1. Walid Raad
Images as counter-archives that challenge official narratives.
Raad’s work examines how images can intervene in institutional control over history. Official archives determine what is remembered and what is erased; when traumatic histories are systematically suppressed, artistic “counter-archives” emerge as alternative containers of collective memory. In The Atlas Group Archive, Raad constructs a fictional research organization dedicated to the Lebanese Civil War. Over fifteen years, he has fabricated photographs, documents, testimonies, and data attributed to invented historians and witnesses. These materials mimic archival authority while simultaneously destabilizing it. In a context where the state avoids confronting mass violence, these fictionalized records paradoxically become more truthful than official accounts. Raad’s practice suggests that when historical memory is fragmented or politically erased, fiction can operate not as deception but as a method of preservation, reconstructing narratives that would otherwise disappear.
2. Sophie Calle
Images as narrative tools that construct identity through fiction.
Calle’s work explores how identity is assembled through storytelling rather than objective documentation. She combines real actions with fictional interpretation, revealing memory as an active process of construction. In The Address Book, she reconstructs a stranger’s identity by contacting people listed in a found address book, piecing together fragments into a coherent narrative. This process demonstrates how gaps in knowledge are filled through speculation, and how such speculative narratives can become accepted as truth. Calle’s work highlights a key paradox: individuals often willingly believe in constructed stories to stabilize uncertainty. As a result, images and narratives do not simply reflect identity—they actively produce it, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction in personal memory.
3. Trevor Paglen
Images are data systems that strip individuals of narrative agency.
Paglen investigates how images function within surveillance and machine-learning infrastructures. Using datasets such as NIST Special Database 18, his works assemble grids of faces sourced from law enforcement archives. Many of these individuals were never convicted, yet their biometric data remains permanently stored and reused as training material for algorithms. In this context, images are no longer personal representations but components of computational systems. The issue is not a lack of storage, but the impossibility of deletion. Without the ability to be forgotten, individuals lose control over their own narratives and identities. Paglen’s work reveals a shift in power: images no longer belong to those depicted, but to the systems that capture, process, and circulate them.
4. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Digital images create an illusion of permanence while enabling erasure.
Lozano-Hemmer explores how memory is transformed when it shifts from biological to technological storage. Digital archives promise permanence, yet they simultaneously destabilize ownership and control. In Atmospheric Memory, human presence is translated into ephemeral digital signals that can be captured, processed, and disappear. This exposes a fundamental contradiction: while digital systems seem to preserve memory indefinitely, they also render it vulnerable to deletion, replacement, or obsolescence. As technologies evolve, personal traces risk being overwritten or lost entirely. Lozano-Hemmer’s work reframes digital memory not as stable preservation, but as a fragile and contested space shaped by technological infrastructures.
5. Hito Steyerl
Images are systems that produce reality rather than represent it.
Steyerl argues that contemporary images no longer function as evidence of reality but as mechanisms that actively generate it. With the rise of AI-generated imagery, deepfakes, and algorithmic simulations, visual culture has shifted from documentation to production. In Power Plants, images depict speculative, algorithmically generated environments rather than existing landscapes. These images appear convincing, yet they are projections of possible futures rather than records of the present. This challenges the relationship between seeing and knowing: visual experience becomes detached from lived experience. Steyerl’s work raises a critical question: Are we shaping reality through images, or increasingly inhabiting realities preconfigured by computational systems?
6. Addie Wagenknecht
Images and surveillance merge as power becomes aestheticized and invisible.
Wagenknecht examines how systems of control are embedded within everyday aesthetics and technologies. In the algorithmic age, surveillance is no longer overt but disguised as convenience and design. In Asymmetric Love, CCTV cameras and network cables are integrated into ornate chandeliers, masking surveillance within familiar decorative forms. This concealment normalizes monitoring, making it less perceptible and therefore more pervasive. As a result, distinctions between public and private space become blurred, and personal data becomes continuously captured. Wagenknecht’s work questions the ownership of images and memories in such contexts: when observation is aestheticized, individuals may unknowingly participate in systems that erode their autonomy.
7. On Patterns and Proxies
Images function as partial proxies shaped by interpretation and power.
In “On Patterns and Proxies,” this article discusses how images are mobilized within political discourse, particularly in debates such as climate change. The same visual material can be used both to confirm and to deny reality, demonstrating that images do not carry inherent meaning. Instead, interpretation relies on existing frameworks and patterns of recognition. When encountering new images, viewers often relate them to familiar visual structures, using analogy to construct understanding. However, any single image captures only a fragment of a larger system. Without multiple perspectives and contextual information, interpretation remains incomplete. This highlights the limitation of images as proxies: they do not represent reality fully, but mediate it through selective visibility.
8. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture
Digital images construct fragmented and nonlinear narrative structures.
This text argues that digital photography disrupts traditional linear notions of time and truth. Images no longer function within a single, coherent narrative but instead form recursive and fragmented temporalities. Multiple interpretations can coexist without being resolved into a unified meaning. This challenges the expectation that visual work must communicate a fixed message or value. Instead, meaning can emerge through sequencing, framing, and classification. By organizing images in specific ways—through order, juxtaposition, or annotation—artists can construct alternative narrative logics. This approach shifts emphasis from representation to structure, allowing images to operate as open systems of interpretation rather than closed statements.
9. Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise
Images are algorithmic constructions emerging from noise.
This text reframes image production as a computational process rather than a direct capture of reality. Camera sensors do not simply record the world; they extract signals from vast amounts of noise, using algorithmic processes to produce a coherent image. This perspective reveals that images are always constructed outputs shaped by technological parameters. It opens up the possibility of working with noise not as interference, but as a generative medium. By manipulating noise and adjusting algorithmic conditions, artists can explore how images emerge, transform, or destabilize. This approach foregrounds the role of systems in shaping perception, positioning images as outcomes of processes rather than transparent representations of reality.
10. In Defense of the Poor Image
The Poor Image: Circulation and Visual Politics
Steyerl introduces the concept of the “poor image” to describe low-resolution, widely circulated digital images that have been compressed, copied, and redistributed across platforms. These images bear traces of displacement, degradation, and recontextualization within global media systems.
As a counter-capitalist visual form, the poor image exists outside dominant regimes of visual quality and control. Its low resolution signals histories of appropriation and transformation, while also allowing it to partially evade institutional standards tied to high-definition imagery.
Despite being blurred, noisy, or embedded with commercial content, poor images embody a contradictory form of visual democracy. They create a grey zone between compliance and resistance, enabling experimental practices and marginal narratives to circulate. In their instability and degradation, they paradoxically produce a raw proximity to reality.
11. Xinyue Liu — Sightings
Invisibility as Violence: When Absence Becomes Evidence
Liu examines fragmented and indistinct images as traces of marginalized existence. These images do not merely fail to represent; they actively reveal the violence imposed on those pushed to the edges of visibility.
Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability,” certain lives are excluded from recognition and mourning—such as political enemies, queer subjects, or non-human entities. This exclusion renders violence against them invisible, normalized, and perpetuated.
Within this framework, marginalized subjects persist as visual residues—partial, elusive, and ungraspable. Over time, they may transform into myths, dreams, or fragments of collective memory.
The image thus operates as a closed field of force. Each photographic act is both a capture and a cut—a moment in which the subject becomes spectral. These ghostly traces mark the ruptures within a continuously fragmenting world.
12. An informal and incomplete journey
Images become indirect languages when visibility is controlled by censorship.
In regions where censorship intensifies, creativity emerges as an alternative mode of communication. Rather than expressing ideas directly, people develop visual and linguistic strategies based on implication, substitution, and absence. Around the unwritten rule of “mentioning without explicitly saying,” a collective grammar begins to form—one that allows information to circulate while avoiding invisible boundaries of control. Over time, this even evolved into forms of protest centered around blankness itself, where emptiness became a communicative and political gesture.
What interests me is not simply censorship as a restrictive force, but the visual systems that emerge in response to it. These coded images, altered texts, and deliberate absences reveal how invisibility can itself become expressive. The project, therefore, does not aim to directly criticize a political structure, but to guide viewers toward a more unsettling question: why must communication take place in this way at all? What kinds of fear, negotiation, and suppressed realities are embedded within what cannot be openly shown?
Reference list
1. Calle , S. (1983). The Address Book.
2. Hui , W. and Chun, K. (2017). Accumulation – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun – On Patterns and Proxies. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/212275/on-patterns-and-proxies.
3. Lister, M. and SLUIS, K. (2013). The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
4. Liu, X. (2023). Sightings – Journal #141. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/141/578716/sightings.
5. Lozano-Hemmer, R. (2023). Atmospheric Memory.
6. Paglen, T. (2017). It Began as a Military Experiment.
7. Raad, W. (2004). The Atlas Group Archive.
8. Steyerl, H. (2019). Power Plants.
9. Steyerl, H. (2021). In Defense of the Poor Image – Journal #10. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image.
10. Steyerl, H. (2024). Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise – Journal #60. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/60/61045/proxy-politics-signal-and-noise.
11. Wagenknecht, A. (2013). Asymmetric Love.
12. Weng, X. (2020). An Informal and Incomplete Journey – Journal #108. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/108/326261/an-informal-and-incomplete-journey.
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