” see Azoulay, “Different Ways.”

2 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.

3 Ibid., 96, emphasis original. It seems telling that Barthes here draws on the work of another psychoanalytic pedagogy theorist, Donald Winnicott.

4 Here I draw on the distinction Shawn Michelle Smith makes between photographic evidence (that which the image shows) and photographic meaning (the contingent interpretations viewers make from photographic evidence) in “The Evidence of Lynching. Lynching Photographs (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007): 10–41

5 Olin, “Touching Photographs.” For a compelling analysis of the ways Barthes elides maternal relationships in the van der Zee image, overlaying it with a racist and paternalist reading, see Smith, “Race and Reproduction .” For a convincing analysis of how Barthes suppresses his family’s involvement in colonialism in Africa through his refusal to reproduce the Winter Garden photograph, see Wexler, “The Purloined Image.”

6 Meyer, “The Red Envelope.”

7 Personal interview with artist, October 2012.

8 Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects; Simon, “A Shock to Thought”; and Simon, A Pedagogy of Witnessing.

9 Smith, “The Evidence of Lynching.”

10 Ibid., 41.

11 More recently, Stephen Sheehi has adapted the notion of photographic latency to argue that indigenous photographic practices allow the historical, social and economic conditions that produced an image to emerge, after and in spite of its manifest colonial content. See The Arab Imago..

12 For a history of Canada’s artist-run centers, see Jacob, Golden Streams.

13 Morell, “Pedagogies of Looking.”

14 Moser, “Exhaustive Images.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabrielle Moser

Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and independent curator. Her writing appears in venues including Artforum.com, Canadian Art, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, and Prefix Photo. Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, the Ryerson Image Centre, the University of British Columbia and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017. She holds a PhD from the art history and visual culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada and is an Assistant Professor in art history at OCAD University.