In Techniques of the Observer, art historian Jonathan Crary explains that the proto-photographic apparatus of the camera obscura is believed to have been “accidentally ‘discovered’ when bright sunlight would enter through a small aperture in shuttered windows” (1990). The function of the window was subsequently incorporated into camera design, with the lens and the viewfinder offering window-like openings within the dollhouse structure of image-making apparatuses. In the history of photography windows haven’t just served as apertures that enable the arrival of light and, subsequently, mechanical image capture. They have also been spaces from which photographs could be taken. Indeed, a window can function as the photographer’s aid as it helps visualise a picture by narrowing the observer’s vision through its frame. Interestingly, an image considered to be the first photograph, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, is known as View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827). To make it, Niépce had positioned a camera obscura on the upper floor of his country home in Bourgogne, with the pewter plate covered with bitumen taking eight hours to expose. We could therefore go so far as to suggest that views from a window are themselves proto-photographs, ‘just’ waiting to be captured and then fixed on a light-sensitive substrate. Windows not only allow the humans looking through them to witness the flow of time, they also enable the stilling of that time and the carving of it into sections —sections which then become images. In this sense views from a window inscribe themselves in the schema of ‘nonhuman photography’, i.e. a mode of imaging in which the agency of the photographic subject and/or object is displaced onto, or at least shared with, a nonhuman entity (Zylinska 2017).[^1] Niépce’s Le Gras image, a photograph that basically ‘took itself’, presents a distinctly nonhuman vision as it features sunlight and shadow on two sides of the buildings due to its long exposure time, while placing nonhuman agency at the very heart of photography’s history. It also prepares the ground for using the window as a conceptual device for reframing our human understanding of our being in the world, in all its nonhuman entanglements.

Due to worldwide lockdowns as a result of a novel coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, and then spreading to Europe and other continents, large swathes of the globe’s population found themselves confined to their homes at various points in 2020. The photographs of people peering through the glass or curtains, or leaning against window frames, casements and bays, adorned daily news reports and social media posts about the spread of the pandemic. Under covid-19, the window thus became a symbol of enclosure and isolation, but also, especially when open, of longing, connection and care. Pictures of Italians singing together from their open windows or people in the UK clapping for the National Health Service proliferated on social media. In this context, the role of the window, and of the multiple photographs that depicted it, was primarily human-centric and representational. Photographs featuring open and closed windows used the dual architecture of enframing (of the window photographed, and of the image showing that window) to convey the sensations and sentiments of containment, loss of freedom, loneliness, frustration, anger and, last but not least, the fear of illness and death. Such photographs thus became placeholders for human anxiety associated with the uncertain situation: they played the role of votive pictures encasing the worry of both those represented in them and those looking at them, while also servings as signs of love, care and hope.

Yet windows have always played a more active, or we could even say ‘agential’, role in photography, beyond mere representationalism. In a catalogue essay for the exhibition held at MoMA in New York in 1978, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, John Szarkowski presented an overview of the then contemporary photographic arts in the US. He distinguished between the view of photography “as a means of self-expression” – a more straightforwardly humanist position associated with Alfred Stieglitz and espoused in the catalogue by Duane Michals and Judy Dater, and as “a method of exploration” —a more ‘detached’ and realist approach pioneered by Eugene Atget and represented in the catalogue by Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. The difference between those two views pivoted around individual artists’ respective “conceptions of what a photograph is: is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?”. But Szarkowski was keen to blur the boundary between the two views and modes of seeing, while also (implicitly) placing the nonhuman dynamics of the apparatus in the midst of the photographic process. The catalogue thus features photographs of windows, reflections and mirror effects in both of its sections. Through this Szarkowski seemed to suggest that no matter what the particular photographer’s stylistic affiliation or intention, a window is always also, potentially, a mirror, while a mirror, as Alice found out, invites one to gaze through it, becoming a window onto a new (wonder)land. The window as a proto-photographic agent performs the act of enframing and thus enclosing something —but it is always also, potentially, a device of self-reflection and an opening onto something else.

The multiple photographic projects developed in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, a situation in which the agency of humans was subjugated to the workings of a nonhuman virus that became knows as SARS-CoV-2, encapsulate this dual dynamics of transparency and reflection, enclosure and opening. Under lockdown many photographers, be it image artists forced to work from home or smartphone-sporting ‘digital natives’ used to recording their lives on a constant basis, found themselves re-enacting, albeit unwittingly, the classic arthouse project View from my Window by Polish photographer and filmmaker Józef Robakowski. Robakowski’s 19-minute film was made from footage shot from the window of his concrete tower block in the Polish city of Łódź during the years 1978–1999. Due to the sparsity of form, the black-and-white film has a photographic nature: it is a collection of long takes that resemble photographic stills, with the undulating voiceover tracing the gentle shifts in the comings and goings of the artist’s neighbours, their friends, cars and dogs in the courtyard in front of the block, set against the traffic of the nearby busy road. The film ends with a scene depicting the construction of ‘a beautiful foreign hotel’ in the courtyard which will block off the view. Robakowski’s project is an exercise in looking, in zooming in on seemingly unremarkable daily events at a time when radical socio-political transformations were occurring at a national level (late-socialist prosperity, Solidarność, martial law, the fall of communism, regime change, the rise of capitalism). But it is also an attempt to see things anew and askew, turning the narrowing of the viewpoint represented by the window into an opening provided by the larger-scale events —and a reaching-out.

Many of the photographic projects that emerged during the time of Covid-19 outbreak represent a similar ambivalence between the narrowing down and the opening out – of viewpoints and movements, opportunities and ways of freedom. As well as generating an outpouring of images shot from the window, the lockdown encouraged some of those who were young or daring enough to go out into the street and capture the stilled world hidden behind windows. It resulted in the widespread production of human (and animal) portraiture, with potential subjects remaining stationary due to the circumstances, already framed by the outer limits of their abodes, looking out of their windows at a world from which they had to be temporarily sheltered. We could thus say that people under lockdown already presented themselves to others as framed images —a condition that applied not only to the frequent acts of looking out of the window in lieu of being able to step outside, but also of encountering one another as digital images, intermittently moving and still, on computer screens facilitating working from home and online learning. This interaction with other humans, when turned into multiple rectangles on the screen on Zoom, Teams or Skype, was coupled with seeing themselves reflected in the smaller window in the screen’s corner. Through this, many people all over the world found themselves trapped in a virtual hall of windows and mirrors.

The Covid-19 experience invites a reflection on the degrees of freedom available —and on what different windows, actual and virtual ones, have symbolised at different times in (photographic) history. A study of ‘views from the window’ thus needs to become a study of labour, leisure and time ownership, but also of human and nonhuman agency, opportunity, access, health and risk. Such a study requires an investigation of what it means for there to be a window in the first place, of who can afford to look out of it, of who is forced to do so and of whether the digital window represents an opening or a closure. This question has been of interest to me for some time now as part of my study of the conditions of labour under digital capitalism —and of the forms of visibility and invisibility that are enacted in the process. In 2018, in an uncanny anticipation of the world-become-window situation of coronavirus capitalism, I made a photo-film called View from the Window. To obtain my footage, I hired 100 workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform (an online marketplace connecting labour suppliers with providers worldwide), to each take a photo of a view from a window of the room they were in. The MTurk platform, informally dubbed ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ by Amazon, places humans in the role of machines, with globally distributed workers renting out their services to perform repeatable tasks such as tagging photographs or filling in surveys – tasks that would be too costly to program for a computer to fulfil.

Amazon’s MTurkers operate anonymously, creating an illusion of a fluid mobile labour force that forms part of the digital cloud. The idea behind my project was to rematerialise the cloudy vapour behind this narrative by creating a group portrait of MTurkers’ locations. Neither conventional portraiture nor landscape photography, the collective image-base of View from the Window offers a demographic snapshot of the global workforce, looking out. The human intelligence of Amazon’s invisible labour force uses digital technology to simulate the work of machines, but it also ruptures the image of the machine world by bringing the material traces of human bodies and their locations into the picture. The view from the window also shows us that there is a window in the first place (or not). This window takes on the form of a metal or wooden frame holding a glass pane (and, occasionally, curtains, shutters or a mosquito net) that lets in the outside world. The window here also stands for the rectangular visualisation of the software interface known as Microsoft Windows, also used by other operating systems as part of their user-friendly interface. Last but not least, the window refers to the computer screen behind which the MTurk workers sit, interfacing with the network that hires them. The MTurk labour force is therefore collectively framed by multiple nested windows, which both hold them together and keep them apart.[^2]

Under Covid-19 crisis conditions, placed behind windows and screens, many of us all over the world seem to have become versions of Mechanical Turks, no matter how creative our occupations are. Yet what is new about the present situation is that the window has once again begun to represent privilege. (There is a long history of this association in Europe, with the window tax introduced in England, France and Ireland at different points in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, which resulted in many people bricking up their windows to save money, with only those wealthy enough able to have many windows.) Reflecting enclosure, exhaustion and the overlap between domesticity and workspace, labour and leisure, in the present situation the closed physical window has also become elevated to the role of a virus guard, available to those who are allowed to work from home. Alongside, the digital window has become a symbol of having work in the first place, of being sheltered, at least from now, from the economic and epidemiological peril. It is therefore worth asking what all those ‘view from the window’ photographs taken during the pandemic from both sides of the closed glass pane do not show: they do not tend to feature all those who are otherwise occupied, in jobs and professions that have become recognised as ‘key’ —from doctors and nurses through to shelf-stackers and delivery drivers. Last but not least, photojournalism and social media pictures from the pandemic, encasing human subjects, and nonhuman views and windows, serve an implicit memento mori for all those who lost their lives to covid-19 —and as a call to responsibility to all the survivors, to keep reframing the world for a better picture, with and without cameras.

[^1] While defining ‘nonhuman photography’ as photographic images that were not of, by or for the human (Zylinska, 2017, p. 5), the ultimate goal of my argument in Nonhuman Photography was to expand the human-centric model of photography and argue that all photography entails a nonhuman element. It was also to show that this nonhuman element has been present in the history of the photographic medium since its inception, as evidenced in Niépce’s photo.

[^2] The text about the video has been reworked from my most recent book, AI Art (Zylinska, 2020)

References

CRARY, Jonathan (1990), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

SZARKOWSKI, John (1978), Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, New York, MOMA.

ZYLINSKA, Joanna (2017), Nonhuman Photography. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

ZYLINSKA, Joanna (2020), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. London, Open Humanities Press.

How to cite this source:
ZYLINSKA, Joanna, “Views from the window: nonhuman photography, human labour and covid-19”, LUR, 28 October 2020, https://e-lur.net/investigacion/views-from-the-window-nonhuman-photography-human-labour-and-covid-19

Joanna Zylinska (Wroclaw, Poland, 1971) is a writer, artist and Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of eight books, she is also involved in more experimental and collaborative publishing projects, such as Photomediations (Open Humanities Press, 2016). Her own art practice involves working with different kinds of photographic media.

“Views from the window: nonhuman photography, human labour and covid-19” is part of the research itinerary The Pandemic Image, led by Jon Uriarte.