Flash Mobs (The Athena Effect)

Recently, there was a potentially iconic photo taken in Portland by David Killen called "Naked Athena" ("Athena"). Like the immolated monk in Saigon in 1963, the subject is in an intersection--and like many "iconic" photos, there are other shots of it on Google images, including images that are erroneously associated with it, as in the following screenshot: 

These mashups made by algorithms are more evidence that we can’t trust them. These people are hardly Athena, but Google is also taking "snapshots" and placing them side-by-side with the text. Algorithms are now a kind of "amateur photographer".

The iconic Saigon photo (which is known to have been one of the flashpoints for the Vietnam war) was the quintessential iconic photo because there was only one (professional) photographer there, and it was taken in a photojournalistic context, not just amateur photography.

"At that point the monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day." https://time.com/3791176/malcolm-browne-the-story-behind-the-burning-monk/

Fake Icons

"Iconicization" has to happen organically; It's not something that can be contrived or "gamed"--except if appropriated for artistic effect.

If Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were alive today (the two primary artists who were at the vanguard of appropriating the look of print in the early 1960s), this would be an interesting irony to experiment with: online publications in which machines make interesting mistakes for artistic effect (Warhol and Lichtenstein as neural-net artists). But it’s not the Ben-Day dot or pixel artifacts—it’s in the machine-learning errors—the “related image”. The "related image" in this result is both female and male (which is interesting in that Athena is gender-less--even a guy can be the Athena). 

It's the horror of the twenty-first century:

"His art, after all, exploited the interplay of mass media and tragedy. Think of his prints of a grieving Jackie Kennedy, or those eerie electric chairs and poisoned tuna fish cans from the Death and Disaster series. Warhol’s DayGlo palettes and celebrity faces can’t soften the underlying horror of his vision—the horror of the twentieth century." https://newrepublic.com/article/158587/desolate-visions-andy-warhol

Photography has suspicions built-in. This is the controversy around the famous Roger Fenton photograph of the cannonballs (Valley of the Shadow of Death). We know photography frames reality and some things are just not in the frame. So one could only speculate what was outside of Athena at the time it was taken. 

One of the good aspects of everybody taking photographs at the same time is that it provides context. But someone would have to make an effort to stitch it together, and even then, there are things that are outside of THAT frame. Conceivably, one could continuously extend things outside of the frame and look to see what was there. In essence, this is what historical research is. 

Visual Implication

Several years ago I had the idea of making an L-shaped sculpture that was half-buried in the ground. If you didn't see the sculpture being built and placed in the ground, you would make the assumption that it is a complete integral unit when in fact it could just be artifice, with two separate pieces placed such that they appear to be one unit. What we takeaway is the exformation--with all the information (that the sculpture could actually be two pieces) and just accept the idea that it is one piece when we know it isn't. 

Consider the actual construction site where the sculpture is being installed. It takes place on one day for 2 to 3 hours. People come and go as they watch and they take photos of it and post them on social media. Some people photoshop the photos to make it look like it was actually one piece, and that is the one that becomes iconic and goes viral. All the other "true" photos are dismissed and become unpopular. The fact that they are unpopular means that they are not true. This is how "metaphorical truth" happens. And people even know that it is metaphorical and mob-rule rules. 

You see so many photos these days posted on social media about people being abused by police and there is never a byline or official accreditation. It's no longer necessary for a photographer to have an identity because photography doesn't necessarily need a photographer any longer--or the photographer doesn't care about accreditation. There could have been many other Athenas that could have been better museum-quality images, but accreditation still matters because at least it's not just metaphorical or truth conjured by algorithms. But even if we see this image framed in a gallery, how do we know it is the one taken by David Killen?