The artists nominated by
The two artists selected by Photo Elysée for FUTURES in 2023 are Tamara Janes and Florian Amoser. On the basis of their age alone, they would both seem to be beyond the category of emerging artists. However, their biographies show that they have had lives before being artists - Janes as an art director and Amoser as an architect. It is interesting to mention this fact, not as a disclaimer, but for two reasons that are relevant to our choice on a meta-level.
First, it reflects a general sociological fact that is representative of the arts field today: that of the hybridity of creative professions as well as lifelong learning practices. This means that an overly narrow definition of what it means to be an emerging artist doesn't reflect the realities of the lives of many creative people today. On a second level, these previous lives - at least from our perspective - have influenced the attitudes and methods of these two artistic positions and how they approach, analyse and help to reshape how we can perceive contemporary conditions and conditions of the image.
Although the results of their work are very different, both aesthetically and philosophically, there are similarities in the way they frame their mission. Both approach their work as long-term processes of artistic research, and for both the apparatus of the camera, as a technological determining factor, and the dispositive, as an important presentational framing device for the perception of images, are important elements in their respective thinking and artistic practices.
Based on these notions, both could be characterised as 'imagineers' in that they consciously question, reconstruct and engineer both the production and perception of images - whether pre-existing or of their own making. Both artistic positions present new ways of dealing with data-based realities and how to manipulate them. They challenge and expand conventional definitions of what photography and cultural heritage can be today.
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.
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.
Florian Amoser (1990), lives and works in Olten. Florian graduated in 2017 with honors from ECAL in photography. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from ETH Zurich (2011). After working for the last five years in the BA and MA Photography at ECAL as well as conducting the research project Automated Photography (with Milo Keller, Claus Gunti), he is now focussing on his personal artistic practice. Florian is also part of the curation team of annual young art show JKON / Junge Kunst Olten. Florian Amoser’s works explore the different aspects of human perception. Since photography’s invention, human beings use it as an instrument to expand the limits of their observational capacity. Consequently, the technological development of the photographic apparatus has a significant influence on our perception. Florian Amoser builds his own original tools for his artistic works, which make new photographic images possible. His photographs bear witness to a material dissolution of the environment in which the view of physical reality is strongly influenced by experiences in digital space.
