Recognized / Not Recognized
Every day, newspaper editors are inundated with thousands of images of one event, often in real time. One image will be destined to become iconic while others will vanish into oblivion. In ‘Recognized / Not Recognized’, Coralie Vogelaar explores the mechanisms of press photography.
She amassed an archive of 850,000 news images (including amateur footage) from the databases of international news agencies, such as AFP and Reuters, of the ten most covered events of the past five years. Using image recognition software, she researched which images were used the most and the least on the Google indexed web and attempted to find the underlying patterns.
In the two-channel video installation, created with choreographer Marjolein Vogels, Vogelaar reproduces these popular and unpopular images in the form of a performance. Nine dancers move from one frozen position to another: on one screen, they mimic the news photograph that was successful and on the other, the simultaneously shot but failed image. Intriguingly, the successful images often show people in poses that we subconsciously recognise from western art history. It suggests that from a vast ocean of photographic data, we favour images that confirm our visual frame of reference.
‘Recognized / Not recognized’ can be interpreted as an attempt to find the algorithm for a future camera – one that only captures the perfect shot, similar to the recent ones that include smile detection software. Vogelaar begins and ends her installation with a collection of ‘orphan’ press images: photographs that are hard or impossible to find on the Internet as they are considered redundant data and therefore have been almost completely erased by the system.
