Photofinish
Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato

Originally published in Un Magazine, 2016

Everything exists to end in a photograph — Susan Sontag1.
In a period in which we have accepted embraced the proliferation of imaging 

systems, our collective gaze is capable of traversing known space and time. 

From Hubble’s technicoloured explosions of distant nebulae to whatever those splatters are in the search for 

the Higgs boson. The idea that the world has almost been replaced by its double is not so unusual, and it leads to the notion that all that remains is to fill the holes in between these two extremes of inner and outer space. 

These holes in between are being filled, and at an unprecedented rate, with image data generated voluntarily and involuntarily by 

individuals as they move through real and electronic space. It is difficult to imagine life without being imaged. Sometimes being imaged precedes being. The DNA molecules of our first child were photographed, and later video recorded, as they were implanted in utero. The Christian doctrine ‘God created man in his own image,’ that is, that the image is the source of life, resonates in the dimly lit clinic as we nervously joke with the nurses. But we need to return to this idea of being imaged preceding being in another place, here we are discussing the image as the end of existence and not its beginning. 

1 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977) p.24 
So the straightforward premise is 

that the widespread collective production, dissemination and control of images has reached 

significant proportions. Not only are we speaking of the photographs taken by humans with cameras—and about 10% of all photos ever taken have been taken in the last year—but also the countless images acquired through CCTV, satellite, Google streetview, and anything else that has been invented since our 

writing this.
Vilém Flusser said “the new photo will hold objects in contempt.”2 Technology can hand reality its ass right now. Just ask anyone with Photoshop and some time on their hands to see how prescient Flusser’s words remain almost 30 years later. The image becomes a riff, following us around like a puppy a pop song. Accomplices in the trickery, we share in chorus. 

Meanwhile, the perception of a constant all-encompassing surveillance has generated a collective horror vacui, resulting in our need to obsessively fill the entire surface of the world with images of increasing detail. In a seemingly unstoppable upgrade cycle, images are not only increasing in number but in how closely they defy reality. 

2 Vilem Flusser, ‘The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs,’ in Leonardo, 19, 4 (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1986) p.331 
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The world imagined has been gradually displaced by the world imaged via infoglomerates 

like the Church, the State or Google, and increasingly panoptic hybrids of the three, resulting in a ubiquity of the image that triggers both our schizophrenic 

repulsion and obsessive return to it. The gradual displace- ment of the unknown with the image, despite our informed distrust of the photograph, constitutes what Groys calls a metaphysical search for the truth. 

Groys argues that it is in our separate perception of both the materiality and meaning of the photograph that we intuit 

the presence of a superior power (like we said, God, and/or Google, and/or State) piloting our interpretation of the image and the world.3 

3 Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology Of The Media, Translated by Carsten Strathausen. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p.11 
When Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and its 239 passengers vanished while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, over 3 million volunteers participated in the search for evidence of what the fuck happened, forming the largest search party in history. Vast areas of the Gulf of Thailand were subdivided into smaller areas to be examined by individuals through the online site Tomnod, as two dedicated DigitalGlobe satellites were repositioned to image the hypotheti- cal crash site. Despite the tagging of over 12.8 million objects, the endeavour failed to uncover a life-raft or piece of wreckage. White caps on the waves. 

As the news cycled down from the initial scramble to scoop the first images of the event from the ocean, the speculative reenactments, 3D renderings and expert interviews were gradually replaced by the disquieting possibility that no 

photographic evidence of the tragedy would be discovered. 

In the months following the incident, various reports have uncovered data packets exchanged between the aircraft’s instruments and a satellite; technolo- gy’s encrypted handshakes have adjusted the field of view; there are realign- 

ments and new foci. Yet despite this scientific analysis the kenophobia does not abate and the image is still expected to save our souls come to our aid. Until the tragedy claims an accompanying image we are awash in an anachronistic sea of words, which is to say the imagined. Our news feeds offer little comfort, only speculation that leaves fertile ground for the conspiracy theorists who provide a kind of image-surrogate to which we turn in moments of suspended truth. 

Perversely, the failure of the satellite image to provide the key to uncovering the unknown story of the flight is misconstrued as a lack of detail or resolvable 
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information in the image, generally referred to as resolution.
So the event or subject’s visibility is dependent on its resolution (dpi), while the resolution of an image (its assignment as key) depends on what is visible. Go Phoenix dredges the bottom of the Indian Ocean with an automated camera, seeking this dual resolution. The contemporary image is caught between its inability to return a truth (that ship has sailed) and its irrational, yet persistent role as evidence, instigator, potential narrator of an event. In the expansive fields of view offered by satellites overhead or prosthetic cameras in the depths below, this dual-resolution of the image is repeatedly deferred to a later time, until the next image. The image becomes less a document and more promissory note, an IOU of the truth. This continual deferral of closure is a defining force of the post-photograph. 

French symbolist school teacher poet 

granddaddy of the cubists, futurists Stéphane Mallarmé wrote of a fictional 

disaster at sea just before the turn of the 19th century.
Mallarmé’s poem is about a captain, called The Master, who faces a terrible storm after losing his ship, which presumably is disappearing into the depths below him (tbh we are not told). In his hand he holds dice that he hesitates to throw, for he knows that the results of throwing these dice may reveal an utterly important truth, which Mallarmé called The Number. The poem is called A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.4 Clicking image after image, we roll the dice and move across the board, hoping to abolish chance. 

4 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard.’ In Nouvelle Revue Française, (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1914) 
Like Mallarmé’s captain, in the deluge of the image (faith- ful, fake, fabricated), we do our best to ride out the storm. We negotiate images like waves, because the image is never singular but accumulates with exponen- tial force as it moves closer. Helen of Troy’s beauty today would be measured not in thousands of ships but in millions of tweets. We surf the surface of Kim Kardashian’s ass, Di Caprio’s tears, kittens endlessly playing piano, sunsets. 

“Everything exists to end in a photograph.” Sontag’s words most likely are intended to mean that ‘everything exists to end up in a photograph’ (she was riffing on her own translation of a phrase by Mallarmé) but another meaning could emerge from those words – that everything exists in order to end in a photograph.5 The role of the photograph, in this sense, is not as preserver of the thing that it images, nor even as evidence against the transient nature of existence, but as the end itself. Non memento, solum mori. 

We sit before a glowing screen, hand cupped around dice that we hesitate to throw, because we are aware of the importance of the result. If everything 

exists to end in a photo- graph, the end we reveal may be our own. We click next image.