When I started as a photographer, there was magic. A moment after putting the piece of paper in the dish and gently agitating the clear liquid over its surface an image gradually appeared. If all went well, the blacks deepened while the whites remained clear and the greys neatly spaces out between. If not I would take the paper out of the dish and breath on an area of the emerging image, the heat of my breath would speed up the chemical reactions darkening the area. This was the last step in a series of magical processes, the measuring of the light, choosing the aperture and shutter combination that following Ansel Adams’ ‘zone system’ gave me the tonal range I saw; the chemical manipulation of silver halides and the emergence of the negative from the tank; the shadow play of burning and dodging beneath the beam of the enlarger and that final emergence. As a photographer I connected objects and worked magic. Photography is a complex assemblage of human and unhuman objects. The photographer, the camera, film and its silver mined, bought, sold and traded, gelatine and chemicals bearing the traces of life, paper and forests, media industries, clients, contracts and postmen delivering prints.

As a jpeg photographer, there is magic. Somewhere ‘in’ my camera and computer something happens to turn the light I see into an image that circulates online, that can be seen and embedded and searched and linked, that makes my photograph inevitably social. At the moment of taking and sharing something happens to turn light into data into social data. When I press the button, protocol does the rest. This is magic. Jpeg photography is a complex ecology of human and unhuman objects connecting. The photographer, the camera, the silicon and battery, the factories and poisoned workers, the card and the router, Web 2.0 businesses, servers and the power that runs them, the carbon burnt to keep those searchable archives running, the ‘friend’ and searcher, the IP lawyer.

This project is about that magic and about those objects, specifically one of those objects: protocol, the jpeg standard that locates my photography in a social media space.

I am a jpeg photographer. I photograph the vibrant material, evocative things that Jane Bennett and Sherry Turkle write about, the rags ’n refuse that Walter Benjamin saw as way of writing history. I use jpeg to do it. I photograph things, encode them through jpeg as jpeg/JFIF files, upload them and allow them to circulate as social photographs. Jpeg, as one of the objects in my imaging apparatus and practice makes sure people can search for them, see them, download them, share them, embed and mash them with other data. My photographs are standards compliant because they were created with standards.

That standards component in my photographic apparatus and practice, that object that generates the magic is weird. It is real. It does things, but we can’t see it or touch it. As soon as it works it is gone. It’s traces and connections are everywhere: in dot jpeg image files, in social media archives and search engines, in data-mining strategies and surveillance practices, in business models, but like Keyser Söze, jpeg just slips out of sight. It withdraws.

I set out to understand that weird object, its nature and its workings. These were my research questions.

This is a practice-research project, I use practice to answer my questions about jpeg. This document is a report on that practice, an account and an analysis of using, refusing and even abusing jpeg and what doing so has taught me about the nature and working of jpeg and the ways it connects with the panoply of other photography objects at work in jpeg imaging. As I discuss in my methodology chapter I developed an object-oriented methodology where I imagined and created three photographic apparatuses, three cameras that used, refused and abused the jpeg protocol as part of their imaging. They were designed to highlight the nature and workings of jpeg. It was my experience of creating and using these cameras that I analyse in this report.

I have taken images during this project. Some have been encoded through jpeg, some through other protocols and some outside of software completely. These photographs are not my central concern nor my objects of analysis in this report. My concern is with using jpeg, with the magic enfolded in the practice of jpeg photography.

My practice is ‘with jpeg’, ‘outside jpeg’ and ‘against jpeg’ photography. My research is an analysis of my experience of working with outside and against jpeg. My report is an account of that practice-research.

This report is structured as follows:

Literature Review chapter: I approach the jpeg protocol as an object. Following an object-oriented philosophy I look to treat all objects in the world at the same level. Jpeg, like me as the photographer, the camera as well as Nikon and Google’s business strategy are all objects, connecting and reconnecting ways that are deeply power-full. In my review of the relevant literature, I look to trace how the digital object and the scopic apparatus have been been seen. I argue that existing accounts of protocol and visual technologies, through their insistence on a relational ontology of objects, have failed to account for the withdrawal yet powerfully connecting nature and role of jpeg. Furthermore I argue that such an insistence locates governmental relations of power – the sort that I have found jpeg to be enfolded in – outside the object and therefore more difficult to counter.

Methodology chapter: I took a particular object-oriented approach to answering my research question. I created three scopic apparatuses from software, hardware, human and unhuman components. Each component was an object in the assemblages I used to explore jpeg. In this chapter I argue firstly why practice was the most relevant way to answer questions about jpeg and secondly why an object-oriented approach was the best way to engage in that practice.

Technology chapter: Before drawing an account of my experience of using these apparatuses and what I found out about the nature and workings of jpeg, I look to explain the technical basis of the standard, how it works technically within the digital imaging pipeline and how it connects technically with other software and protocols.

Conclusions chapter: Over the course of this project, I have used these three apparatuses as part of my photography of vibrant material things (in this case around the edge of the 2012 Olympics site). This practice has enabled me to understand the nature of jpeg, the way it works within our scopic regime as well as the the governmental implications of that nature and that working. This chapter reports those findings.

This chapter begins with the images those cameras produced. True to my argument that my practice and my practice-research is photography not the photographs, these images are the starting point for my discussion. They are the traces of my jpeg (or anti-jpeg) imaging practices – the real object of analysis. I take twelve images and imaging experiences as my starting points.

From my work ‘with jpeg’, I discuss four images and four imaging experiences:

• A picture ‘taken’ through my web-based screenshot apparatus as well as the experience of imaging with it.
• A screengrab taken on my phone using an augmented reality App, as well as the experience of imaging it.
• A geo-screengrab taken on my phone using a GPS-aware social media App, as well as the experience of imaging it.
• A ‘slideflow’ mashup stream of images, as well as the experience of imaging it.

From my work ‘outside jpeg’, I discuss four stereo Kodachrome images and the experience of producing and consuming them.

From my work ‘against jpeg’, I discuss four jpeg/JFIF and their partner RAW data files as well as the the experience of producing and consuming them.

These twelve images and imaging experiences are my ways into reporting on researching the nature and workings of jpeg. I look to draw out from my own imaging experience what jpeg is and does. These are not discussions of the images, let alone of the things within. They are discussions of the nested objects of which the images are components, the objects-within-object connections that photography and governmentality/photography are built around.

As a report on my personal photographic experience, this chapter cannot be narrowly dry or objective. As a photographer (in my understanding of photography) I am an object in play. This goes beyond the common admission of the role of the researcher to locate him as an equal component within the apparatuses. As such the report on these imaging experiments owes more to the style of Camera Lucida (Barthes 1990) or Another Ways of Telling (Berger & Mohr 1989), perhaps than Thinking Photography (Burgin 1982). It is personal and reflective as much as critical and analytical. From my object-oriented perspective there is no outside from which to report or analyse… and a good thing too. It is only by locating myself as photographer and author within a flat ontology of objects that I can account for those objects – including the jpeg protocol – in governmental play.

• Barthes, R., 1990, Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography, Translated by R. Howard. Hill and Wang, New York.
• Berger, J. & Mohr, J., 1989, Another Way Of Telling, Granta Books, Cambridge.
• Burgin, V. (ed.), 1982, Thinking Photography, Macmillan, Basingstoke.

So, now my upgrade is behind me, I can unveil the latest olympic arcades scopic apparatus, here.

As you probably know by now, my practice-research is built around imagining, creating and using there ‘scopic apparatuses’ that work with, against or outside the jpeg protocol. This latest one is designed to work with jpeg, in fact it can only work with the protocol.

Essentially, when the page is loaded, a javascript calls on those fine screenshot chaps at Art Viper whose software visits Google, Flickr, Yahoo and Bing and does an image search for ‘London 2012’ and/or ‘olympic arcades’. Their software screengrabs that page, renders it as a jpeg and serves it back to my apparatus where it becomes a background image. With some  jQuery and CSS wizardry from Tutorialzine, that jpeg becomes the target for my camera. A user can select and area, click and grab an ‘image’. They can then screengrab, upload to the Web and eventually see their image appear in the searches.

All of this is dependent on jpeg which ensures that images are visible, usable, linkable and shareable.

For those of you not in the PhD industry, a bit of explanation. When you register for a PhD programme it is normal to be registered as an MPhil student and then half way through your supposedly three year programme, your supervisors conduct a sort of mini-viva exam where they decide whether a) you’ve been working hard enough and b) whether you are likely to complete and so get them off the hook with the funding bodies and boss classes counting the number of never-finished PhDs. My upgrade panel is on Wednesday. I’ve sent them c60k words of literature review and methodology musings – much of which has appeared as rags ’n refuse here.

They also want a short presentation to kick things off. As anyone who has attended one of my Birkbeckmedia courses or Digital Charabanc workshops will tell you, I tend to busk my way through presentations. With this though I think a little more formality might be better. I’m not writing this presentation out because I’m nervous or intimidated (my supervisors are all cool and groovy people). Nor do I think a written/read presentation fits with the gravity of the situation. Rather I want to write it out in the same way as I see this site. I use writing as a way of getting things straight in my own head. If it’s straight in my head, it’s easier to deal with questions – and seeing as I’m working with Harman’s OOP, a philosophy that seems to rankle with some people, that might be useful.

So…

From my understanding, an upgrade panel is a chance for you to see how far I’ve come and how far I have to go. For me too, this is an opportunity to take stock. As those of you who have been following my work online will know, I have been placing what I call ‘belay points’ as I have been writing. This point is slightly different because it is also a belay as far as the practice goes. In the next 10 mins or so, I want to explain and explore the way my practice and research fit together within the broader object-oriented philosophical framework.

Even before the AHRC stepped in with their surprising award, this project was about objects. As a photographer I am interested in what I now understand as, following Jane Bennett, vibrant material or, following Sherry Turkle, evocative objects. As a form of documentary photography I look to focus on objects with histories, presences and a power that goes beyond a semiotic representation. I looked to tell the story of the liminal spaces around the 2012 Fence through the objects embedded or discarded in those spaces.

As my project became an academic practice-research one, my starting point was taking my concern for objects into my photography. I began to conceptualise my work as object-oriented photography with an assemblage of objects – the ones I photographed, myself, my cameras, prints or digital files and… software and protocols. It was this that became the focus for the research questions.

In order to explore this photography as it operated in a distributed media space, I chose to explore one particular object – jpeg, the protocol that enables digital images to work with the logic of the Live Web: sharing, embedding, searching, linking. In order to understand this protocol as an object I developed a methodology built around connecting it with other objects in different apparatuses.

In order to explain this, I need to take a short diversion into the particular form of object-oriented philosophy I am working with not only in terms of theory but also practice.

Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy is distinct from others in the speculative realist ‘movement’ and indeed others like Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost and Tim Morton. A key distinction is Harman’s insistence not only on a flat ontology but on the actuality of objects that exceed their relations, qualities and accidents. Furthermore, for Harman, objects connect with each other within objects, not in some context, plasma or field of becoming. It is this framework of actual nested objects addressed within objects that enable me to understand the weird nature and work of jpeg as well as develop a practice-research methodology.

For Harman, there are two sorts of objects. Real Objects are inaccessible, following Heidegger, they ‘withdraw’ from access. We can never fully encounter them. The objects we encounter as Sensual Objects which, following Husserl, which are visible as long as we expand energy on them. When we stop paying attention to them, they disappear. This metaphysical distinction because it provides a way of understanding the way we encounter jpeg’s traces and even its moment of working but not the object itself. Enfolded in software it withdraws. As present in software and in camera (an interesting phrase) it does things as long as it remains in focus.

Contrary to some views of Harman, he does not deny relations. His argument is that we can understand the way objects relate at the level of objects rather than at the scale of a broader, more basic of more fundamental context, network or field. For Harman, the only way objects can connect is between these two poles. Real objects cannot connect with other real objects because they withdraw not just from human perception or the human object but from each other. Rather real objects connect with sensual objects, their images. The encounter between me an a tree has a unity. I can never encounter the whole, real tree. I encounter an image of it. Even if that tree is a hallucination, the encounter has a unity. It persists as long as I expand energy on it. That encounter has qualities, the particular sense perceptions of the tree in a particular light and moment. But that encounter is more than those qualities. For Harman, therefore, that encounter with its unity, its qualities and its excess means that we can see the i-tree encounter as an object. The relation happens within an object.

The important thing for Harman of course is that this applies to unhuman as well as human object-relations. To use his favourite example, When fire burns cotton, it does not have access to the colour or smell that we humans are able to detect in it. Inanimate objects do not make direct contact with one another any more than we do with them.

Mapping this framework onto my assemblage of objects I can conceptualise photography as a space of object connections where real and sensual objects connect within new objects – the sort of nested objects that we can find all over the social web. As my methodology I worked with three objects: the jpeg protocol, in-camera software and myself as a jpeg photographer. To use Harman’s matrix, we can map the way those objects connect:

The real Jpeg protocol object encounters the sensual in-camera software object within the ‘encoding object’. Reciprocally the real in-camera software object (that complex amalgam of software hardwired into the camera chips) encounters the sensual jpeg protocol – a particular image or instantiation of jpeg. At the moment of encoding light as data, a new object emerges.

The real photographer object encounters the sensual in-camera software object within the ‘photography-moment object’. I cannot access the full nature or presence of that object. I encounter a particular configuration or instantiation as I press the button. Similarly the real in-camera software object encounters an image of me, a particular aspect of me as jpeg-photographer. At the indecisive moment of jpeg imaging a new object emerges.

Harman’s framework develops into what he calls the fourfold, a way of accounting for ‘essence’, ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘eidos’. I am looking into how that maps onto software, imaging and digital objects but what is clear even with the focus on the central real/sensusal poles is such an object-centred approach allows us to see protocol as weird yet powerful. It also allowed me to develop a particular practice-research methodology based on connecting objects.

I did this by ‘creating’ three scopic apparatuses, connecting in various ways the photographer-object, the in-camera software-object, jpeg and a number of analogue photographic objects.

The first apparatus (with jpeg) connected jpeg, in-camera and in-browser software and the photographer through a series of mash-ups that brought in distributed images of 2012 alongside my own. Here jpeg, software and the photographer-objects connected within distributed image-space objects, search-space objects and the digital archive-objects, objects we can see as owned and certainly controlled by corporate interests such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

The second apparatus (outside jpeg) connected film and non-software cameras and the photographer through the creation of a stereo photographic installation, a photographic production and consumption practice that could not be online.

The third apparatus (against jpeg) connected jpeg, another imaging protocol, in-camera and in-browser software and the photographer through the creation of digital photographic installation on a memory card and a series of photographic prints.

These three apparatuses allow me to explore the real and sensual jpeg objects. It was only through practice, through using and connecting jpeg that I could map its fourfold nature.

It is the experience of developing, using and analysing these apparatuses that will form my research findings and, true to my object-oriented philosophy and methodology, I will report those findings through an object, a ‘Black Box’ including  a memory card, a series of slides and a viewer together with a series of photographic prints.

Fanfare and unveiling… the Box.

These separate and actual objects, connect within the ‘molten core’ of the final object. Each element or object in the work serves a particular role and has a particular relationship to my practice-research.

The slide and stereo slide-objects are the traces of the second apparatus, the outside protocol imaging device. They are photographic objects: decisive moments, unique photo-works of a specific photographer-object.

The print-objects are the traces of the third apparatus, the against protocol imaging device. As prints of the processed but unsaved RAW files they too are photographic objects: decisive moments, unique photo-works of a specific photographer-object.

The memory card-object includes an html page with the mashup code-works, as well as a series of digital files (both RAW and jpeg). These files are the traces of my first and third apparatuses.

I chose to make my conclusions part of my practice. Not just an academic account of theoretically-informed knowledge gleaned from practice but an active player, an actant in the practice-research objects I work with and will hand in to be examined on. I chose to produce a work around Robert Frank’s The Americans. In many ways Frank’s photography appears to be the antithesis of what we might understand as an object-oriented approach. His photos are full of people and things, a correlationist collage of human and object. Surely the new objectivist work of the Bechers would fit better? Or maybe William Eggleston’s Guide? The reason I chose to use Frank was both personal and philosophical. Firstly, as a professional photographer, The Americans was seminal in my development as a photographer, in my understanding of the photograph and the photo-work. As a photographer one is brought up in the shadow of this text. The second reason to refract my own work and findings through The Americans was linked to my research questions around the nature and position of the photograph, the photographer and photography in a jpeg-scopic regime. Firstly, Frank’s images are of objects –  a flat ontology of objects, human, non-human. Secondly Frank’s book is an object. He designed it as such, as a particular narrative/stream. It was a photo-work not a series of images. It was and remains a nested object. Finally, The Americans is deeply rooted in a particular historical, cultural and technological moment but throughout the past 50 years it has connected and reconnected within other objects . My use of it connecting with it as a photographer and writer as well as the way I connect it with my own objects, forms a new series of objects.

I look to create written and photographic engagement with Frank as a way of engaging with what I have found about my position as a (jpeg) photographer, object-oriented (jpeg )photography and the (jpeg) photo-object. This photo/text work will be the coming together of practice and research, both a work in itself and an account of my research findings.

This needed to be in the Box.

I had considered creating a digital object. This would bring together the protocol imagings as well as my photo/text work or research findings. I knew I did not want to place this work online as a website or installation because one of the key themes of the work was the off-Net object. I looked at the potential of an individual digital object- an eBook or digital work on an iPad, and iPhone or a Kindle. I explored ePub open standards, PDF, Kindle AZW files, Adobe Digital Publishing folios and even Objective C or Android-authored Apps. All of these options were run through with their own issues of protocol and standards. All were their own spaces of objects within objects. But to add those objects to the mix (although of course they are inevitably part of the protocol ecology under investigation) would be lose focus. This box is about jpeg. It’s not about IoS or e-Ink or PDF or mobility. Alongside the slides and the prints I chose to simply include the jpeg/JFIF and RAW files on a memory card. Off-Net but easily on-Net by connecting to a computer or device (wirelessly or by USB) that can render some files visible and other unvisible, some part of the stream and search-space others not. The images like jpeg itself were platform agnostic, but deeply connected with those platforms.

As for the text, I chose to make that, like the images and Frank’s (paper) road movie and Benjamin’s Arcades Project index cards, as individual objects – as jpeg/JFIF and RAW files. Each protocol-encoded page of the work would, like the images be visible and unvisible. In addition they could be rendered as searchable via OCR or remain mute and unvisible on the SD card.

The box could not contain jpeg. It can contain the traces as well as the traces of where it cannot work – the slides and viewer/viewing experience.