7 Photography's Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries
7 Photography's Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries
Long abundant, photography’s ubiquity and multiplicity has undoubtedly intensified in recent years. Photographs proliferate in the digital domain at an unprecedented scale, offering the partial realisation of many longstanding desires from a global encyclopaedic mapping of the visual world to a museum without walls. Photographic multitudes, however, also embody multifarious fears: of visual noise and mindless repetition, of metaphorical promiscuity and overpopulation. To engage with the apparently unmanageable excess of images is, it seems, to gaze into the abyss. This chapter considers the photographic abyss through an examination of the visual and literary device of mise en abyme and through WJT Mitchell’s concept of the metapicture. Through an exploration of contemporary artists who explore photographic enormity as their subject matter, particularly in relation to works that utilise obsolete photographic materials – in the form of 35mm slides from deaccessioned art history slide libraries – this chapter examines how such works and such materials employ and embody metapictorial strategies. As the works constitute images of images of images, this chapter argues that they offer a productive metapictorial site for surveying desires and anxieties about image abundance and excess.
Keywords: Mise en abyme, metapicture, photography, 35mm slides, contemporary art, scale, abyss, excess, abundance
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