Artist
Tamara Janes
Tamara Janes is an artist based in Bern. After studying photography at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and at the School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA), she completed a master's degree at the Institute of Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel University of Art and Design. She then returned to New York on a Studio Scholarship from the City of Bern to continue her research at the Public Library. Among others, her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Glarus, HeK Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Kunsthaus Baselland, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Stadtgalerie Bern, on the occasion of Plat(t)form15 at Fotomuseum Winterthur and at the Bieler Fototage. Her projects have been supported and awarded several times. Tamara Janes received the Swiss Design Award 2023 in the category photography with her work “Copyright Swap”. Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at the photography class, F+F School of Art and Design, Zurich.
Artist Statement
In my work I deal with the conditions of digital images. I take a critical view of current photographic behaviour because our perception and our handling of images is increasingly determined by technology and algorithms. Mostly we unreflectively consume images every second and strive for more and more unrealistic sharpness and brilliance. This development is at the same time thought content and friction surface for my work. By shifting through and contextualizing my own and other people's visual material, I want to create new perspectives and visual commentaries.
The New York Public Library Picture Collection
During her residency in New York, Tamara Janes regularly visited the Public Library Picture Collection. The public archive has been in existence since 1915 and houses a collection of over 1.2 million images categorized into folders based on approximately 12,000 keywords. During her stay, she borrowed images almost daily and scanned them. Since 2021, this treasure trove of images has been presented on multiple levels.
For her first exhibition, she selected about 90 images from the Picture Collection for an Instagram Story Edition. This combined traditional visual language with the aesthetics of Instagram, stimulating unusual perspectives and reorienting perception.
The Super Zoom Edition exhibition was created during her one-month summer residency. Here, she experimented with a 100x digital zoom on a smartphone, capturing on-site arranged and found still lifes. Using her personal archive of objects and scans from the Picture Collection, she made large photographic prints that enhanced the painterly character of the upscaled pixels. These were presented on industrially manufactured standing displays. Additionally, a video work titled “Bixby Knows Best” was produced. All 72 posters from the “Super Zoom” exhibition were cut up, reprinted, and numbered for the publication. Each poster was turned into a 36-page booklet. All elements of the exhibition are integrated, without traditional exhibition views.
The Super Zoom Edition is part of a series of works that engage with the conditions of digital images. Tamara Janes explores our contemporary photographic behaviour, such as the unreflective und high speed consumption of image material. Our perception and interaction with images are increasingly determined by technology and algorithms. This process serves as both the subject matter and the point of friction in her work. Examples of this are the “Poor Image Series” and the “Room Portraits with Google Reverse Image Search."
In her latest work, Tamara Janes deals with copyright issues and searches for the “tipping point" of copyright by manipulating the original images. The legal assessment of the modification process was done in collaboration with a lawyer and documented using a traffic light system. The broad space of interpretation of copyright in photography and art is relevant and omnipresent for Tamara Janes. The “Copyright Swap” project is based on the idea of digitally altering other people’s images to such an extent that they become her own. The source materials are scans from the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library.
For the “Purple Edition” series, archive images were grouped together to generate new meanings. An orchestrated photograph is created for each group, with excerpts cut into the newly formed image as a matting, concealing the archive images.
Other completed works by Tamara Janes are documented on her website, tamarajanes.ch
Tamara Janes's series Copyright Swap from 2023 represents her latest body of work. The series is part of a long research process based on the legendary New York Public Library Picture Collection, which Janes consulted extensively during an artistic residency in 2018. Open to the public since 1915, it is a collection of over 1.2 million images clipped from books, magazines or newspapers since the dawn of photographic imagery and filed under some 12,000 keywords.
Only a small proportion of these are available digitally. It serves her as a kind of image mine, as raw material that she later arranges, edits, recontextualises and modifies according to her interests. One of these interests is the question of image appropriation and its legal consequences. In Copyright Swap, Janes explores this with a lawyer in a kind of dialogue performance. She documents both the process of versioning the images, which are increasingly edited by the artist on the basis of the legal opinions she receives from the lawyer. The final results, presented as works, integrate the legal commentary, which explores and defines the moment when copyright passes from the original author to the author who has appropriated the image.
The NYPL Picture Collection project as a whole is a way for Janes to explore not only copyright issues, but also the ways in which images change meaning as they are sent out as vessels into the seas and clouds of digital networks, recombined with other image forms such as GIFs, and reinterpreted by non-human agencies such as image recognition algorithms. All of these phenomena are central to current artistic and theoretical engagements with visual cultures. Tamara Janes approaches these questions with a highly original mix that synthesises high-brow source material as well as so-called poor-image genres in a way that is at once deeply engaging and exposing visual culture banalities in highly amusing ways.
Florian Amoser's work addresses the history of perception and perspective. In his working method, the phase of research and development - usually considered merely 'preparatory' - is in fact the 'decisive moment' for his photographic practice. His work reflects the contemporary condition of the computational image by exploring the recursive feedback loops of physical and digital realities. As Amoser himself states: "his photographs testify to a material dissolution of the environment in which physical reality begins to imitate a digital reality". To achieve this, Amoser takes on multiple roles: artist, engineer, coder, curator, scenographer and theorist.
For Amoser, it is necessary not only to rethink the role of the apparatus in his practice, but also, as in the case of his ongoing project splicer, to actually rebuild its hardware and software from scratch in the manner of his artistic "wetware" persona. This represents a new form of photographic materialism that does not fetishise the object character of the photographic print, but rather challenges and circumvents long-standing Western traditions and conventions, such as the concept of linear perspective. By constructing his own tools, a process that has taken him years to develop, he is on the verge of literally engineering new forms of pictorial category. As Amoser notes: "An image sampled on the Splicer is the record of a coordinated dance of a sample in front of the camera module. It's a reconstruction and remix of a three-dimensional object, lending its appearance and texture to create new visual matter. An image made with splicer can be infinite, can begin where it ends, and can be abstract yet concrete".
So this ongoing project splicer should also be understood as a political statement. It proposes, in a very concrete and practical way, how to begin to move beyond the impasse of technological determinism. A social, cultural and material reality that has become dominated by a quasi-feudal oligopoly of tech companies for whom networked images and computational photographic practices are part of a larger attention economy strategy that seeks to maximise capital gains and market share. In a sense, Amoser proposes to unlearn photography, allowing the viewer to dispense, at least partially and temporarily, with the dominant dispositive or technological framing of the image in contemporary visual culture.