Mois de la Photo a Montreal

I’ve just written a review of Drone: the Automated Image, to appear in Source Magazine (Belfast).  The book is a catalogue of the biennial exhibition Mois de la Photo Montreal, 2013. But this is an unusually focussed and durable “biennial”. It has a guest curator — for 2013 this was Paul Wombell — who identifies a theme, selects the participants, and assembles the catalogue essays.  My review takes up the idea of a drone, which Wombell uses as a metaphor.  The field referred to is clearly the relationship between human- and automated “beings”.  But sometimes the drone seems to figure something definitively not-human “Other”.  I wanted to endorse it as another way of describing the Apparat–a human-machine mesh so intricate as to defeat any attempt at a clean separation.  Only this meant that I couldn’t really pursue what was, to me, the most memorable comment; at the very end of the book, George LeGrady–both an essayist and among the participating artists (see image caption), points out a deepening rift between the consciousness of those who make, and those who use photographic technology.  It could nearly be a direct quote from Flusser.

The image is from Experimental Visual Laboratory, a collaborative of George LeGrady, Marco Pinter, and Danny Bazo.