Et Cetera Photobooks? Reflections on Conceptual Documentary Photography as Visual Enumeration

Abstract

Using three photobooks by Ricardo Cases, Allison Stewart, and Stephen Gill, I explore the question of whether visual lists can exist. I investigate what operations must be involved in conceptualizing a semantically open and polysemous artifact like photography as a discrete enumeration and then consider which aesthetic practices might be associated with it. My thesis is that, through reductionist and abstracting practices, enumerative photography has found a way to rethink the problem of figural representation in documentary photography. As a serial work, the Conceptual Documentary photobook (CDp) can be both politically and conceptually coherent in emphasizing the interpretive gaps between individual images and thus creating a receptive autonomy, which is an important representational goal in approaches to Postdocumentary Art.

Photography has thus far been conceptualized not as a list but as a series. This contribution aims to question the photographic series in terms of enumerative functions and modes of representation. I will ask whether visual enumeration is a viable possibility and, if so, how. I will ask whether photography, and in this particular case the Conceptual Documentary photobook,¹ is particularly suited to assign an enumerative, a “serial” function to the image and how that enumerative function is communicated to the viewer. One thesis is that the role of the viewer in the CDp is strengthened. The viewer is not “only” the recipient but active constructor of the work. We can define an enumeration as a kind of inventory or catalogue, if they represent a characteristic (like names), we can speak of a register. An archive or inventory of categories presents the user with a series of instances without a narrative thread; the book form, however, suggests and inevitably creates a sense of progress from beginning to end.² Yet, how are these opposing dynamics reconciled and transformed when the archive or list is reproduced in the form of a photobook? Both the book and the list satisfy a need for order, for a distinct selection. However, if the list is generated from the anthropological need to name and order unknown things, there should be no visual lists, as the act of naming is (necessarily) precluded. Images are not distinct signs. I argue that in order to become enumerative, the image must have a marked grasp on the word. To speak of visual lists is possible through the adaptation of verbal sign systems on several transmedial levels. However, the image has to undergo various operations to achieve this alignment. The image must be reduced and semantically limited in order to become a distinct and isolated item with a countable element. In order to achieve this, unifications are necessary that align the individual images with each other. To put it in a nutshell: at least to some degree, the photographic series must become a serial work.

In the following I introduce the term “et cetera photobook” in order to attribute another, more serial component to the Conceptual Documentary photobooks discussed in this chapter. As I will later explain in more detail, this term highlights the process of continuously adding new items and the aesthetics associated with this additive mode of presentation. To a certain extent, I owe this phrase to Peter Bexte. In his book Konjunktur & Krise he examines the conjunction “and” in images and texts, not only as a linguistic phenomenon but also as a structure of thought (see Bexte 2019). With this term I want to make clear that seriality in the photobook cannot be defined only by a certain set of themes, as is the case in the documentary discourse on concepts such as power, memory, and testimony. The visual plural also functions as a formal criterion and forms its own aesthetics.

From Series to Photobook, from Photobook to Conceptual Documentary Photobook (CDP)

In scholarly research little has been said about the visual list. The following considerations will take up the concept of plural images as hyperimages as described by Thürlemann (2013).³ He mainly emphasizes two principles that are at work when we deal with images in the plural: first, the principle of reciprocal sharpening and, second, the principle of distancing.⁴ Both principles negotiate the connection between parts and the whole and are therefore important for any consideration of visual series (see Thürlemann 2013, 16). A series refers to an artistic work which consists of parts that are independent but which together form a whole. A series is an umbrella term that has many manifestations. A painted medieval winged tartar can be considered a series, as can a comic strip or Upper Italian Renaissance frescoes that embellish representative villas. Another form is serial works. As a demarcation to series, serial works are characterized by a “numerical or otherwise systematically predetermined process (permutation, progression, rotation, reversal)” (Bochner 1967, 23). The sequence in turn designates the way in which those parts are arranged.

Visual series have recently been the subject of two studies that discuss the minimum number of images that can be considered a “series.” The question also seems relevant for the discussion of lists. Martina Dobbe allows serial orders to begin with six or more objects, since each element then “resists separation through perception” (see Dobbe 2013, 38). Bettina Dunker later also lets her “picture plural” begin with six; she explicitly excludes diptychs and triptychs—also because of their “religious horizon(s) of meaning” (Dunker 2018, 11).

However, there is such thing as an “excess” of pictures, as Dobbe and Dunker make clear. Where “the equivalence of the individual elements is lost” (Dobbe 2013, 39), where “repetition and variation of a certain pictorial pattern” (Dunker 2018, 12) are lost in the mass, the plural overtaxes the series. Dunker concludes her considerations with the thesis that image-sets in which “the individual image […], as well as the arrangement and the exact number” (Dunker 2018, 12), are interchangeable, do not represent serial concepts.⁵ These considerations suggest that lists and enumerations can also express and represent some kind of “information overload” rather than providing order or structure. Can lists express order and abundance at the same time? The question nicely leads us to the photobook as both a plural and a comprehensive picture compilation. In a conventionally bound book three principles of order can be distinguished: the double page, possibly chapters, and the material body of the book as a whole. Before I consider whether (and how) photography becomes enumerative in the context of the photobook, I will first present a few basic considerations about the photobook and its encounter with Documentary Conceptual Art.

The Conceptual Documentary Photobook (CDP)

In this paragraph I would like to introduce the concept of the CDp, which was essentially coined by Melissa Miles (see Miles 2010) and transfers the approach of Conceptual Documentary Art to photography and the photobook. Since the three photobooks I will analyze all belong to this “genre” to varying degrees, I find it helpful to highlight those characteristics influenced by Miles, starting with a brief definition of the photobook. One of the most informative definitions of the photobook comes from Andrea Nelson:

Photobooks are publications characterized by the careful sequencing and editing of photographic images in order to convey visual arguments. They imply authorship by a photographer or photo-editor and are not intended to describe a book simply containing photographs nor a compendium of photographs illustrating a text. (Nelson 2007, 10)

The formulation “careful sequencing” used by Nelson does not distinguish between artists’ books and books that are not produced in an artistic context. Her definition strengthens the thematic openness of the photobook. The photobooks discussed in this paper are also “photobookworks” in the sense that they interrelate “between two factors: the power of the single photograph and the effect of serial arrangements in book form” (Sweetman 1985, 187). Clive Scott states that the photobook is able “to capitalize on our natural need to read series as sequence, and sequence as consequence” (Scott 1999, 215). The photobook of Conceptual Documentary photography deliberately frustrates the expectation of “consequence.” Conceptual Documentary photobooks do not create a narrative with a beginning, climax, and end. Melissa Miles explains that

Conceptual Documentary photography is characterized by a desire to explore a single, often banal idea from many different angles […]. Rather than submerging themselves in dramatic events, Conceptual Documentary photographers seek out and frame their subjects according to a pre-determined idea or scheme. Processes of repetition and categorization are central to Conceptual Documentary. (Miles 2010, 50)

As we see, the concept has set out to respond to the criticism against humanist photography⁶ by combining the tradition of humanist photography with ideas of seriality and Conceptual Art. The humanist—or “concerned”—photographer is someone who not only thinks and sees through his camera but also decidedly “feels” and thereby hopes to transport that feeling into the photographs. He thus abandons the objectivity usually typical for documentary art as he concentrates on his subjective feelings, often assuming that objectivity is hardly attainable in complex situations.⁷ Although they are often conceived with a decidedly political stance, the CDps—unlike in humanistic photography—do not show close-ups of suffering victims, no photography of dismay.

Aesthetically, the CDp certainly has precursors within photobook production. In the following paragraph I introduce some of the works that are important for contextualizing the enumerative function of photography, as these can provide an idea of the historical development of the visual characteristics of the CDp. The first work I want to discuss is one of the first photobooks ever: William Henry Fox Talbots’ The Pencil of Nature from 1844.

Order and orientation were two of the most important functions with which Talbot promoted his invention of the photographic negative. According to him, a photo was a lot more efficient, faster, and precise when it came to documenting a collection of Chinese porcelain, for example, than a written inventory: “The more strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of their descriptions”.⁸ Carol Armstrong calls the resulting genre “inventorial photograph” (Armstrong 1998, 127). The inventorial photograph already reveals some basic visual assumptions that later become relevant for the CDp (Fig. 13.1).

Fig. 13.1

William Henry Fox Talbot, Articles of China, 1844, Detroit Institute of Art, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

The Chinese porcelain is shown in such a way that the objects maintain a constant distance not only from each other but also from the viewer. The picture ground is parallel to the picture planes and identical to the shelf wall; the oculus is in the middle of the picture; the horizontal lines run parallel with the edges. The spatial depth is minimal, the illumination uniform. For Friedrich Weltzien, these photographs are not only archival aids but at the same time function as an “Enlightenment movement of tidying up and sorting” with regard to “an ideal of clarity” and politeness, since correct distancing and appropriate spacing were becoming synonymous with civility in the Enlightenment (see Weltzien 2006, 29). The distance described (polite and respectful) is also important with regard to the CDps. In the context of CDps, the photographer is not a “concerned photographer,” but someone who tries to keep and maintain distance, both toward his objects and toward the viewers and their perception. While the origin of the visual list as we find it in the collectioninventories—which are often arranged according to specific criteria—is limited to a single page, our next example, Karl Blossfeldt’s photobook Urformen der Kunst (1928)⁹ (Fig. 13.2) shows how the elements of the single page can be distributed throughout the length of a book.

Fig. 13.2

Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst (Berlin 1928), 3, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Blossfeldt’s plant photographs were not only botanically innovative: the isolation and sculptural arrangement of the natural objects went beyond Talbot’s even spacing. For Ed Ruscha, Blossfeldt’s sacrosanct “uniformly operative principle of form” (see Molderings 1977, 73)—both in nature and in technique—turns profane.¹⁰ His books have had a significant impact on the CDp: he implements the serial element of repetition in his works, be it with small fires, with petrol stations, or parking lots. Indeed, such repetition tends to reinforce the image. Its formal and aesthetic aspects are amplified, while the relevance of the depicted is diminished.¹¹ Ute Eskildsen recently suggested that conceptual artists like Ruscha, who conceived photography as the epitome of mass media, gave new impulses to the CDp and the photobook as a high-circulation artist’s book in general (see Eskildsen 2004, 27). The three photobooks presented in the following acknowledge this serial and conceptual legacy but combine it with another, namely, the political and socially critical heritage of humanist photography.

Ricardo Cases, El Porqué De Las Naranjas, Mack 2014

On opening Ricardo Cases’ photobook El porqué de las naranjas we see (next to the title) a photograph in which an orange is trapped between a curb and a car tire. This remains one of the few oranges that Cases depicts, even though the title translates as The Reason for Orange(s). Cases explains in an interview that the fruit is “one of the symbols of the Levante region,” as well as of “tourism and construction” (Pantall 2014). When we turn the page, the orange fruit transforms into the color that collects as oil in the middle of a paella pan (Fig. 13.3). Later in the book the leitmotif, the color of orange, reappears in leaves that turn orange or wooden slats, plastic tarpaulins, and small or large fires (Fig. 13.4).¹² Even if the color detaches itself from the object in the course of the book, as a surface color it often remains associated with the background in the picture. Cases’ colors are bright and saturated because the sun plays a significant role in his portrait of the Levante region. His use of light gives the work a penetrating and relentless presence: no shadow remains unexplored, nobody can hide. The sharp-edged overexposure is often aided by flashes; these give the objects a surprised, even trapped look as if they had been caught. That flashlight aesthetic resonates with the local past: the Levante has been a tourist destination, once very popular, today a victim of real estate speculators and financial crisis. The transitions of the image are often formally motivated: a round object is correlated with a likewise round object in the next picture; the exposure time has changed from one picture to the next. Although Cases, in line with the cinematic principle, only sets one image per double page, the book is primarily arranged in pairs of images, not in larger sequences. Despite the luminosity of the colors, it must be viewed from a short distance, especially since the photos are printed relatively small, which increases individual attention. In terms of reception aesthetics, the reader repeatedly tries to discover the color orange in this series of images. And the reader usually (yet not always) succeeds. This dissolves the form into abstraction while simultaneously endangering it with such clear instructions such that the search for the color is abandoned as soon as it is found.

Fig. 13.3

Ricardo Cases, El porqué de las naranjas (London 2014), n.p., © Ricardo Cases

Fig. 13.4

Ricardo Cases, El porqué de las naranjas (London 2014), n.p., © Ricardo Cases

Due to the differentiated use of the color orange, sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, sometimes used extensively or as a small accent, the search is never easy or unconditional. In this search, the contexts of this withered and emaciated region cannot be ignored. Just as the color orange repeatedly reappears and cannot be overlooked, so, too, the economic crisis that shapes the region is omnipresent—even if only in minor and easily overseen details.¹³ The enumerative quality of the book is obvious. The title of the book works as a connecting hypernym, while the formally designed sequence has linearity in its compositional geometry, although it is still far from being diagrammatic.

The enumeration refers—regardless of the object—to signifiers (see Eco 2009, 118), while Allison Stewart and Stephen Gill, the authors of the photobooks introduced in the following, count the signified. This means that Cases’ use of the color orange emphasizes the expressive side of the sign, whereas—as we will see in the following—Gill and Stewart tend to highlight the thematic aspects of their enumeration. Cases has pointed out several times that he wanted to start his project “openly”, that he viewed the photographs as “autonomous” (Pantall 2014), an autonomy that, since the degree of staging is relatively low in Cases, remains visible—in contrast to Stewart and Gill.

Allison Stewart, Bug Out Bag: The Commodification of American Fear, Self-Published 2018

If the fairly discrete elements in Cases were arranged one behind the other on different pages, in Bug out Bag they lie next to each other on the same page. “Bug out bags” are bags that are intended as basic equipment for disaster preparedness and serve either as a 72-hour survival kit or as a means to rebuild civilization. The spiral-bound book, which also focuses on the commercialization of prepping by showing trade fairs and other places of supply for utilities, is visually reminiscent of a manual, a printed aid, or guide that provides instructions in case of emergency. As functional as this travel occasion may be, the photos by Allison Stewart show that each bag allows individual conclusions to be drawn about the character of the packer, about his idea of society and solidarity, and about order and control in situations that are hard to imagine. If one understands the list as a phenomenon of crisis (see Bexte 2014, 27), as a possibility to create order and thus assert control in a disordered world, Stewart’s work is doubly relevant for the theme of this essay: on the representational as well as on the iconic level.

The objects in the photographs are singularized, intentionally exempted. They do not attempt to tell a story but rather stage specific isolated (and more or less deliberately constructed) scenes. Stewart uses her mobile photo studio to show the unwrapped emergency backpacks on an even white background. They are central to the content, which is arranged more or less in a row around them. In this microcosm, the objects certainly function as stimuli or references to a narrative (see Wolf 2002, 43): while Mike from Texas encounters the apocalypse with tequila and phenobarbital (Fig. 13.5), Sam’s backpack reflects his need for communication by packing “walkie talkies” and a radio (Fig. 13.6).

Fig. 13.5

Allison Stewart, Bug Out Bag: The Commodification of American Fear (2018), self-published, 23, © Allison Stewart

Fig. 13.6

Allison Stewart, Bug Out Bag: The Commodificationof American Fear (2018), self-published, 25, © Allison Stewart

The sparse titles assigned to the panels activate the viewer as a (co-)constructor of the narrative.¹⁴ The intended viewers would complement and connect the given image with Mike’s or Sam’s idea of what would be important in and after the expected catastrophe. It seems that the more sparingly explanatory elements or narrative stimuli are used, the more active the viewer has to be. Although Stewart, like Talbot in his inventory (Fig. 13.1), combines the objects in one image, the oversight and inequality of the objects create a different effect: due to the singularizing type of recording and the neutral perspective afforded by the overhead perspective, the objects become findings or clues in a crime scene that not only function prospectively but also retrospectively. The objects depicted could be instructions but also the legacies of their owners, posthumous testimonies after the catastrophe. A similar representation where the photos qualify as found objects can also be observed in the photobook by Stephen Gill, in which people are identified by what they leave behind.

Stephen Gill, a Series of Disappointments, Nobody 2008

The pages in Stephen Gill’s A Series of Disappointments are heavy and slightly larger than a usual piece of paper. Also photographed from above, they display differentially illuminated objects on a black background (Fig. 13.7). Watches, too, were advertised in this way, in black and white, as were jewels and other valuable products. Gill, however, has photographed discarded betting slips—that is, objects of no or of negative financial value, to be precise. The 36 slips were found in Hackney, a district of London that has three times as many betting shops as the rest of the city (see Miles 2010, 64). Although the lack of color and the two-sided positioning of the photographs have the effect that the objects are aligned more closely than in Stewart’s photobook, they simultaneously possess a distinct individuality.

Fig. 13.7

From A Series of Disappointments (London 2008) by Stephen Gill, n.p. Copyright © 2008, Stephen Gill

In the truest sense of the word: the two-dimensional slip becomes three-dimensional through the body of the bettor: “(N)ervous tension and grief” (Gill 2008) is what Gill called the emotions he sees as responsible for the fact that we do not see rectangular notes but rather types of death, crumpled up piles, torn, artfully turned or otherwise transformed pieces of paper that “began as hope, were shaped by loss or defeat, then cast aside” (Gill 2008). The failed bets are placed sparingly as text attached to the images (Fig. 13.8).

Fig. 13.8

From A Series of Disappointments (London 2008) by Stephen Gill, n.p. Copyright © 2008, Stephen Gill

In addition to the act of leafing through, and printed as a fanfold, the book allows for a different mode of reception, which further differentiates the issue of value: owners of A Series of Disappointments are encouraged to hang their own exhibition of the book. The book contains within it instructions for the removal of the text block from its cover and on how to properly hang the pages on small nails using the holes punched in the cover. The resulting long, continuous line, the “Series of Disappointments,” underlines the extent of the loss and the repetition of frustration.

Melissa Miles stresses that this form of repetition is also typical for the CDp: “The repetition of photographs of a single, often banal subject has the effect of protracting and merging the photographed moments” (Miles 2010, 64–65). The disappointed hopes become one big disappointed hope, which is individualized by the formal difference of the betting slips. And yet the sheer amount of betting slips combined with the greatest standardization of the recording situation is a reductionist gesture that could be called a visual form of the list: the book is just an option for the display; the pages give the appearance of a showcase, an exhibition of living dead. There is no narrative, no dynamic owed to it. This visual list is neither complete nor discreet but produces surplus in the psychological charging of the form and received kinetic energy.

Formally, the betting slips have been transformed into signs—signs that refer to the structural change in Hackney and the poverty of the population as well as to the next page, which could possibly be showing the identical betting slip in a different form. This sculptural kind of aesthetic with its differentiated shades of gray borrowed from product photography, which in Walker Evans’ and Karl Blossfeldt’s work (Fig. 13.2) referred to the beauty of everyday life and pure form, is here called into question by a cultural product that—unlike Evans’ pliers—has a negative rather than a low value. The simple listing emphasizes the loss of value, since the identical photographic treatment of the slips turns them into a singular mass, further stressing the huge loss of collective value. This practice is counteracted. The various deformations of the betting slips refer to the individuality of their owners. The kinetic energy, which is evident in the betting slips, highlights the extent of economic loss as well. It appears paradoxical how much money seems to be associated with a simple sheet of paper. Eventually, the book also draws our attention to the bizarre nature of banknotes, where value is again just a matter of agreement. As in Gill’s series Billboards (2002–04), the fantasy worlds of advertising are visually provided with an ironic, yet highly political commentary.

Et Cetera Photobook

In the following sections I would like to broaden my methodological focus and talk about cultural and literary approaches. This will allow me to work out the intermedial functions of the visual list more strongly and also to distinguish the enumerative qualities of the photobooks presented. So again: why do I use the term “et cetera photobook” in the title? I do not intend to define a new genre but rather to highlight a shared function of these books that the term Conceptual Documentary does not sufficiently emphasize. It is about the “and” and the “and so on,” that is the connectors and the endings of enumerative systems. Peter Bexte has written several texts about the “and” and explored it not only as a verbal but also as a philosophical and visual phenomenon (see Bexte 2019).

Unlike analysis, the list is a form of synthesis. Like the word “and,” it stands for connection as such, without its modality having yet been clarified. If one follows Bexte’s argument, the list becomes a constructive phenomenon, a remedy against the crisis; the dissolution and the disintegration can at least be countered by a mere list.¹⁵ Lists turn against a causal logic. This can be linked to the CDp’s claim that visual series are directed against humanist photography, which often works with dichotomies. As already emphasized by Melissa Miles, the CDp is also to be understood as a partial response to the crisis of representation in humanist photography. As a swan song to the pity-generating single image, it creates a series of images that, following no causal or chronological narrative, seems most likely to be associated with an “and.” According to Bexte, the “and” (like the “or”) is a disjoint conjunction, for it divides as it connects (see Bexte 2019, 21). He also emphasizes that conjunctions and prepositions have no meaning of their own in contrast to conceptual categories but that “their meaning always arises from the context” (Bexte 2019, 51). This contextuality of the “and” is constitutive for the verbal and visual enumeration. Only in and with the context does the mode of enumeration open up; only then does it become clear whether one counts in an archival, typological, or hierarchical manner.

Due to the specificity of its medium, photography is particularly suitable for creating visual lists. The uniqueness of photographic textuality lies in the referential or indexical sign-like nature of the photographic image (see Hughes and Noble 2003, 4). The indexicality of a photograph—its reference to a reality located in front of the image—creates a closer connection to the depicted than other media. Moreover, as Victor Burgin wrote in 1977, photographs—like language—are seen as part of the environment, “whereas paintings and films readily present themselves to critical attention as objects” (Burgin 1982, 143). The depicted can thus be more strongly present as a countable and delimitable sign, as evidenced by the numerous archival impulses in photo history (see Fig. 13.2), which can promote its list-likeness. It is also through this indexicality and through other characteristics such as the reproducibility, distributability, and cropping of a photograph that it is most context-sensitive, as photo theory argues.¹⁶ Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out that an evidential history of photography could therefore not be written without a “history of photographic uses” (Solomon-Godeau 1991, xxiv). And like the photo, the “and” is an “unsecured, because context-related meaning of connectors, brackets, couplings, etc.” (see Bexte 2014, 32). Still, the “and” emphasizes a lack of hierarchy between the parts as a conjunction, which is most likely to remain invisible (see Bexte 2019, 15). This lack of hierarchy between the individual photos is also present in the CDp.

The contextualizing word produces repetitive loops, and yet it is important to emphasize that the “bidirectional directionality” (Selmani 2012, 171) of the “and” means that the law of exchange does not apply. As Bexte has shown, the words “father and son” have a different quality than “son and father” (see Bexte 2014, 31). Unlike in mathematics, neither literary, visual, nor semantic elements in general can be exchanged without consequences, a phenomenon already pointed out by Meyer Schapiro (see Meyer Schapiro 1969). In the examples shown here, for instance, the formal sequencing of Cases was needed to give coherence to the series, which otherwise had hardly any underlying ordering parameters. This coherence offers the basis for further considerations such as how the color orange is reflected in the work.

The “et cetera” can refer not only to the “and” but also to the “etc.” and thus to the end of lists. The “et cetera” is then to be understood as a gathering, as an end that could go on. As already emphasized above, a bound book necessarily has an end, even if it appears as a fanfold. This seclusion is counteracted by the incomplete nature of the discrete individual elements: the “et cetera” is about the basic possibility of a subsequent rereading, a reassessment of what the agreement actually consisted of in the first place (see Garfinkel 1967, 74).

The gaps and interstices are what I initially called the discursive power of the list. Therefore, Sabine Mainberger is to be agreed with when she states that enumeration—she deliberately avoids the word list—is “often marked as incomplete” but does not have to be “in principle infinite” (Mainberger 2018, 95–96). Thus, the photobooks dealt with here correspond to Mainberger’s third category of infinity: “A finite number of items cannot be written down in full” (Mainberger 2018, 95–96). The “et cetera” is therefore not a sign of infinity but of detail.¹⁷

The CDp relies on the affordance of photography to freeze time, to isolate subjects from their surroundings, and to put them in a new context in which new associations and meanings can be forged. As the viewer has to recontextualize its isolated and thus abstracted objects, here the CDp shows itself in its openness and revisionality as well-behaved postdocumentary (see Gevers 2005). This postdocumentary quality is also evident in the sensitivity toward figural representation. Humanist photography has been criticized for, among other things, cementing injustices rather than helping to overcome them by representing unfortunate and needy people. People are not depicted in Stephen Gill’s book, and hardly in Allison Stewart’s and Ricardo Cases’ books.

Of the examples shown here, the betting slips by Gill are most list-like in nature. The “and” between them can be understood as hung and leafed through; they are literally connected and, as such, are exhibited as a unit. This unity is further reinforced by the reduction of contexts already emphasized above: due to the many constant parameters, color, perspective, display, and background, the comparison is directed at the form of the betting slip and thus indirectly at the psychological condition of the owner—an owner who is not shown. This connects Gill’s series to Stewart’s backpacks: they both do not show the owners of the photographed objects. The color orange is an object-overlapping phenomenon for Cases as well. This representational void, together with the non-hierarchical order of the individual images, gives the viewer the opportunity to expand them imaginatively—both on the personal and on the political level.

This openness and revisionality are shared between visual and verbal enumerations. Literature is fascinated by lists because they seem to unite incompatible things very simply. Eva von Contzen emphasizes that lists in literary texts underline the constructiveness of the discourse, since they deflect classical reception expectations such as immersion: “Lists resist the immersive impetus and challenge readers on a cognitive level, requiring, to varying degrees, strategies of familiarization and narrativization in order to make sense of their meaning” (von Contzen 2016, 246). This refusal of immersion—or of narrative—is also inherent in the examples that I have presented in this article.

Horizons of Reception

Christiane Frey and David Martyn begin their essay on knowledge in and through lists with a remark on reception aesthetics: we would read “over the individual elements of a list” (see Frey and Martyn 2016, 91) if we knew the heading, the category under which the elements would be subsumed. The authors speak of horizons of expectation with which the reader is equipped. If we ask ourselves when and who is equipped with which horizons of expectation, then we have a clear winner: Bug out Bag is too well known as a term and too ubiquitously understood than to have to guess for a long time what kind of unpacked backpacks might be depicted. But neither Cases nor Gill allows such simple conclusions to be drawn from the title of the work on display: the fact that the color orange could become the smallest common denominator within Cases’ enumerative structure is something the viewer, despite the title, only realizes after turning the pages several times; no text is assigned to the pictures that could guide the viewer in Gill’s work to associate the disappointment mentioned in the title with the betting-slip sculptures. Even if “3.20 Hereford Earcome Sannie £ 5 to win” provides only very fragmentary information about the betting context, it is the combination of visible fonts in the image and the captions that slowly makes the viewer aware of the fact that they are seeing betting slips. It is also the suggestive materiality of the book (the way in which it reminds us of the black-and-white photography as is typical for jewelry catalogues) that meaningfully leads the viewer astray. If the category or/and a certain hierarchy is given in advance, the following would no longer be a “mere” list but a catalogue, that is, a “hierarchical subsumption of particulars under general terms” (Frey and Martyn 2016, 96). This differentiation can also be applied to visual forms of cataloguing. What works as a list when, how, under which conditions, and in which media also depends on the viewer’s stance. The list is an associative principle that exists primarily in a cognitive capacity as “object and process” (Bronfen et al. 2016, 8). However, if a list is a cognitive tool, as Eva von Contzen emphasizes (see Frey and Martyn 2016, 96), we have to ask how the concept of a visual list comes about. In the beginning, I put forward the thesis that it is a reductionist and abstracting act that aligns the polysemic image to the disjointed sign. Abstraction occurs through countable repetition and formal reduction, a principle that the CDp has adopted from serial art. The reduction is achieved amongst others by equalizing the shooting parameters that the photographer imposes on his series, which is often accompanied by a high degree of staging.

Conclusion

A cluster is not a list because the elements are not discrete but overlap. Visual lists therefore rely on conjunctions, the “and” must be exposed to show the enumerative quality of the image. This can be realized in various ways. In my examples it is the page and the associated page turning as a visual blink that creates that structure. Even though lists can do both, separate and connect, they are more visible when they separate. But to what extent does the list then strive for its own erasure and to what extent does it expose itself?

Sabine Mainberger suggested that enumerative texts either “accentuate the diversity of the individual elements” and as a result appear ‘objective’ and ‘factual’” or emphasize “the equalizing” and “repetitive,” which makes them appear “‘ritualistic’ and ‘obsessive’” (Mainberger 2003, 95). It is not quite that simple with visual enumerations: Ricardo Cases’ photographs attach less importance to repetition than to difference, yet on the pictorial level it is primarily the exaggerated colorfulness and the access to objects, which oscillates between surreal and expressive, that contradicts attributions such as “objective” or “factual.” However, the thesis seems to apply to Stewart’s photobook. Her prepper-hauls emphasize diversity and create order at the same time. The individual objects gain meaning through their connection to the other objects and through their relationship to the whole of the bag. Stephen Gill’s enumerations seem most repetitive, but not obsessive. Yet, one of his aims is certainly to represent the mass of betting tickets in Hackney. Creating a list is always an act of abstraction. When a list is created, the individual items become both reduced and more complex: reduced because they are cut off from previous (semantic) contexts, and more complex because they are entangled in new semantic structures within the list.

Martin Parr has described humanist photography as much too preachy (see Miles 2010, 57). Lists cannot preach. The CDp abstracts/reduces its theme to a list in order to allow further (crisis) description. As a serial work, the visual list can be both politically and conceptually coherent. Gill and Stewart use the camera’s dyadic power to isolate its object and remove it from its social context in order to generate a much more open conceptual economy for Contemporary Documentary photography.

Following my initial thesis, various ways in which signs emerge can be distinguished in the photobooks: the enumerative character is less obvious in Cases, as he does not singularize his objects like Gill or Stewart. Nevertheless, one looks for the color orange. By the time you find it, you have seen a lot of the once rich but now disused region around Valencia and have experienced the way in which light is able to illuminate the worn, peeled, and dried up plains. Through the back door of a narrative that deflects to be subsumed, Cases is thus able to draw attention to the forgotten contexts of the region. Stewart’s glass cabinet backpacks, on the other hand, are most closely based on the photographic tradition of the inventory—an isolated, future inventory that receives its sign-like aspects from the absence of the owners. Every canned tuna, every battery thus refers to someone who is only present as a first name in the book. Stephen Gill’s photobook A Series of Disappointments is best described as a visual list, while with regard to Stewart and Cases it seems more appropriate to speak of enumerations or enumerative systems, for in addition to the necessary reduction involved to create a discrete sign, Gill’s work also adjusts another parameter: that of space.

If you turn the pages of Cases’ book, the place where the photo was taken changes on every page. Sure, we are always in the same Spanish region, but in very different places, where the viewer is confronted with very different things. This changes with Stewart: here, the place seems to be the same, and yet the viewer is aware that Stewart had different backpacks unpacked at different places, in which she found different things. This distinction also disappears in Gill’s series: you always see the same thing in the same place. Because the recording situation is unchanged, the viewer can respond more quickly to the depicted objects and their similarities and differences. The betting slips are arranged differently, but they always remain betting slips that he has picked out and photographed in black and white on a neutral surface. The fanfold, which makes it possible to display the pages as a row or as a line, also refers to a spatial continuity—and thus to a further alignment with the writing. Similarly, Gill’s camera is the only one that is static, while Stewart changes the distance of the camera to her objects to visually match stuffed and not so stuffed pockets.

I began this text by arguing that lists create surplus. Visual enumerations in the documentary photobook also create this surplus: disappointed hopes with Stephen Gill, dystopian fears with Allison Stewart, and tourists’ desires with Ricardo Cases. Strictly speaking, this surplus is not visually represented in their books, but it is still present. A semantic and an affective surplus, an emotional level of perception that is generated for and ultimately also by the recipients themselves. The CDp makes use of the apparently non-hierarchical and unfinished structure of enumeration in order to counter the hierarchical problem of humanist photography. Additionally, it emphasizes the interpretive gaps between individual images and thus creates a receptive autonomy, which is also an important representational goal in other approaches to Postdocumentary Art. It uses the decontextualization of space, time, and presence to emphasize the photo as a sign and to counter the crisis through a series of signs, the first step of which can be an “et cetera,” a list.