I.
Welcome.

I want you to imagine something.

Imagine yourself in a photography museum. 
In the museum is an exhibition of ‘vernacular’ photographs -
Photographs that weren’t necessarily intended to be ‘art.’ 
The exhibition title indicates that these are photographs of
Transformation
Transgression 
Metamorphosis… 

There are pictures of people posing in gardens
People at parties
Neatly framed
Under white mattes. 
The exhibition texts claim ignorance of dates and names. 
You feel something, looking at these pictures. 
It’s crazy to see (what feels like) ample proof
That people like you can survive into adulthood. 

However
The pictures are high on the walls
The lighting feels like a freak show
And there is no seating.  

You wonder who this exhibition was made for. 
Who would need to see these pictures
In this way. 
You fantasize about seeing the same pictures in a photo album
Cradled in your lap
Or how it would feel to come across one of them
At the bottom of a box in a flea market.  

You wonder how this would be different
If the pictures weren’t presented as butterflies pinned to a collection tray
But as bits of bark flaked off a giant tree
Structured by the same xylem and phloem that structure all photographs
How it would be different if the edges of the photographs were visible
And if they could have been fucked to add a couple of benches.  

II.
La photographie, le cloud, les IA – ces choses paraissent magiques. Cette magie ne trouble pas parce qu'elle rend la vie plus confortable. Il est plus confortable d'être consommateurices, utilisateurices. De ne pas être au courant. À mesure que l'espace et le temps deviennent plastiques, que la souffrance de la mine et de l'usine est dissimulée pour certainx derrière la fumée et les rideaux, que l'effort haletant d'enregistrement et de transmission des savoirs s'éloigne de l'espace-temps de l'usage, l'ignorance béate devient commercialement viable. 

/ 

Photography has baggage. 

It can be used to self-document, 
to fight for existence in the face of systematic elimination. 
The self-actualizing force of photography 
has buoyed generations of lonely teens
And if pictures are as real as the imagined realities they image
The photographic dimension reiterates multiverses of being. 

The same ‘democratic’ (commercial) ambitions that put cameras in these hands
Also handed cameras to the state
Who used them to identify who was to be incarcerated, eliminated
And although the footage produced by airborne autonomous drones 
equipped with massive livestreamed camera arrays 
takes up more space than the Paris police archives in 1897
It’s kind of the same shit with extra steps. 

“We so often ignore the larger operations in which photography is enmeshed…because we experience the photographs as images”[note]Ben Burbridge, Photography After Capitalism, London: Goldsmiths Press, 2020, p. 11[/note]
“…photography has long exemplified the operative logic of communicative capitalism, insofar as its users have typically focused on representational content visible on the surface of the photograph – at its visual interface – not the materiality of the photographic object, or the systems of production and circulation, in which photography is entwined”[note]Ibid., p. 12[/note]
Photographs are composite objects: 
Inescapably, comprised of many things:
systems of power and control,
Economies and labor, 
marketing schemes and waste streams.  

III.
There are artists – many, many artists – 
Who think about these things. 
Maybe, as artists, we should take more responsibility
For packing all of this into our work – 
For gesturing to who we are, where we are, who we speak to, 
where we speak from, supply chain economics, 
and the History of Everything. 

(Of course, this makes no sense in the case of vernacular photographs
Spit from polaroid cameras
Whose operators didn’t even mean for their images 
to see the dull light of the Kunsthalle.
What happens when we make such images public?) 

At least part of this responsibility falls on curation. 

Remember: there were plenty of ‘marginalized people’
Included in the Expositions Universelles
Of the 19th and 20th centuries; 
But they were in cages and forced to dance. 
The logics of these exhibitions – 
Conquest, domination, elimination – 
Are deeply embedded in exhibiting
And simply being visible is not enough.  
 

Institutions love to fetishize representations
But demonstrate little interest 
In the corresponding methodology.  

But what is curation, really?
In a lot of ways, curation is value production. 
This aspect, practically speaking
Is mostly tied to selection and programming
And deciding who is in the room with whom
Who gets to eat at the dinner table
Etc.  

But ‘the curatorial’ also includes other stuff
Like research
Writing texts
Grant applications
And drawing floor plans
And if we drill down curation like we’ve drilled down photography,
Curation includes stuff that the Curator
Probably doesn’t do: 

Organizing transports
Art handling
Booking plane tickets
Ordering paint
Scheduling Instagram posts
Designing flyers
Translating
Babysitting
Coding
Sweeping
And so forth. 

So the curatorial
Like photography
is also a kind of compositing:
Putting a bunch of stuff together 
And deciding which seams will remain visible.  

When the seams in an image are concealed
Its surface becomes a proscenium – 
a fourth wall. 
An exhibition that conceals its seams
Is a maze of fourth walls,
Precluding the very possibility
Of having a position.  

When was the last time you saw an exhibition space
Really designed for loitering?  Exhibitions are like industrially landscaped rivers – 
Flowing far too fast for fauna – 
“always already co-opted by the imperatives of profit”[note]Ibid., p. 171[/note].  

But composite curation – 
Curation that shows its seams – 
Is not about transparency…
Some forms of compositing
Especially sweaty compositing
Can, in fact, be even more opaque – 
It’s all about reflecting and transmitting
The right frequencies.  

Some kinds of sweaty composite curation
Might undermine art world power dynamics:
Nobody likes to talk about money.  

But I think it’s worth it
And I dream of better seating
And bigger wall text
And open access publishing. 

So I would like to repeat the invitation of the editors of Trap Door[note]Reina Gosset, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (eds.), Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, Boston: MIT Press, 2017[/note]:
I invite you to dream otherwise.    

Link to the video Composite Curation by Fig Docher. Password: composite