Fotografiska exhibition confronts photography’s power and image overload

Fotografiska’s exhibition “The Power of Photography. Worlds Brought to Light” presents an expansive look back at the photography exhibition venue’s history while exposing the tensions created by the spread of images. The review, published by Sirp and republished by ERR, was written by Hans Alla.

The Swedish-Estonian photography venue, which is also connected with Germany, China, Norway and the United States, has reached 15 or seven years of age depending on the location. It is marking the anniversary with an exhibition that looks back across the years.

The dense exhibition, which seems to overflow its boundaries, provokes contradictory reactions. It is not simply a hymn to the noble art of photography. Without intending to, the exhibition also conveys photography’s sin and curse.

The misfortune of pictures, especially photographs, lies in their ability to reproduce themselves and in the exponential growth of that ability. The more successfully an image spreads, meaning the more people who have seen it, the more likely it is to spread further.

“Sir Mick Jagger. In Motion” by Bryan Adams, made in 2008, is an image most Sirp readers have probably seen, even if they do not remember it or know who made it and when. They know the picture.

This is not unique to photography. Albrecht Dürer’s 1515 woodcut “Rhinoceros,” a fantastical depiction of the animal, became so popular that it replaced more realistic images of rhinoceroses in many people’s minds. An anecdote says that in Germany, Dürer’s picture still appeared in a biology textbook rather than an art history textbook as late as the early 20th century.

Such an image celebration is an apt illustration of the reproduction of pictures and its memetic and genetic nature. Cultural phenomena have developed the ability to replicate themselves virally and made that replication a defining feature. Photography is the starting point of such phenomena, the index case of the image pandemic. The disease may prove incurable.

What the current flood of images means, and what it may bring in the near future, is a separate question. There is little room here for entirely optimistic answers. Yet people must somehow live with the flood, look at other people’s pictures and perhaps take pictures themselves. They must also make sense of the avalanche of images that looks back at them from phones, television screens and tram information boards.

Pictures can be exhausting if one allows oneself to imitate the cliché of the iconoclast. Perhaps the best way to cope with them is to support one’s ego and reaffirm one’s individuality: I am not like the people in those pictures, motionless, frozen and objectified, because what else does a lens do? I am different. I can resist them there on paper and under glass. I breathe and sweat, I am warm, I move and I even make a sound.

The confrontation between the picture and the person is caused by the fact that photography has proved particularly effective at depicting the human face. In photography, the portrait as an image of a unique individual has reached a kind of apotheosis. A photograph of an individual is as individual as the individual themselves. Thus, when people discuss photographs and look at photography as a category, they are constantly encountering other people, with the focus squarely on their faces.

“The Power of Photography” is a very dense exhibition and, to some extent, a parade of stars. Fotografiska highlights Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, Refik Anadol, Ellen von Unwerth, Paolo Roversi, Martin Schoeller, Lars Tunbjörk, Sarah Moon, Peter Lindbergh, David LaChapelle and Jimmy Nelson.

The Tallinn exhibition also includes Estonian artists Toomas Volkmann, DeStudio, comprising Herkki-Erich Merila and Peeter Laurits, Anna-Stina Treumund, Heikki Leis, Lembit Peegel, Cloe Jancis, Kaupo Kikkas, Tanja Muravskaja, Marlen Kärämä and Ivar Veermäe.

It is an intense and strongly pressing sequence of images, most of them depictions of people falling directly on the viewer’s eyes. The exhibition is open at Fotografiska until September 13.