Raphaël Dallaporta, CHESME SHAFA. Balkh Province, Afghanistan. From the Achaemenid period (6th–4th century BC) to the Ghorid period (12th–13th century AD), 2011, from the series Ruins (2011). Detail. Chromogenic print on Dibond, 120x150cm. Courtesy of the artist.
© Raphaël Dallaporta
Paul Wombell is an independent UK based writer and curator of photography. Previously directing two of the UK’s top photography institutions as well as curating many photo festivals in Europe, Wombell was invited as guest curator for the 13th edition of Le Mois de la Photo à Montreal, the city’s international photography biennale. In this short interview during the opening event, Wombell talked to M-KOS about his motivations to theme this year’s program under “Drone: The Automated Image” so to suggest the camera is imposing its own agency in relation with humans and thus to further question the meaning of being human in the technology age.
MKOS: How did you start the process of curating Le Mois de la Photo?
Paul Wombell [PW]: This started 26 months ago, a long time ago, I put the proposal in to the biennale and I was quite surprised that they accepted it. The premise was the idea of humans using technology to see or to extend human vision. The key concept was the idea of the drone, which was the idea of using a form of technology to see in the distance, partly with all the military issues with the American government and the idea of surveillance. But I took that as a kind of metaphor to look beyond just the drone. There are drones featured in some of the exhibitions, I took the idea that I could include closed circuit television, that I could use automatic image making like the photo booth, include robots and start thinking about webcams and software which can connect to Google Street View and Google Earth.
MKOS: So in replacing the human photo operator, are drones announcing an emerging post-human age?
PW: I wouldn’t call it post-human, because of all these issues about materiality. I mean, the issue of agency or the idea of species and a sense of consciousness. Those ideas have been in philosophy for thousands of years. My issues or concerns in a lot of the work here is the idea that in particular in terms of modernity or renaissance, it’s the idea that human is central. Some of the works in the biennale question that we are just one species that can have consciousness, that other species can have a consciousness. So some of the artists are using animals, but another idea is that technology has its own agency, there is a sense of different time frames, not just only human time frames but other time frames. I’m thinking about that kind of range of relationships and raise the key question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’
MKOS: Are we venturing past the humanist project?
PW: Very much so. You are right. In terms of photography the humanist photography you could say is central to how the history of photography has been written about. In a very direct sense, this biennale questions that idea.
MKOS: And it seems you are also questioning photography as an extension of the linear perspective?
PW: Yes. One of the key objects in the biennale is the camera and the camera that predates photography. Photography as we know it is roughly 187 years old, the idea of some kind of permanent image is generally discussed as the beginning of the photography. Maybe some of the questions I’m raising here, maybe the most important thing is not the image and its relationship with humans, but the relationship between the human and the camera. And the image comes as a kind of secondary effect from that relationship.
Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger, 1994. Detail from the installation, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1994. Photo: Philippe Migeat. Mixed installation: 1 cylindrical structure, 1 videoprojector, 4 speakers, 1 digital file, colour, stereo sound, 11min51s. Courtesy of Centre Pompidou © Mona Hatoum
MKOS: Also drones and other machines can take the camera to places where the humans cannot go, maybe to protect them from dangerous sites like volcanoes, but also change the reference of perspective by becoming very small, very big or looking very far…
PW: It goes both near and far. Mona Hatoum’s work for example, where there is a medical camera in her own body, that’s somewhere we physically could never go into and image like these are only possible because we let the camera have its own life beyond the hands of the photographer. Also artist like Thomas Ruff are using imagery from NASA, from Mars, from a place where we haven’t been to, we might get there one day but the idea of that distance is central here, so it’s about closeness and things that are very far away.
MKOS: So how did you go about selecting artists for such a project?
PW: When I originally wrote a proposal I provided a long list with it. Then after the proposal was accepted, I did another a year of research that involved meeting artists in Europe, America and Canada. Out of that I tried to create a balance between some of the ideas that I wanted to explore and the production process of the chosen artists. Interestingly, I was reflecting on this choice about four weeks ago and thought it would have been very difficult to do a project like this in the UK, with the range of work being available in terms of artists from Montreal and Quebec. I think there is something quite interesting here which allows a range of experimentations which you don’t see anywhere else.
MKOS: Is it also to do with the availability of so many venues on offer?
PW: Absolutely. What is amazing here is the range of venues where you can put together just one exhibition with one artist, to give them one space to say something, then other venues where you can show a group of artists, and more venues where you can match two artists to create an interesting relationship. All that makes a kind of quality in engaging with the work in hopefully an interesting way.
MKOS: And what is your next project?
PW: I’m working on a big project that will be realized next year, which is a new mission on photography on the French landscape called “Liquid Territories”. That is a very big project involving about 40 photographers in France. The plan is to have an exhibition in the spring with a large publication. ◼︎
Interviewed by Oli Sorenson
Paul Wombell has been director of Impressions Gallery in York (UK, 1986–94), director of The Photographers’ Gallery in London (UK, 1994–2005), and head of the Hereford Photography Festival (UK, 2006–07). Since 2007, he curated exhibitions for the annual photographic festival PHotoEspaña in Madrid and FotoGrafia Festival Internazionale di Roma. Most recently, he organized the one-person exhibition “Calves and Thighs: Juergen Teller” (2010) and the group exhibition “Bumpy Ride: The Prophecies of Photography” (2010). He regularly writes for international photographic publications and edited eight books on photography, the most recent being “End Times: Jill Greenberg” (TF Editores/D.A.P., 2012), as well as “The 70s: Photography and Everyday Life” (La Fábrica, 2009) co-edited with Sergio Mah.