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A thematic premise based upon “deleted scenes” runs throughout each piece. One of the most humorous and appropriately linked is Language to be Looked at, a syncopated three-monitor video. The left screen depicts Hadley “rocking out” while listening to music through headphones, intermittently squirting liquid soap from a bottle and tossing various objects, including a live cat and a flower. The items are projected toward the right of the screen and then travel out of the monitor’s frame. The right screen installed a few feet away is synchronized so that the blindfolded Maxwell is pelted in the back of the head with the items. However, when the items reach the screen, the flower is a fabric version and the soap has become bubbles. The audio component to this piece is available to the viewer through headphones. The song “Under Pressure” (Queen and David Bowie, 1981) remade by the Blood Brothers (2002) corresponds to the first monitor and Maxwell’s voice, calling out the items tossed, links to the second.
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With more than forty photographers in thirty-five exhibitions in twenty-one venues in and about Odense, home of Hans Christian Andersen, the OFT addressed the global theme of food in compelling ways. The politics of food–production, marketing, and its effects on different populations–was a major theme. The economic nature of food was examined in imagery by Steven Benson of the farmers and fishers displaced during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China; in Andreas Weinand’s elegiac work, “acker*arable land” (1999-2004), depicting holdouts of ecological farming in heavily industrialized Essen, Germany; in photojournalist Matthew Sleeth’s ironic take on grocery shopping, “Call of the Wild” (2004); and in Felicia Webb’s haunting project on obesity and bulimia in the West, “The Forbidden Body” (2006). On the other hand, Heidi Bradner’s series on food and survival in Siberia, “Midnight’s Lands” (2005); Angelica Julner’s imagery from small slaughterhouses in third-world communities, “Sand [Blood]” (2006); Numo Rama’s work from slaughterhouses in the rural Brazil of his birth, “Carnivores” (2006); and Finn Larsen’s two bodies of work on fishing and farming in Greenland, “Nerisassat [Food]” (2006) and “Tamaviaartumik [Passion]” (2006), told of worlds still directly connected to a socially integrated food chain.
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“The Movement of Images” at the Centre George Pompidou opened several months before the Month of Photography and began to convey a close relationship between photography and film. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s assertion that “it is less necessary to know whether photography and film have to do with art than to understand how they alter the perception we have of it,” (1) this exhibition moved away from concerns surrounding the relationship between optics and chemicals in order to examine the photograph’s “unfixed character.” (2) Within the areas of montage, narrative, unwinding, and projection, artist films such as Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968) and Chris Burden’s Documentation of Selected Works (1971-74) were juxtaposed with modernist works of art. The repetition of blue, red, green, yellow, and orange leaves in Henri Matisse’s Vitrail bleu pale (1948-49), for example, along with Josef Albers’s “Homage to the Square” series (1967) and Donald Judd’s Stack (1972), suggested that repetitive motifs set within the context of a square frame expose a connection between the plastic arts, photography, and the moving image. Whether these plastic stills can indeed be connected to either the medium of film or photography remains a subject of debate. However, the montage photographs of Moi Ver in “Paris. 80 Photographs” (1931) reflect a combination of the figurative and abstract caused by camera movement. Together they seem to incorporate different types of abstract art within the photograph.
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Of interest is how LeVeque’s video projects, influenced by situationist politics, digitize desire–a contradictory movement between algorithms as controlled experimental systems and desire as uncontrolled, inchoate, ineffable, and immaterial. Looking at digital media from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze’s conceptual model of contingency is significant to developing a theory of the “unexpected”; moving from a model of inert theory and practice of control to a model of a mobile media interface that produces unexpected and unpredictable results. It also moves media practice from the question, What does it mean?, to What would happen if? In this essay, we consider the key conceptual and political nodal points in a vast network of relations that make up the new mediascape through the challenges that LeVeque’s video works present.
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These artists pursue their vision independent of technological advancement and have discarded the notion that one must continually invest in the latest equipment to make compelling and meaningful images. They rely on what are now known as alternative, Do-It-Yourself (DIY), or adaptive photographic processes. Many pursue the craft without something as seemingly necessary as a lens. This is not to say that these artists disdain technology; instead, they embrace the idea of a hands-on photographic aesthetic that is not dependent upon materialist acquisition of goods. The direct hands-on involvement inherent in alternative techniques unites photographer and process.
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In the central room of the Daguerreian Society Gallery was Spagnoli’s Untitled Botanical Study (2001), an impressive triptych of whole plate daguerreotypes that eloquently captures a delicate pattern of intertwining tree branches. Spagnoli’s triptych hung framed on the wall above a display case that held a combination of smaller historic and contemporary daguerreotypes of outdoor scenes.

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The exhibition’s greatest strength lay in the juxtaposition of the historic with the contemporary as daguerreotypes past and present confronted the viewer side by side. Most of the historic images were grouped thematically in display cases around the perimeter of the front room where the history and technical details of the medium were explained. Some cases displayed daguerreotypes that helped illustrate the technical aspects of the work, such as plate sizes and hand tinting. Other cases presented groupings of similar subject matter, for example, images of children and postmortems. The emotional potency of these unique images highlights their intended function to capture the memory of a fleeting moment.
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Not to toe a die-hard Marxian line, but the sheer magnitude of the spaces, the frightening quantity of money needed to mount the exhibitions, the necessary economic underpinning for any artist included, and the massive pilgrimage of dealers, collectors, curators, and critics for the first few days of the event reinforce the overwhelming commodity aspect of the entire enterprise. It is a cultural phenomenon, and it is big business even if the curator is officially in the nonprofit sector and aims to keep our sights on loftier concerns.

The word “globalization” is associated with international conglomerations. An artist included in the Biennale automatically becomes part of international art commerce. The commodity status of his or her work goes up. I do not mention this in a disparaging way, and it is not my intention to reduce any work to a mere commodity, but a raw reality of the Biennale, as elsewhere, may be that meaning is inseparable from the consumer vortex aspect of contemporary culture.
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Set in Lille, a city in northeast France, Transphotographiques is a small but important festival that seeks to go beyond conventional limitations of photography. Approximately seventy exhibitions were held in galleries and institutions, including a former postal facility, around town and in nearby villages. The festival largely featured film-related photography. Its exhibitions ranged from paparazzi photos to the archives of the legendary Cahiers du Cinema. Major retrospectives included the work of Michel Ginies and Barry Harcourt, as well as late studio and press photographers including Leo Mirkine and Sem Presser. There were many works featuring stars like Brigitte Bardot and Yves Montand but few vintage prints. The selection of work appeared to influence the type of photographer coming to meet the international cast of reviewers, who hailed from ten countries as well as France. Most interesting were the bodies of work by Finnish artist Martine van Biervliet who lives in Paris and Lille. One of her works combined sophisticated surrealist-inflected word and image games with documentary-like images of her mother playing on the French phonemes occurring in the words for mother (maman) and moment (moment), as well as a similarly inflected series of small poems accompanying her images of aging flesh, rumpled beds, and clocks–an altogether interesting depiction of women and the detailing of lives and identities.
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Action/Interaction’s first keynote speaker, Audrey Niffenegger, is known among book artists for her hand-colored etchings with aquatint that make for fictions of mostly pictures. Since the publication of a bestseller, The Time Traveler’s Wife (2004), Niffenegger has become better known as a novelist. Nifenegger spoke to the differences between her projects of pure writing versus predominately image-based books, such as The Three Incestuous Sisters: An Illustrated Novel (2005), which was published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. in a much larger edition than viable using hand-printed methods. Niffenegger also reported she is embarking on a serial for the United Kingdom’s Guardian Unlimited newspaper as well as reading screenwriters’ disputable attempts to adapt The Time Traveler’s Wife for an upcoming feature film. Niffenegger is a case in point for the conference’s parallel discussion session, “Artists’ Books and Mainstream Publication,” lead by Jen Blair of Columbia College Chicago. Blair and those present contended over decisions faced by book artists pursuant to attention from major publishers. Tactics for improving artists’ books distribution, profitability, and the Internet’s potential for opening up new audiences were also debated.
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In recent years, commissioned artists have been sent to Northern Ireland (Ken Howard, 1973, 1977); the Falkland Islands (Linda Kitson, 1982); the Gulf (John Keane, 1991); Bosnia (Peter Howson, 1993) and Kosovo (Graham Fagen, 1999/2000); Afghanistan (Paul Seawright/Langlands & Bell, 2002); and most recently, Steve McQueen was sent to Iraq (2003). (2)

For McQueen to create significant work in response to the war in Iraq is easier said than done. In late 2003 he visited the war zone and spoke with British troops in and around Basra. However, plans to film in Baghdad were disrupted by the security situation. Such practical limitations were no doubt compounded by creative considerations. For what can an artist create that differs substantially from the work of Victorian artist-reporters, or contemporary media professionals like photojournalists or editorial cartoonists? And what can an artist learn about a complex war situation after a brief visit, under official supervision? Not a lot, feared Nico Israel, whose 2004 article for Artforum about artists in Iraq specifically mentions McQueen’s lightning tour:
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