When we snap a photograph, we think we’ve captured a moment in time, in reality. It is this experience that inspired Susan Sontag’s ‘ecology of images’, in her seminal essay ‘On Photography’. But philosopher Peter Szendy argues that to organise pictures, photographs and images into a system is impossible. Instead, we need to insist on the open-endedness of images. In doing so, we can better understand their relationship to reality.

Statistics prior to Covid-19 indicated that there were more than three billion images circulating each day on social media. This is equal to hundreds of thousands of images during the time it took you to read this sentence. In 2019, YouTube boasted on its official blog that there were more than 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, equal to 720,000 hours a day, and  the equivalent of more than 80 years worth of video. This is more than a lifetime of images every day. This overflow has probably increased exponentially, not only because the pandemic has drastically shifted our gazes towards screens but also because another iconological tsunami has hit our contemporary iconosphere: AI, which already has generated, according to recent figures, more images in a year and a half than photography has in 150 years. Not to mention other kinds of images made by machines for machines (from automatic licence plate readers, to facial recognition or imaging systems designed to oversee shipping and logistics). American artist Trevor Paglen, in a groundbreaking article, has suggested that these pictures constitute an “invisible visual culture,” with humans “rarely in the loop” of their circulation.

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An ecological approach to pictures is meant here as an antidote to the consumerist logic of their infinite surplus.

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