Believable Unrealities

The focus of most headlines from the G20 summit in Toronto swings from sensational reports
of anarchists taking over the downtown core to dystopian recounts of police brutality and
human rights infringements. What’s forgotten under such extreme circumstances are the
systems that create such a spectacle. Just as burning police cars and illegally arrested
bystanders are the subject of most viral web videos, photo blogs, and mainstream media outlets,
so to does the art world focus on the constructed nature of the media.
Just as mayhem is taken for granted at a G20 summit, so to is it taken for granted that the
truth value of the news media is less than absolute, this is now a mute point.

All media belong to the genre of science fiction where narrative and technology are inherently
linked. Photojournalism presents a paradox. Photography is science fiction whereas journalism
relies on actuality and truth value. The reconciliation of these opposing forms results
in a believable unreality.

The photographic medium shatters the profilmic event while recording it. There is only the
photograph, the story, the fiction – what came before is split into a million memories,
individual experiences. Persons, places, things, concepts, what's being recorded, the reflected
light thereof, or an imprint cast onto matter, and shadows. Negative space, denoted by the record
of its borders, the existence outside itself, marks its absence, that which is more profoundly
felt according to the theory of relative deprivation. Photojournalism creates the spectacle
because it disseminates it. Repetition creates a reality, a collective consciousness through
images. This is what news media does, it creates a believable unreality. Not disreal, or even
dishonest, but a technologically mediated fiction that has the pretenses of actuality. It is science
fiction that pretends to be empirical fact.

The power to create such a situation lies in the apparatus. The most important element being
the mobilized gaze. News trucks are capable of chasing events as they occur, collecting their
images and broadcasting them around the world virtually instantaneously. The mobility of the
correspondents and the quality of the cameras and transmission equipment are what give a
particular news outlet its credibility. Showing it as it happens. As a fly on the wall.
The G20 was security as spectacle – to be looked at, and thus, attracted all mainstream and
amateur photojournalists eager to show their over-developed teeth. This series shows not the
events, but the system. The build up, the waiting, the event, the reporting, the aggregate of
which is the spectacle. The G20 was sensationalized. We saw it coming, the preparation,
the anxiety. We saw it happen, with our eyes, with our cameras, from afar. And now it is being
retold as a consensus struggles to form. Undoubtedly though is the structure of its system.
Mayhem aside, Toronto was a ghost town, as media waited for the news, chased the news.
The perspective the media give is of the event, and not the lack of event surrounding it.
Presented here is that lack of event, the negative space, implying the absolute truth,
“there was a spectacle”. Around the borders of the over reported, this is what was and
this is definitive. High definition.



Media


Mediate


Immediate


Waiting


Transmission


Foreign press


On location


Formalism


Camouflage


Negative Space


Security as Spectacle


Interior


Different Ways of Looking


On Assignment


The Event