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"It’s always too late, whenever you take a photograph.”
This laconic remark, which I heard during a recent artist’s talk in Berlin, bubbled up from a discussion upon the often-tragic indexicality or nonindexicality of contemporary photographic practice. JPEGs taken for wonders. Smoke plumes without embers. Footprints crossing the beaches of abandoned resorts. Hands that point at nothing in particular, and the gullible eyes that follow the lead of pointing index fingers. There is indeed something awkward to the snapshot’s belatedness. Its untimeliness. The ways in which, the second the shutter clicks—or that our thumb melds with the appropriate region of our phone’s liquid plasma displays and the resultant file is uploaded to a distant server—the instant we sought to “capture” has passed by and something else enters the frame. Someone blinks, the rubble dust envelopes the scene, the light changes, the hoodie we saw underground bearing the phrase “THEIR DESTINIES WOULD INTERTWINE” disappears behind an arriving subway’s blur, the wind cajoles a neighboring branch we hadn’t before noticed into the family portrait. Photography then remains, contrary to the terms in which it is sold to us by Silicon Valley manufacturers who stress its total immediacy as an instrument for perceiving the world, a stubbornly untimely pursuit.
Can we not also say, “It’s always too late, whenever you start to index”?
The fifth issue of e-flux Index features contributions from Rouzbeh Akhbari, Sanna Almajedi, Étienne Balibar, Rend Beiruti, Xenia Benivolski, Daniel Birnbaum, Hunter Bolin, Nathan Brown, Harry Burke, Luis Camnitzer, Mark Cinkevich, María Iñigo Clavo, Maya Deren, Jacob Dreyer, Anna Engelhardt, Solveig Font, Kenny Fries, Coco Fusco, Orit Gat, Leo Goldsmith, Ana María Gómez López, Andrea González Garrán, Boris Groys, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Barbara Hammer, Dehlia Hannah, Isobel Harbison, Jörg Heiser, Yuk Hui, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Celia Irina González, Juan José Santos, Aubrey Knox, Hamlet Lavastida, Debra Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Julio Llópiz Casal, R.H. Lossin, Vijay Masharani, Azadeh Mashayekhi, Naeem Mohaiemen, Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Trevor Paglen, Furqat Palvan-Zade, Artavazd Peleshyan, Sol Pérez-Martinez, Precarious Workers Brigade, Irit Rogoff, Mila Samdub, Stephanie Sherman, Henk Slager, Jonas Staal, Bernard Stiegler, Thotti, Ina Valkanova, Elena Vogman, Pramodha Weerasekera, Evan Calder Williams, Virginia Woolf, and Gary Zhexi Zhang.