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Anonymes. L’amerique so nom: photographie et cinema

From the commodification of the everyday and the homogenisation of culture to the standardisation of work and resulting political alienation, anonymity is one of the defining characteristics of the modern era – the ubiquitous background against which locality, difference and singularity are measured. The optical image (photography, film, video) has maintained an ambiguous relation to the concept and experience of anonymity. On the one hand, it is a commodity, standardised and popularised; on the other, it is unprecedented in its ability to single out – and draw attention to – the utter specificity of things and the uniqueness of detail. Reproduced on a mass scale, the image has contributed to the standardisation of culture but it can also become a form of resistance. Anonymes explores these contradictions. The project focusses on North America. Since the 1930s, its mainstream culture has celebrated individuality and the self, while nearly all its important image makers have addressed the nondescript, the flattening of daily experience and the pervading sense of anonymity. These have been North America’s twin gifts to modern visual culture; their contradictions and tensions are now experienced everywhere. A secondary argument of the book/exhibition is that the relation between wall, page and screen needs to be rethought in the light of the ‘triumph’ of photography in/as mainstream art. Anonymes brings together work made in commercial magazines with works from avant-garde cinema, photographic books and pictures made for the modern art gallery, establishing a new set of terms that focus on struggles with/against the range of photography’s working contexts. Although a free-standing book, Anonymes was occasioned by an exhibition of the same name that was curated by David Campany and Diane Dufour to inaugurate Le Bal, Paris – a major new institution dedicated to the visual document in the expanded field (Sept-Dec 2010).