Document:Q11738

This is a project of and about photography. Institutional discourse around photo­graphy remains encumbered by certain established strictures. These are intimately tied to a specific history of photography that is concerned with the camera’s status as a tool used to depict states of things in the world. This history could be said to revolve around confirming or problematizing Roland Barthes’s assertion that the medium’s essence is the ability of the photograph to testify: ‘That-has-been.’ This tends to repress, or at least discount, several integral aspects of the medium: the physical support upon which the image is registered, myriad technical processes, as well as the numerous choices that were made by the photographer in capturing the image.
The photographs are Google Books images in which software distortions, the imaging site, and the hands of ScanOps employees are visible. They’re both indexical, and medium-specific. Their processes, digital manipulations, and material supports are folded within them.
_x005F_x000B_The hand - always the synechdoche for the worker - is occasionally inserted literally into our view of the text, presenting a persistent necessity for repetitive, manual labor.  These accidents then complicate the categorizations of “immaterial” and “informational” labor in the Information Technology sector.