Max Pinckers Archives

What we’re reading #2: Autumn 2024

For the second instalment of What we’re reading the focus sharpens on both the urgency of our deepening political crises and the symbolic power of messianic imagery. Thomas King spotlights Yanis Varoufakis’ ongoing analysis of big tech, insights into the current U.S. election campaigns courtesy of David Levi Strauss, an eagerly anticipated book from Ekow Eshun that offers a form of literary portraiture of five black men, and more, presenting an overview of recent reflections at the intersection of politics, technology, and visual culture.

Thomas King | Resource | 12 Sep 2024

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism Penguin Books, June 2024

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, popular economist and ex-Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis details the ascendancy of big tech oligarchs to the status of modern feudal overlords. He argues that the traditional capitalist engine – ‘private profit fuelled by central bank money’ – has been supplanted. In its stead, digital fiefdoms orchestrated by tech platforms extract value and ‘cloud capital’ from the masses, the purpose of which is to ‘train us, to train it, to train us’ while consolidating power within a diminutive oligarchy. Taking the form of a letter addressed to his recently deceased father, Varoufakis charts the evolution of capitalism from the 1960s into the present era. Here, Varoufakis contends that capitalism’s unchecked triumph has led to its latest grotesque mutation.

Varoufakis argues that the likes of Amazon and Facebook embody a new techno-order where digital platforms with a single algorithm dictates what is sold, who sees it, and how much ‘cloud rent’ is siphoned from vassal (or traditional) capitalists. Economic power is then seen to be shifting from traditional markets to digital spheres of operation controlled by small groups of unimaginably wealthy and powerful individuals. Within this hierarchy, vassal capitalists are squeezed by platform overlords, cloud proletarians (Amazon warehouse workers) are surveilled and managed by algorithms, and cloud serfs – everyday users – unwittingly contribute free labour, enhancing big tech’s capital stock. As wealth extraction has moved beyond traditional profit to a more insidious form of rent, Varoufakis describes the masses as ‘unpaid producers, toiling the landlords’ digital estates,’ much like feudal peasants who viewed their labour as integral to their identity. He warns that while today’s tech barons ‘treat their users however they like’ and are seemingly impervious to resistance, a ‘cloud rebellion’ offers hope. Varoufakis insists that ‘unless we band together, we shall never civilise or socialise cloud capital,’ nor will we reclaim our autonomy from its pervasive control.

‘This Is Not Just an Image’ | David Levi Strauss for The Brooklyn Rail, July 2024

‘Dying to make an image?’: this is the question David Levi Strauss, writer, poet, cultural critic asks of America’s deepening political crisis in a series of dispatches published in The Brooklyn Rail. Across numerous instalments Strauss delves into the polarising campaign period, refining his concept of ‘iconopolitics’ – where words and images become disconnected from reality. His analysis begins with the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which despite its apparent failure, baptised him ‘in blood and in the image’ and arrived at an opportune moment to reinforce his messianic image – further amplified at the Republican National Convention shortly thereafter. Strauss’s inquiry has since extended to Trump’s choice of J.D Vance as his running mate – ‘an absolutely malleable subservient Vice President’ – and to Joe Biden’s passing of the torch to Kamala Harris, where ‘the old feeble man in the race is now Donald Trump.’

Although his 2020 book, Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication, predates Trump’s iconic mug shot and the subsequent assassination attempt image, it crucially outlines the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Here, Strauss reveals the underlying decay in American exceptionalism and the evolving nature of how words and images are produced and perceived to make the current surreality possible. Strauss then delineates the latest iconic political image – more than just an image, as he contends – that has pierced the social psyche. The photograph of Trump that we all know, with his fist raised and face bloodied, is noted for its powerful, pyramid-like composition. Strauss concludes that this evocative frame distils a complex moment and, with its messianic overtones, will serve to reinforce belief, where both ‘images and politics are primarily about belief.’

‘How They Fell’ | Max Pinckers for De Standaard, July 2024

If Strauss argues that images rely on belief, Max Pinckers posits that ‘most iconic pictures are shrouded in controversy that alludes to their mythical powers.’ In his essay How They Fall, Pinckers critically examines the mythic significance of such images. Commissioned by Flemish newspaper De Standaard to write about a photograph that defines his life, Pinckers chose instead to focus on an image of death – or the illusion of it: Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier, purportedly capturing the precise moment a Libertarian Youth soldier is shot during the Spanish Civil War. Pinckers challenges the authenticity of this image, which has been the subject of intense debate since the 1970s. He speculates on the photograph’s origins, writing that ‘most iconic photographs stand in for an event that they do not literally represent,’ suggesting that images are ‘experienced collectively and cannot claim a singular truth.’ Regarding The Falling Soldier, Pinckers notes that we often choose to believe the more compelling or dramatic narrative – that this image captures the split second when a man’s life ends. What does this reveal about our society? In a world increasingly mediated by social media, iconic images serve as ‘monuments’ to the histories that sustain them, encapsulating entire worlds in a single frame. These images, Pinckers suggests, are less about documenting reality and more about the widespread beliefs and master narratives we impose upon them.

Ekow Eshun, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them, Penguin Books, September 2024

Writer, curator, and broadcaster Ekow Eshun presents The Stranger published by Penguin, an incisive study of five Black men – Ira Aldridge, Matthew Henson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Justin Fashanu – all of whom grapple with the pervasive experience of exile and estrangement. Eshun approaches these figures, in his own words, not through the lens of ‘conventional biography’, but as a form of literary portraiture – intimate, impressionistic and acutely observed. Eshun’s objective is clear: “I wanted to give voice to the inner lives of these men. To explore what it feels like to be made Other, while also giving subjective lens to the ideas and dreams that sustained them.” His prose, both precise and evocative, renders these individuals not as mere subjects of historical scrutiny, but as complex persons navigating a world that relentlessly marginalises. By charting their trajectories within the wider framework of Black history and culture, Eshun reveals the intricate interplay of alienation, identity, and the unyielding quest for dignity. The Stranger is more than a historical account; it is a critical intervention that restores agency to its subjects, offering a profound meditation on the intricacies of belonging and the lasting impact of othering.

Ex-Machina, A24, Screenplay Book, MACK, July 2024

Ex-Machina is the first title in the Screenplay Collection by MACK and A24, ‘the first of its kind between a studio and a publishing house.’ Each Screenplay Book focuses on an individual film and includes the entire script as well as original essays, director-selected frames, behind-the-scenes content and other extras. This edition features Alex Garland’s celebrated sci-fi script, essays by queer theorist Jack Halberstam and AI expert Murray Shanahan, and concept art by Jock. Shanahan, a cognitive robotics expert who consulted on the film, warns of the dangers of creating human-like AI and questions whether we should craft beings ‘capable of both empathy and suffering.’ Whether we engineer AI from scratch or emulate the human brain, his cautionary message remains critically relevant a decade after the film’s release.

The film of course stars Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, a programmer who wins a week at the secluded estate of tech CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac), and explores ideas of artificial intelligence, consciousness and ethics. Caleb’s task is to determine whether Ava (Alicia Vikander), an advanced humanoid robot, possesses AI. Nathan’s creation of Ava is more than a scientific achievement; it asserts control over nature, positioning himself as a god-like figure. In a telling moment from the film, Nathan reveals to Caleb that his competitors thought search engines were “a map of what people were thinking. Actually, they were a map of how people were thinking. Impulse, response. Fluid, imperfect. Patterned, chaotic.” However, despite this warning, Ex Machina becomes concerned with Ava’s personal liberation and manipulation of the humans around her. She challenges perceptions of consciousness and autonomy as she becomes the ‘God’ of her own story – a true deus ex machina. While the book explores the layers of authorship behind the film, Garland’s script and the book as a whole stand as a complex, multifaceted work, engaging readers in a dialogue about reality, perception and control in the age of AI.♦

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Thomas King is Editorial Intern at 1000 Words and a student on BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism, Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Images:

1-Cover for Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Penguin Books, 2024)

2-Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

3-Robert Capa, The Falling Soldier, 1936. © International Center of Photography, New York / Magnum Photos

4-Cover for Ekow Eshun, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them (Penguin Books, 2024)

5-Still from Ex-Machina

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Top 10

Photobooks of 2018

Selected by Tim Clark

An annual tribute to the most exceptional photo book releases from 2018 – selected by our Editor in Chief, Tim Clark.

In association with Spectrum.

1. Carmen Winant, My Birth
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions

My Birth by Carmen Winant is perhaps this year’s standout title from Bruno Ceschel’s famed Self Publish, Be Happy enterprise. Yet it is also utterly unlike any other. Deftly fusing image and text, the book – a facsimile of the artist’s own journal – combines photographs of Winant’s mother giving birth to her three children alongside found imagery of other, anonymous women undergoing the same experience. This visual strategy aims at “the flattening of cross-generational time and feeling”, while the title is a nod to Frida Kahlo’s 1932 painting of the same name. Immediate, precarious and utterly vulnerable, Winant’s project, which coincided with an on-site installation at MoMA’s Being: New Photography 2018, is also bold and fearless. Sensitive to the world, and to the world of images, My Birth asks probing questions that move beyond transgression to open up a space for considering childbirth and its representation as a political act.

2. Zanele Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
Aperture Foundation

What really matters now are the needs that art answers, and visual activist Zanele Muholi always delivers with great rigour. Having first emerged as a photographic spokesperson of members of the black queer community in South Africa and beyond, her long-awaited monograph sees Muholi turn the camera on herself to powerful effect. This arresting collection of more than 90 theatrical self-portraits first reclaim and then reimagine the black subject again in ways that resist, confront and challenge complacency to racism – both historic and contemporary. During these times when violence, misogyny and even white supremacy are rife, the photographs’ accumulative presence flies in the face of stereotypes and oppressive standards of beauty.

3. Raymond Meeks, Halfstory Halflife
Chose Commune

This is the kind of pleasurable photography that approaches something so eloquent yet understated but which we cannot altogether grasp. Master of the quiet photograph, Raymond Meeks is also a prolific photo book maker. Meeks’ current collaboration with Chose Commune bears all the hallmarks of his lyrical explorations; strong narrative and occasional riffs off poetry and short fiction, all the while concentrating on the symbiotic relationship between family, memory and a sense of place. Here, black and white photographs of young men, making their way through openings in hedgerow to access prime spots for river-jumping in the Catskill mountain region of New York, are both visceral and spontaneous. Their pale bodies fling themselves into the dark void, frozen as if mid-flight, pivoting from the point of view of an adult seemingly remembering a moment of fledgling sexuality and uncertain future.

4. Michael Schmelling, Your Blues
Skinnerboox and The Ice Plant

Taken between 2013 and 2014, and shot while on commission for the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Colombia College Chicago, Michael Schmelling’s photographs in Your Blues are our guide through the city’s vibrant and eclectic music scene, where “the dominant form is hybridity”. Musicians and revellers, parties and recording studios, lovers and strangers all collide, depicted through casual views and with feelings of familiarity. This then forms a ripe photographic account of the varying degrees of individualism within this community. Blues, punk, hip hop, psychedelic jazz, emo, hardcore and house music are all part of Chicago’s cultural inheritance and encompassed here via Schmelling’s vignettes and reflections on niche and local performers in unconventional venues. Akin to a novel of images, Your Blues provides a noteworthy contribution to this year’s offerings.

5. Max Pinckers, Margins of Excess
Self-Published

A response to the ‘post-truth’ era, Max Pinckers’ speculative documentary work revolves around the narratives of six protagonists who all momentarily achieved infamy in the US only to be ousted as fakes or frauds by the media. Such highly-idiosyncratic stories range from a self-invented love story set in a Nazi concentration camp to a man compulsively hijacking trains. With fever-dream urgency, Margins of Excess brings together fragments of these lives through staged photography, archival material, interviews and press clippings: the explicit folding of imagination into imaging “in which truths, half-truths, lies, fiction or entertainment are easily interchanged.” Pinckers’ take on embracing reality in all its complexity via this particular strand of storytelling offers an interesting reminder: that contemporary documentary practice might be more productively considered as small arguments, gestures or even critical methods.

6. Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê, White Gaze
Sming Sming Books

Readers of 1000 Words will recall the recent magazine feature on this gem of a photo book from collaborative duo Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê, which deserves much wider recognition in light of its poetry, playfulness, acuity and, most crucially, decolonising strategies. Intellectually energetic, White Gaze repurposes imagery from National Geographic to confront notions of white privilege and Western-centrism by reworking and negating image and text from the publication’s original pages. Countless uncomfortable truths hidden at the bottom of every lie, every act of denial or white complicity, come to bear through the interplay of the two languages, critiquing how meaning is constructed to administer imperialist narratives and racist histories.

7. Mimi Plumb, Landfall
TBW Books

As far as great discoveries go, the case of Mimi Plumb’s resurfaced archive has been a fairly recent but major breakthrough. Having taught photography throughout much of her career at San Jose State University and San Francisco Art Institute in the US, it has only been during the past five years that her work has really come to light following the 2014 exhibition of her Pictures from the Valley series. Now, a collection of images taken throughout the 1980s have been published by TBW Books under the title, Landfall, containing black and white photographs full of foreboding and unease, yet always delicate and beautiful in register. They appear to encapsulate a time when the world at large seemed out of kilter – with obvious parallels to our present moment. Stylistically, too, there’s a whiff of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Henry Wessel to these images that certainly will not fade quickly.

8. Chloe Dewe Mathews, Caspian: The Elements
Aperture Foundation and Peabody Museum Press

It’s heartening to observe this renewed period for Aperture Foundation’s photo book publishing arm, albeit still very traditional in format. One of its many great, recent titles comes courtesy of British photographer and filmmaker Chloe Dewe Mathews who spent five years roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea, where Asia seamlessly merges into Europe, to come away with a compelling record of the region’s complex geopolitical trevails. Much of this of course is largely bound up in the singular importance of gas and oil reserves and the disparate economies of bordering countries – Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – but it’s Mathews’ receptiveness and examination of the ties between people and the landscape, as well as the religious, artistic and therapeutic aspects of daily life, that are so intriguing.

9. Thomas Demand, The Complete Papers
MACK

While there is obviously no equivalent experience to viewing a Thomas Demand artwork at its intended size and scale, this new volume on the oeuvre of the acclaimed German artist more than makes up for it in scope, depth and scholarship. Edited by Christy Lange, and with texts from voices as diverse as the novelist Jeff Euginedes to curator Francesco Bonami, The Complete Papers provides a hugely comprehensive view of Demand’s past three decades of artistic production. Known for using pre-existing images culled from the media, routinely with political undertones, which he then recreates from cardboard and paper at 1:1 scale before photographing the assembled scene, admirers of the work will no doubt appreciate hitherto unseen pieces from the early 1990s when he first started making paper constructions for this sole purpose of photographing them. With the customary bibliography and full exhibitions listing, this is a researcher’s dream. A catalogue raisonné of the highest order.

10. Sunil Gupta, Christopher Street, 1976
Stanley/Barker

Sunil Gupta’s Christopher Street, 1976 performs an act of personal remembrance by bringing together photographs shot in in New York when the artist spent a year studying photography with Lisette Model in between cruising the city’s streets with his camera; part of a burgeoning, proud and public gay scene prior to ensuing AIDS epidemic that subsequently sent it underground. The photo book is minimally designed, presenting one black and white photograph on each right-hand page in a spiral-bound volume, marking the latest release in Stanley/Barker’s small but judicious selection of titles. It celebrates both a key moment in Gupta’s identity and the political value embedded in the struggle for LGBT liberation, the consequences of which were far-reaching. ♦

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Tim Clark is a curator, writer and since 2008, has been Editor in Chief and Director at 1000 Words.