Highlights 2014 – Sean O'Toole

In retreat mode, I found photo historian Kate Palmer Albers’s essay ‘Abundant Images and the Collective Sublime’, published late last year, to be a helpful compendium piece to a line of enquiry opened up by Boris Groys in his 2010 book of essays Going Public: ‘The relatively easy access to digital photo and video cameras combined with the global distribution platform of the internet has altered the traditional statistical relationship between image producers and image consumers. Today, more people are interested in image production than image contemplation.’

You can include me in that statistical shift. This past year, in between sitting jack-knifed in front of a screen thinking about what I’d seen, I made selfies in Osaka (in front of a Swarovski bejewelled Mercedes); in Cape Town (giving an Ai Weiwei middle-finger salute to artist Christopher Swift’s callow disco contraption masquerading as a memorial to Mandela on Signal Hill); and in New York (close to some taxidermied ‘koodoo’, or kudu as we spell it here, on display in the American Museum of Natural History).

On balance, I preferred looking at Beyoncé’s Louvre selfies to mine. The Drunk in Love chanteuse, who graced the cover of Time magazine’s evanescent 100 most influential people issue (remember Oscar Pistorius?), has a good grasp of what Albers describes as photography’s ‘voracious consumptive and accumulative tendencies’. A selfie of Beyoncé giving the Mona Lisa a red-nailed victory salute during her private tour of the Louvre in August received 825 000 likes on her Instagram page. (‘Likes’ are a form of shallow looking that merit investigation. What do they denote? Are they like capsule reviews, a form of notice rather than studied attention?)

During her Louvre visit Beyoncé also photographed herself in front of an Italian marble sculpture from 1700-20 portraying Apollo conquering the serpent Python. The sculpture is currently a popular place to pose for selfies. Many tourists believe Apollo’s gesture, holding up his hand as if peering at a smartphone screen – actually, his sword that went missing at some point – resembles the pose of amateur self-portraitists. Self-absorption and narcissistic wonder are hardly new human attributes. Nor is joy, communion, playfulness, affirmation, curiosity, wonder, boredom and loneliness, all attributes visible in selfies. What is new, though, is how these very primary instincts interface with, and are amplified by the perpetual present tense of social media.

Sifting through the ‘digital deluge’ (Albers again) stored by energy-intensive and secretive digital warehouses across the world, the images that most gripped me this past year included a trickle of self-portraits produced by Peshmerga fighters resisting the spread of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This is not about picking sides. There was a selfie meme featuring ISIL jihadists demonstrating their affection for that addictive Italian hazelnut chocolate spread Nutella that reminded me of Abderrahmane Sissako. ‘It’s important to say that the jihadist is someone who also resembles us, and who no doubt at one point of his life tipped over into something,’ remarked the Mauritanian-born director during the Cannes Film Festival where his film Timbuktu (2014) was shortlisted for a Palme d’Or.

Sissako predates the age of abundance. His films are slow, as is his output. Since releasing his first film in 1989, a short, he has produced only four features. Speaking to film festival director and promoter Peter Scarlet in 2006, Sissako remarked on the interrelationship between pace, politics and poetry in his work: ‘For me poetry is a better way to communicate with the other, to say things that are important, important politically. Because when we live in a country and on a continent where making a film is a very rare and difficult act – because the means are not so readily available – we can only be but political. But political in the sense of building a better world, not only for oneself, but for everyone.’

Two offline projects from this year, both photographic books, both produced in Göttingen by Gerhard Steidl, bear all the hallmarks of Sissako’s riff of being an artist from Africa. They are also great examples of what it means to grapple with abundance as a working premise. Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases is both a heartsore archive of murdered friends and rigid taxonomic study of the LGBT community in which Muholi honed all the many facets of her dynamic personality. It is also, quite simply, a gorgeous book of portraits. Ponte City, a collaborative project between fellow South African photographer Mikhael Subutzky and English designer Patrick Waterhouse, is nominally a book. It is possibly better understood as a Perec-like attempt at exhausting a place in central Johannesburg through words and images. Plentiful, superbaundant images – fitted into a box. Pleasingly, both books have earned their makers nominations for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.