We stayed up all night, my friends and I … So begins the preamble to that ur-manifesto of the avant-garde, F. T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909). The manifesto appeared as a paid advertisement on the front page of Le Figaro; the next morning it was birdcage liner for most of its readers. Yet it has become more familiar than any single work of art the Futurists produced in the decades of activity that followed. More manifestos followed, too: hundreds of them, on subjects ranging from painting and sculpture to cinema and photography, from clothing and feminism to cooking and lust. Futurist manifestos were ephemeral, hurled off balconies and out of speeding automobiles, but they have since been carefully archived, translated, anthologized, and reproduced in textbooks of art history, literature, political science, and rhetoric.
On the surface, the 365 photgraphs that accumulated daily during last year exhibit a sense of repetition, familiarity, continuity (cf. 02011, 02012 and 02013). As in the previous years, blur (49), light (82), leaves (40), texture (38), shadows (34) and reflections (33) are all present. Many were greyscale (170).
Below the surface there has been a change of pace as the daily practice grows more habitual. The contradictions of the digital present, the inevitable everything of ubiquitous imagery and the more hesitant, folded, reticulated images on expired film, exposure, finding light and shadow, composition, the present moment. The sympathetic magic that every photograph, no matter how disposable holds over time.
It was not the individual events that made 2014 so topsy-turvy: after all, what could top the 1991 Soviet collapse for sheer disruption of the status quo? The year instead was remarkable for the number of big, consequential and utterly unforeseen events—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of ISIL, the diplomatic breakthrough between the US and Cuba, the emergence of US shale oil and the collapse of oil prices, not to mention a clutch of other economic, business and market events. All in all, it has been evident for months that 2014 was a staggering maelstrom of surprises.
An employee of the Russian Space Training Center near Noginsk, Russia, hung the space suits of Russia’s Anatoly Ivanishin, NASA flight engineer Kathleen Rubins, and Takuya Onishi of Japan after their training on July 2. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
A forest has been planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until 2114.
Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that “photography” and “seeing” are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics. Why look at any particular image, when they are literally everywhere? Perhaps “photography” has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps “photography,” as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.
Well, it’s 2014, and I thank goodness the WELL is still here. I’ve never been so happy to have an Internet account that doesn’t belong to some ultra-rich creep. It’ll be hard, this year, not to dwell obsessively on the capering specters of the NSA, Snowden, Wikileaks, Bitcoin… 2013 turned out to be the year when the Digital Revolution trended Stalinist. Old-school Digital Bolsheviks scattered hapless in every direction, as Big Data Killer Bot Commissars scoured the darkening landscape, and Trotsky went to ground in Ecuador. An extraordinary atmosphere of sullen, baffled evil, as the year opens. I don’t know what to compare 2014 to – except for many other glum post-revolutionary situations, when the zealots succeeded in toppling the status quo, then failed to install a just and decent form of civil order. The world in 2014 is like a globalized Twitter Egypt.
