The contemporary functions of images: beyond memory

We think we know what an image is. We think it is a trace, a memory, a proof. But images have changed function without our fully realising it. For a considerable share of their uses, they have become acts of language comparable to speech: things we make and transmit the way we utter a word, with no intention of keeping them, no prior plan, in the moment of the relationship. This shift, roughly twenty years old, profoundly transforms what we can do, as mediators, with images.

The image as proof: a heavy inheritance

To understand what has changed, we first need to name what was there before. A machine-made image, whether photographic, cinematographic or video, is not of the same order as an image made by hand. The difference has nothing to do with aesthetic quality but with something deeper, which film theorist André Bazin identified in the 1950s as “the ontology of the photographic image.” A machine-made image constitutes proof. It attests that something was there, in front of the lens, at the moment the shot was taken. It is not a reinterpretation, like drawing or painting, but a mechanical recording.

The first historical “photograph,” if we dare go back that far, is not in fact that of Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, who fixed the view from his window onto a light-sensitive plate after eight hours of exposure. The first image that claims to be a mechanical recording is the Shroud of Turin, the cloth said to bear the imprint of Christ. Whether this image is a medieval forgery matters little here. What matters is its function as proof, the proof of God’s existence. A physical phenomenon had imprinted an image onto a surface, without the intervention of the human hand. And this image was taken on faith.

I stress this point because when we do mediation work with photographic or video images, we are working with proof-images. This status of proof is not trivial. It carries a considerable weight. A person can take their own life because of an image, not because of what the image shows in itself, but because of what it does, the way it circulates, the proof it constitutes within a social space. The proof-image can inflict violence. Some people cannot bear to be photographed, feeling that something is being stolen from them. This feeling is not a superstition, it is an anthropology, a way of being in the world. We have the right not to want a machine to record something of us. And when we work with people, whatever their symptoms, whatever their histories, we must keep in mind that images can be as destructive as they can be constructive. It is a pharmakon, in the sense Bernard Stiegler used the term, the same object being at once the poison and the remedy.

The illusion of objectivity

We need to go further and acknowledge something paradoxical: the proof-image is not objective. A camera has a lens, a lighting, an angle, settings, automatic processing, including today artificial intelligence processing built into the hardware itself, which cannot even be switched off, and which smooths skin, waits for the smile, corrects the light. The identity photograph, which we believe to be our truth, is merely a social convention inherited from police anthropometry. The judicial identity system and the national identity card, introduced under the Vichy regime, stem from a will to surveil, not a quest for truth. As Jean-Luc Godard put it, in one of his most apt phrases, it is not a just image, it is just an image.

Our own vision, which we believe to be objective, is no more so. The zone of sharpness in our eye, the fovea, is extremely small, covering roughly two degrees of visual angle. If we have the impression of seeing everything clearly, it is because our eye moves constantly, captures sharp fragments here and there, and our brain reconstructs a global image that we take to be faithful to reality. Our vision is a reconstruction. The world we see is an edit our brain performs in real time. And when we watch a video, we believe we are seeing movement, when in fact we are seeing successive still images, at least sixteen per second, which our brain fuses into an illusion of continuity. There is no movement on the screen. The movement is in our heads.

All of this has direct consequences for mediation. If we believe that images are objective mirrors of reality, we handle them with a naivety that can be dangerous. If we understand that every image is a construction, made by a machine with its own biases, viewed by a brain with its own, we can open up a far richer critical and creative space. One of the exercises I most often propose in my workshops is founded precisely on this principle: showing that the same image can be seen in radically different ways by each person. This is not an abstract media literacy lesson but a collectively lived experience, and one that demonstrates it irrefutably.

The memory-image: what we believe images are

For most of us, and I include myself in this “us,” image equals memory. Family photos, holiday films, memories of celebrations, portraits of those we love: we make images to keep a trace. It is the function that seems most natural, most obvious. And it is old, far older than photography. Painted portraits already served to fix the faces of the powerful, to affirm their institutional position. History paintings narrated founding events. Painting served narrative, identity, cohesion.

The semiotician Roger Odin, who worked extensively on what he called “private cinema,” put forward in the 1970s a distinction that I still consider essential. He argued that no hierarchy should be drawn between professional images and amateur images, because they simply do not serve the same function. Professional images serve entertainment, information, propaganda in the broad sense. Amateur images serve the construction of our personal, family, and collective identities. If there are no photos of the wedding, if there is no film of the youngest child taking their first steps, it is identity itself that falters. These images are part of who we are.

This distinction is fundamental for our mediation practices. When a person we work with shows us an image, whatever it may be, that image has a function for them. It is not for us to rank that function, to say that this image would be less important than one made by a professional, or that it would be a symptom to interpret rather than an expression to welcome.

What changes in 2005: the potential image

I propose calling the image from before 2005 the projected image, and the image from after 2005 the potential image. It is a conceptual distinction, obviously schematic, but useful for thinking about what happened.

Before 2005, making images with a machine required a prior decision. You had to think, in the morning, about bringing the camera. You had to plan ahead: tonight is the children’s end-of-year show, I’ll take my camera. The image was preceded by a verbal or mental act of language, a project, a stated intention. There were words before images. The image was projected in the sense that it was anticipated, willed, decided.

In 2005, two technological events converge: the appearance of the video function in mobile phones, and in April, the launch of YouTube and all the community video platforms. The act of making images no longer stems from a prior choice, it becomes potential at every moment. I do not need to decide to make an image, I permanently have in my pocket a device that allows me to. The image can come into being at any instant, without a project, without anticipation, without prior words. And it can be transmitted immediately, to the entire world.

When I founded the Pocket Film Festival in 2005 with the Forum des images, it was precisely to think about this change as it was happening. People told me at the time that a phone was for making phone calls, it was obvious to everyone. But I said that in ten years, by 2015, everyone would have a camera permanently in their pocket, and that this was not trivial. We did not yet know what people would do with it. It changed a thousand things. The arrival of the iPhone in 2007, unifying in a single object all the functions that separate phones had previously carried, further accelerated the shift. The phone is no longer a single-function object, it is a computer whose uses depend on the software installed on it, now called applications. Filming or photographing is nothing more than one possibility among others in a continuum of practices.

Image-as-speech: a new regime of images

From this shift, I draw a concept I would like to propose: that of image-as-speech (in French, image-oralité). Alongside the memory-image (the trace, the souvenir, the proof), alongside the fiction-image (cinema, series, invented narrative), alongside the information-image (journalism, documentary), there now exists a regime of images that functions like speech.

Imagine I see a rainbow. I take out my phone, snap a photo, send it to the person I love. With or without an emoji, with or without a little heart. There were no words before the image. The image is the act of language itself. I create something and transmit it, as when I speak, forming a word in my head and giving it to the other. This image is not meant to be kept or to serve as proof. It is a gesture, a breath, a presence addressed to someone.

Applications have in fact integrated this dimension by making images ephemeral. You choose the status of the image, which can disappear after being viewed, be unsaveable, or even block screenshots on certain platforms. These images remain in the present. They are not memory. They are speech.

There are also live streams, on Twitch or TikTok, people who spend hours facing the camera in the presence of viewers who come, stay, leave. Not much happens sometimes, but there is a kind of co-presence, a visual orality, a being-together mediated by images that are not made to be preserved but to be lived in the moment.

Recognising the existence of this image-as-speech regime has important consequences. When a teenager sends an image to friends, they are not necessarily committing a narcissistic act, or a dangerous one, but speaking. They are saying something about their presence in the world, with the means of their time. And when we, as mediation professionals, look at these practices through our own categories, those of the memory-image and the proof-image, we risk understanding nothing of what is happening.

The selfie as social costume

This analysis sheds light on the question of the selfie, which provokes so many judgments. Our first reflex, as adults shaped by the culture of the memory-image, is to see narcissism in the selfie. People who photograph themselves all the time, who change their profile picture, who use filters: vanity, self-obsession, perhaps a symptom.

I do not believe this is principally what is going on. Take the profile picture on WhatsApp. When I interact with someone on this application, I see their profile picture. They see mine. Our interactions are shaped by these images. In the morning, as we get ready, we decide how to dress. We do not dress the same way for university as for a concert in the evening or the market the next morning. It is a social construction, a choice about how we exist in different social spaces. Profile pictures, selfies, the images we put out on social media, follow the same logic. It is a modelling of our social existence in digital spaces, no more narcissistic than the choice of a shirt or a touch of makeup. It is a subtlety of social interaction that we do not always grasp because it is not part of our culture.

Serge Tisseron popularised the concept of extimacy (extimité), this exposed intimacy that shifts the boundaries of the intimate. But I think we need to go beyond this concept, which remains bound to the inside/outside, intimate/public distinction. What is at play in selfies and profile pictures is less a displacement of the boundary of the intimate than an active social construction, an identity work in the strong sense, through which people elaborate, in digital social spaces, the way they exist for others and for themselves. It is work in the same way as the work of birth, the work of mourning, therapeutic work: something that partly escapes control, that transforms and that opens.

The reversed hierarchy

The arrival of community platforms in 2005 also produced an economic and symbolic reversal whose consequences we have not yet fully measured. Before 2005, amateur content had no market value. The family man with his camcorder could only show his films to his captive family on a Sunday afternoon. Professional content, meanwhile, had value: the cinema ticket, the subscription, the television licence, the time spent exposed to advertising.

From 2005 onwards, amateur films begin to go viral, to be seen by millions. And because the platforms attach advertising to these videos, amateur content acquires a market value it had never had, not for its makers, who receive only a derisory fraction, but for the platforms. Video games overtook cinema economically more than fifteen years ago. Community video platforms represent far more than theatrical cinema. Yet symbolically, cinema still considers itself above. We know the names of filmmakers, we hardly know the names of video game creators.

This reversal directly affects the question of hierarchy between images, and therefore mediation. When we offer an image-making workshop, are we operating within the logic of cultural outreach where a professional artist transmits their knowledge to people assumed to have less? Or within a logic of shared creation where each person, with their own practices, skills, and cultures, has something singular to contribute? Roger Odin teaches us that there is no hierarchy between the functions of images. Cultural rights teach us that every person is rich in their own culture. The economic reversal teaches us that the old symbolic hierarchies no longer correspond to reality. Mediation through images must draw all the consequences from these three converging lessons.

We are cyborgs

There remains a point that goes beyond images but concerns them first and foremost. We are cyborgs. If I asked you to leave your phone at home tomorrow morning and spend the whole day without it, what you would feel would touch on questions of existence. You would no longer have your train tickets, your contacts, sometimes your bank card, your map, your means of proving who you are. Our integrity is no longer tied solely to our physical body, it extends beyond it in both directions. We are ourselves within machines. Bernard Stiegler spoke of tool-assisted memory (mémoire outillée) to describe this extension of ourselves into technical objects.

What is at stake, for our mediation practices, is that the people we work with are already living in this condition. They are not “facing screens” as is too often said, in a phrasing that presupposes an exteriority. They are with screens, in screens, through screens. Their identities, their relationships, their memories are distributed between their bodies and their machines. And the images they make, send, and receive participate in this distributed identity.

The step aside: proposing something else with the same tools

What are we to do, as mediators, faced with this complexity? What I have learned from practice is that our role is not to judge people’s everyday image practices, nor to educate them towards a “proper use” that we ourselves would be hard pressed to define. Judgment damages the bond and the potential for a bond, while our role is precisely to create bonds.

What I propose, and it has been the foundation of my practice for a long time, is what I call the step aside (in French, le pas de côté). It consists of taking the same tools as those of everyday life, the phone, the camera, and proposing to do with them something completely different from what happens in daily life. The pen is a good example: plenty of things happen every day with our pens, but if we suddenly each write a poem, something completely different takes place, something that breaks from the everyday. And yet it is the most ordinary object there is.

The step aside is this proposition: using objects that have become everyday to do something other than what usually happens, and in so doing, opening a space of experience that may shed a different light on the relationship people have with these tools and with themselves. Not through a lecture, not through a warning, but through a lived experience. You do not learn French by reciting grammar rules, but by writing a poem, by making the language your own in order to express yourself. Likewise, you do not understand images through a course about images, but by living an experience with them that reveals something you did not know.

This requires not being in evaluation mode, not operating within the hierarchy of beautiful and ugly, successful and failed. It requires welcoming everything that arises, including the off-topic, including refusal, including the unexpected. Above all, it requires creating the conditions of trust so that people dare to take the risk of doing something with these tools that is not what they usually do with them. And in this space of trust, in this step aside from the everyday, things are discovered that neither we nor the people had foreseen. It is there, in what the word creation precisely means, that mediation takes place.