Reality Hack

There is an old idea in photography that camera and lens are mechanical surrogates for the human eye, and that photographic ‘seeing’ parallels human vision. However, as powerful and compelling as photography can be, as an analogue for human vision the medium has always come up short. Ultimately, photographs are merely pictures—two dimensional objects with undeniably special qualities—while seeing is a mental state.

Humans have two eyes, not one monocular lens; we don’t see in rectangles, but in domains of perception. At the right settings, cameras can make pictures with an infinite range of focus, whereas human focus is selective. People may detect things using peripheral vision, whereas cameras cannot record things beyond their optical limits. And unlike a simple camera lens, human eyes provide at least an illusion of seeing in three dimensions. Human experiences happen through time, in context, filtered by our minds and written subjectively into memory. Camera and lens merely bend light and fix it on a picture plane. The human eye, by contrast, transmits light energy to the brain, where it is processed, made electrical and organic, connected to sound, smell, taste and touch, joined in our minds to relevant experiences, and sometimes even corrupted.

With irony, humour and a touch of metaphysical mischief, in his project Mixed Reality the Russian photographer Gregori Maiofis explores the inherent disconnect between photographic vision and human perception. Through a series of incomplete narratives, Maiofis shows us characters engaged in macabre play, their senses co-opted by virtual reality glasses as they engage in acts which should be deeply sensory, but are instead confounded. A uniformed man looks into the chamber of a revolver, as if searching for bullets. His headset guides him, but if he is misled, the results could be deadly. Throughout these pictures, weapons such as guns, axes, rifles, knives and grenades frequently appear, suggesting bigger stakes than the trivial games the subjects seem to perceive. Elsewhere, a painter holds a palette before an easel, her shoulders hunched. Peering into the headset, her experience of canvas and easel, brush and paint— let alone the noble callings of art—are distant and remote. A seated mother cradles a child as she holds it to her breast. What could be more sensuous, more primal? And yet the mother’s attention is diverted, hijacked by the goggles she wears. We cannot see what she sees or hear what she hears. It may be a simulacrum of the very baby she holds, or some other infant, an iavatar of some cruel and remote game. What should be a timeless scene of maternal nurturing instead becomes a Madonna for our times.

Virtual reality, or as the artist prefers to call them, “augmented” reality headsets, are the perfect foil for Maiofis’s photography. Since their commercial introduction in the early 1990s, AR technology has become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous, especially in the video game industry. Headsets may also be used in simulations and remote applications, for example in handling dangerous radioactive materials or conducting deep-sea rescues— anywhere a human body might be put in harm’s way. Maiofis makes clear his figures are engaged in a nameless game, giving his pictures titles such as ‘Briefing at the Safe Zone’, ‘Please, Do Not Change the Settings’, and ‘Retired Couple in Survival Mode’. Like the identity of the figures themselves, the nature and purpose of the game, or games, are never explained.

Like Van de Graaff generators and eight-track tapes, augmented reality headsets have had a distinctive, antiquated appearance since the time of their first introduction to the public in the 1990s. The processors, screens, detectors and sensors necessary to make a VR AR headset functional give them an inescapable bulkiness, which inevitably renders the wearer vaguely ridiculous. Maiofis plays on this built-in incongruity, as cutting-edge technology takes the form of retro science fiction fantasy. He uses a variety of different headsets in his pictures, with and without built-in headphones. Each is of a type readily available to ordinary consumers.

Augmented reality might itself be seen as an attempt to overcome the limitations of still photography. Over the nearly two centuries since photography’s invention there have been numerous attempts to bridge the gap between mechanical and human vision. Indeed, research on the nature of perception paralleled the developments in chemistry and optics that gave rise to photography as we now understand it. The great English scientist, Charles Wheatstone, received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society for his work on binocular vision in 1840, the year after the invention of photography was announced to the public. This led to the invention of a practical stereo camera some ten years later, which enabled photographs to convey the illusion of three dimensions. But even that failed to capture the vitality of human vision. Countless other incremental advances, from colour photography to Smell-O-Vision, have sought to bridge the gap between mechanical, physical and optical effects and human actuality. Augmented reality headsets combine several of these developments, from stereo photography to colour television and video, with origins in the 1920s and earlier. Similarly, the gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers found in many units are also drawn from technologies that have long been understood, cleverly combined and controlled with twenty-first century computer electronics.

As a result, the photographs Maiofis makes are inherently paradoxical. They are conventional still photographs of updated photographic technology—sly deceptions betraying deeper ones. Consequently, Maiofis shows us not only the observer and the observed, but forces us as observers to confront the observed and contemplate what they are observing. Meaning is layered in these pictures and ‘reality’ elusive. Where does truth reside? In the blinkered reality of the AR-wearing subject or in the corporeal reality we as viewers perceive? Digging deeper, are Maiofis’s photographs themselves meant as literal observations or metaphorical constructs? These are pictures that ask us to map our own experience as observer and witness onto the experience of the subjects. Yet certainty forever eludes us. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, to remove the headsets would be to fundamentally alter the reality of the sitters depicted. Is their reality the electronic world being transmitted to them through the goggles, or is it the earthly reality of flesh and bones made manifest in the world around them? Perhaps it is both.

As viewers we remain largely omniscient, standing outside and beyond this paradoxical state of affairs. Yet even as we study Maiofis’s photographs, we are transported into our own punctured reality, as our attention shifts from our actual situation—standing in an art gallery, looking into a frame—to the scene. In the photographs, the wearers of the augmented reality goggles are immersed in a confected reality. But aren’t we all? In this sense, the pictures may be thought of as metaphors for photographic viewing in all its forms. Immersion is a form of escape. But it is also a form of blindness.

Maiofis’s pictures do not look like conventional photographs, but are instead unsharp and unsettled, and frequently assembled from multiple panels of imagery. Like moments of realisation, they seemingly flicker into view, soft and indistinct, their boundaries unclear. Here too Maiofis challenges photographic representation and adds another layer of meaning, creating pictures with both mimetic and painterly qualities. He achieves this using the Bromoil process, yet another technique borrowed from another time, invented and popularised in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

It is an arduous process, requiring considerable dexterity and skill. To make a Bromoil, the photographer first prints the image on a traditional sheet of gelatin silver photographic paper. Not all modern papers work well for this process, so a certain amount of experimentation is necessary in the first instance to find the right type. The paper is then bleached to remove the silver pigment and tanned, like leather, using a potassium dichromate solution. The result is a ghostly image made mainly out of various thicknesses of hardened gelatin, called a matrix. The matrix is then fixed, dried, soaked in water and squeegeed partly dry. Where the gelatin is thickest, the matrix swells with water; where it is thin, less water is retained. A fatty ink, usually borrowed from lithography, is then stippled onto the surface. Since oil and water do not mix, the ink is repelled by the water-rich gelatin, but sinks into the exposed paper in proportion to the tones and highlights of the original image.

Since they start with camera and lens, Bromoil prints have photographic qualities. Yet they are transformed by hand, through bleaching, tanning and inking into something more tactile and elusive. Because the artist controls how much ink is applied to the surface of the matrix, he or she may lighten or darken certain areas. And because the ink is applied by hand, brush marks and other inconsistencies may be visible. Bromoil is a tricky and temperamental process, subject to a degree of chance. No two Bromoil prints, no matter how expertly made, are exactly alike.

Working in Bromoil, Maiofis demonstrates his technical mastery, producing exquisite, visually arresting prints distinct from conventional black and white photographs. At the turn of the twentieth century, so-called Pictorial photographers saw this approach as a challenge to the conventional arts establishment. Later, this technique would be viewed as sentimental and nostalgic, but the Pictorialists had greater ambitions in mind. If a photographer could make something as grand and painterly as a print, drawing or painting, they reasoned, then surely photographs belong as equals on the walls of museums and art galleries. No longer concerned with proving photography’s artistic value, Maiofis turns this logic on its head. If a Bromoil is an altered—some would say distorted—version of a traditional photograph, then it also represents an altered version of photographic reality. This altered reality is a rich subject matter in its own right. In Maiofis’s hands, Bromoil photography takes on a hypnotic, dream-like quality, untethered in time and space. His prints are a microcosm of the subject matter itself.

In one of his most haunting photographs, Maiofis shows himself at work in a metal workshop, wearing his own augmented reality headset as he measures a bolt with a calliper. The task is small but the shop surrounds and envelops him: coils of wire and machined steel are piled on shelves on one side while a variety of lathes and metal cutters stand on the other. The walls are drywall, bare and patched roughly with plaster. Nevertheless, Maiofis cannot see them. In his own self-portrait, he can see nothing the headset does not permit him to. What he does see is a mediated reality, not what his eyes and ears tell him directly. Yet this state of affairs does not deter him. He works with intensity and seriousness. The metalworker is both photographer and artist, the builder of his own reality, all the while absorbed in the unseen experience of his own “game.” We sense the urgency of his undertaking. And we are willing to see through his eyes.