The years 1989 and 1990 are widely described as witness to events when “everything changed.” Popular uprisings against the self-declared revolutionary states of the people—workers and peasants—brought the supposed ultimate direction of “mankind’s ideological evolution.”1 This acceleration in historical development appeared to be proof of linear progression from one socioeconomic epoch to another. Displacing communism, the market economy and (neo)liberal democracy became universal goals and endpoints. The promise of their establishment made economic shock therapies, resurfacing xenophobia, and nationalism seem temporary and bearable. Western journalists and camera crews were not the only ones rushing in to document the changes. With the storming of Romanian state TV in 1989, the revolutionary masses took the production of images into their own hands, not only capturing the unfolding events as “a previous reality,” as Hito Steyerl put it, “but creating a new one in the form of regime change.”2 These “videograms of a revolution”—as Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică titled their 1992 documentary film collecting amateur footage, news footage, and excerpts from the Bucharest TV studio at that moment—ushered in a new understanding of images as “catalysts of events.”
Around this time, Bruno Serralongue was attending art school in Arles and already working with the medium of photography. In September 1993, while undertaking further studies at the Villa Arson in Nice, he started the series News Items (1993–95)when the news-in-brief section of his local daily newspaper captured his attention. In these seemingly “minor” events—often comical, but sometimes violent or dramatic—larger social conflicts between the French Riviera’s well-off holiday guests and local marginalized communities played out. Serralongue decided to channel the news cycle and the regular rhythm of publishing into a “photographic procedure” that played to his interest in conceptual photography.3 Effectively reversing the fundamental character of news—its very newness and the way it is manufactured—he would travel on his own initiative to the exact location of a reported event and take a photograph. His strategy of arriving too late after the occurrence in question foreshadowed the ways in which absence, delay, and immediacy would come to shape his approach to photographic representation and the ways it is produced, circulated, and received.
In the summer of 1994, a different project called Feast brought the artist to various public events such as a Miss Côte d’Azur contest, an air show, and traditional harvest festivals in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France, which he photographed as if following the rather unspectacular daily assignments of a local reporter. Serralongue’s developing interest in the social forms and dynamics of events staged by different kinds of collectives, whether self-organized village associations or regional governmental agencies, brings to mind Allan Sekula’s approach of working from within a “world already replete with signs.”4
That same year, on another continent, the Zapa-tista Army of National Liberation(EZLN)staged an armed insurrection in Chiapas against the Mexican state, drawing global media attention. Serralongue had come into touch with the movement and its ideas both through reading the news and via his involvement with the French anarcho-syndicalist union National Confederation of Labor (CNT), which supported the EZLN. Seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he traveled to the unified city to attend and photograph a meeting of the European support committees for Chiapas, and then went to Mexico for the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and against Neoliberalism. This event brought together thousands of supporters and press people from across the globe and was of lasting influence not only to Serralongue’s developing artistic methodology and focus, but moreover to the wider alter-globalization movement and its use of media in the post-Cold War world.
As argued in NATO’s Defence Strategic Communications journal, the lasting success of the EZLN was thanks to their not resorting to escalating violence and prolonged guerilla warfare. Instead, they were the first guerrilla group and political movement that adopted a networked strategy of communicating images, ideas, and demands via both conventional media channels such as radio and print and also over the internet. This was instrumental in mobilizing supporters and solidarity from other left-wing groups across the world and in swaying broader public opinion in an “asymmetrical conflict” that nevertheless “contested the physical, not the virtual, domain.”5 In their struggle for recognition of and rights for Indigenous communities in the Mexican nation-state and their opposition to neoliberal modernization, the egalitarian distribution of power among EZLN committees was crucial. Their decentralized organization allowed for the likewise decentralized and networked production and dissemination of a (visual) narrative that dwelled equally on information and symbolic representations. The EZLN’s achievement of a kind of communicative autonomy of the underrepresented became a lasting influence for Serralongue and can be traced in his subsequent photographic series.
At the meeting in Chiapas, Serralongue developed what would henceforth be a recurring image typology—one equally determined by the protocols he sets up for himself, the actual conditions under which he finds himself at an event, and his use of a particular photographic apparatus, namely a four-by-five-inch view camera. This type, which nowadays (when a film camera is used at all) is found almost exclusively in the controlled environment of studio photography, requires a tripod and considerable setup time. Amid the proliferation of digital photography, Serralongue’s tools make the rapid succession of images typical of press photographers technically unavailable. He inevitably spends more time navigating the setting and preparing to shoot than actually photographing, and the limited number of photographs he produces are never retouched or cropped.
Bound up with Serralongue’s approach to photography are questions of absence—what is left out of the image—as well as distance, which here encompasses concerns and decisions that are not only of a physical nature, for instance the number of meters between the camera and the depicted object, but also ethical. The relationship between photographer and subject becomes a “complex encounter” shaped by the “inequalities, the patterns of exploitation, and the incommensurable expectations, aspirations, and modalities of participation.”6 Serralongue relies heavily on direct engagement and even conversations with the depicted subjects and groups, such that photography implies a kind of coproduction with the photographed.
At the EZLN meeting, Serralongue took panoramic, “low-intensity”7 photographs that were determined by the structure of the event itself and thus predominantly produced during breaks between discussions in which he participated. Here, the well-thought-through media strategy of the EZLN—subverting the media’s usual preference for a singular revolutionary leader over a collective of balaclava-wearing functionaries—reverberated with Serralongue’s consciously limited use of individual portraits and overt refusal to turn the camera only on leaders and other prominent actors. In a conversation with fellow photographer Philippe Bazin, he explained: “I don’t want to be pushing and shoving with other
photographers. . . That’s not what interests me, the issue has to do with the public taking part. My position is to be among the public, in fact. In [a] photo where you can see the backs of the chairs, I also have a chair that I’ve pushed out of the way to frame this composition. I’m in the crowd, a participant, with this desire to produce a certain type of photograph, but I’m not near the speakers’ platform, I’m not a special guest, I’m not a journalist.”8
In the following decades Serralongue has continued to work in series, traveling and sometimes returning multiple times to the places where “news is happening.” For instance projects such as Calais (2006–20), Water Protectors (2017–ongoing), and La Vie Ici (2020–21) were shot at the emergency and border zones where lives and deaths of so-called second-class citizens and noncitizens are effected by the violence inherent in the formation and reproduction of nation-states and capitalism. As a kind of chronicle of postwar globalization and its discontents, his work pictures the complex relationship between state and people. The ideals and mechanisms of both political and visual representation are complicated in his series that turn to gatherings of movements, often in exile, struggling for autonomy and self-determination in Chiapas, Tibet, Kosovo, and South Sudan.
While oftentimes a public event—a conference, assembly, protest, or occupation—provides the occasion for Serralongue’s travel, his motivation differs from that of a journalist. His camera does not capture the “newsworthy occurrence” but rather frames the act and form of collective and social organization, and the spaces produced therefrom. Thus, the photographs are inevitably inutile as press images, and also too neutral and removed to be of any value to political agitation. Tellingly, Serralongue refuses to be labeled an activist, but nevertheless makes clear that he collapses both personal political conviction and artistic project.9 Drawing his attention are both the internationalism of official forums and events, such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development or the Expo 2000 in Hannover, and the internationalism of grassroots and non-state organizations that give voice to those barred from representation. Though Serralongue makes clear that he does not produce politically committed art, many of his series and subjects from the 1990s and early 2000s paint the promise of an organized international left-wing alter-globalist front. The hope of bringing together the many struggles of the global “multitude”10 figured largely not long at all before the relentless rise of ethno-nationalism and right-wing populism garnered anti-globalist sentiment to advance racist political agendas.
By traveling on his own accord, instead of in the service of press agencies with an editorial prompt, Serralongue effectively creates his own media outlet. Driven by an opposition to today’s unbound image flows, his media outlets are not the online platforms and forums EZLN so virtuously employed, but the privileged spaces and audiences of commercial galleries and public museums—the very bastions of bourgeois and state-approved culture. Here, a kind of visual autonomy is granted to the images thanks to the rarified space and specific temporality of the visitor’s experience. The work’s slowed-down production is strategically mirrored by a slowed-down viewing pace. The artist is well aware that the art field itself, bound up as it is with the mandates of attention, commodification, value, and insistence on a singular authorial voice, produces demands and pressures on one’s practice: “I consider photography a commission and thus that the author, style, etc. should stay in the background.”11
In 1998 Serralongue attended the Tibetan Freedom Concert, a Live Aid–style event that took place in what could then be called the uncontested political center of the new unipolar world: Washington, DC. During the 1990s, the Tibetan struggle for rights and self-determination received unprecedented attention and support from Western cultural sectors, political institutions, and the mainstream public.12The concert was followed by a demonstration on the Capitol lawn involving members of the US Congress and Senate, representatives of the Tibetan government in exile, and personalities from the entertainment industry. The sheer scale of the spectacle, with thousands of attendees and gigantic banners reading “FREE TIBET,” suggested an event of historical magnitude, a social tipping point on the path to liberation. And indeed, Serralongue’s photographs capture a post-Woodstockian flair in moments of suspension—groups of concertgoers relaxing on a lawn, the dampened energy of a midday gig—raising doubts regarding the mythical historical event that could possibly “change everything.” This very idea that is mired in faith in progressive development and fueled by an “expectation of teleological macro-change” has come into doubt in recent years.13
One could even argue that the photographs epitomize not a dramatic tipping point, but indeed a moment of harmonization—an alignment of business interests, politics, cultural activism, and the efforts of nongovernmental organizations—among the various actors of Western capitalism in response to a geopolitical outside.
Standing out among seemingly minor scenes at the concert is one photograph that is seductive for its iconographically loaded composition—its strategic juxtaposition of the low-intensity and the theatrical. Shot from an elevated viewpoint in the visitor ranks, the depicted stadium field holds a crowd stretching far up to a stage. The sheer distance to the stage makes it impossible to decipher what commands the crowd’s attention, although the title, Free Tibet, KRS One on Stage, Washington DC,reveals that it is the US rapper flanked by a Tibetan flag and dragon masks. The focus is on the concertgoers themselves, yet viewpoint and distance prevent a direct sociological reading of this mass that is simultaneously composed of consumers of a particular genre of pop music and subjects who identify with a specific political cause and presumably more abstract values of freedom and democracy. In its affirmation of a corporate visual language, this “image of the people”—which operates as a symbolic representation, one that requires an emotional response and identification—points to the mechanization of photographic representation in the formation of ideological histories.
That very same summer of 1998, the violence that beset the Balkans during the disintegration of the socialist Yugoslavian multinational state erupted into a war between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Eleven years later, in 2009, Serralongue attended the events celebrating the first postwar anniversary of the now-independent state of Kosovo. Over the course of the following years, he would return without press commission but equipped with his view camera to record “concrete life situations”14 in a new state that was “catching up with modernity”—that is, integrating into the Western political and economic order. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not “change everything” by bringing about a total erasure of borders, but rather created new zones, as Ugo Vlaisavljević has described it.15 These newly bordered zones (such as the “Western Balkans”) came along with the dominance of a Western power principle of fostering sovereignty in the form of an international system of states and multinational corporations to eventually civilize a young state such as Kosovo with a future promise: EU membership. In that context, Serralongue’s Kosovo series sparks thinking about borders not just as constituting territories but as going beyond locality and materiality to encompass sociopolitical and economic logics that might affect, exclude, and/or ghettoize people, lives, practices, histories, and thoughts, and that are inscribed in bodies.
The Kosovo city scenes that Serralongue captured show everyday life against the backdrop of the arrival of capital, for instance construction activity and oversize adverts for the fully Austrian-owned Raiffeisen Bank Kosovo. The visual space of the city signals a collective promise of development, reflected from facades and shop windows rife with logos and goods of Western consumer brands, but also omnipresent political messaging on billboards—peace, stability, democracy. Here, where the state’s image and the self-perception of the Kosovar society were being heavily fabricated and managed by a foreign managerial complex of NGOs, think tanks, and supranational organizations, Serralongue’s images trace the limits of communicative autonomy.16 The captured competing visual representations point to a larger question: Are ethno-nationalism’s promises of self-determination and sovereignty ultimately only veiling a total submission to neoliberal capitalism?17
Serralongue’s photographs from Kosovo uncover what Svetlana Boym calls the outbreaks of nostalgia, or cultural manifestations of longing, that followed the “velvet” revolutions in the Eastern Bloc. As she argues, whereas the twentieth century began with fixation on notions of futuristic utopia, it ended with a “restorative nostalgia” that dwelled on a “rediscovery of identity and national community” and re-creations of homeland.18 Countering a “restorative nostalgia,” which employs categories of truth and tradition and lies at the core of ethno-nationalism’s resurgence, is a “reflective nostalgia” that acknowledges the contradictions of modernity and the fact that readings of the past are always “subject to the covert demands of the historical present.”19 When Serralongue captures struggles for recognition and rights, what is inevitably at play is the idea that the medium of photography is determined first and foremost by a particular set of relations between individuals and governing powers and, on the other hand, by the relationships among those who take part in the photographic event. Hence it is precisely this “imperial and non-imperial” potential of photography that Serralongue’s works reveal.20 Instead of reinforcing the fraught notion of photographs as focal points or end products of photography as a practice, the works do not claim absolute truths or try to record, document, or “straighten.” In the words of Harun Farocki, they “distrust” themselves in favor of catalyzing events yet to come.
Elisa R. Linn is a writer, curator, educator, and theorist based in Berlin. She is doing a PhD in philosophy with Marina Gržinić at AdbK Vienna. In 2022 she held an interim professorship of Art Theory and Mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and currently teaches at Leuphana University. In her research, she examines the impact of borders and “border thinking” on marginalized groups and how strategies of self-organization from below can dismantle them. She is the artistic co-director of the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg. Her writing appears in Starship, artforum, Texte zur Kunst, BOMB, Jacobin, and the Journal for the History of Knowledge, among others.
Lennart Wolff is an architect, curator, and educator based in Berlin and a graduate of the Architectural Association, London. Since 2018 he has been co-running the AA Visiting School Zurich “Exhibiting Architecture.” His work encompasses curated exhibitions, public art projects, architecture commissions, and exhibition architectures, such as recently for a show by LaToya Ruby Frazier at Kunstverein Hamburg. Since 2012 Linn and Wolff have run the curatorial and artistic project km temporaer. Recent exhibitions, performances, screenings, and lectures have taken place at the National Gallery Prague, Barnard College/Columbia University, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, South London Gallery, and Royal Academy of Arts. In 2022 they curated the exhibition the state I am in at Capitain Petzel, Berlin, which featured Bruno Serralongue’s work.
Bruno Serralongue (b. 1968, Chatellerault) lives and works in Paris. He began his career in the 1990s after completing his art studies at Villa Arson, Nice, and the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie in Arles (he also holds an MA in art history). Taking into account the specificities, history, use, and status of photography, he has developed a distinctive body of work that questions the truth of photographic representation via a precise working method that enables him to analyze the ways in which images are produced, disseminated, and circulated in today’s world. Before going into the field, he gathers information published in the media, using reports from the press, internet, and television and radio news, then “commissions” his own images: “My very own Agence France Presse are the newspapers and bulletins that are accessible to readers/viewers. I therefore don’t have access to the raw information—the dispatches—but to information that has been sorted and selected by editors. I then make my own selection from that and, if the event referred to in the news item is of interest to me then, whatever its geographical location, I make my own way out there to take my own photos.”