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e-flux Index #2, 512 pp., full color, 20 x 25.5 cm, ISSN: 2997-1950, July 2024


Index #2

“It’s always too late, whenever you take a photograph.”

 

This laconic remark, which I heard during a recent artist’s talk in Berlin, bubbled up from a discussion upon the often-tragic indexicality or nonindexicality of contemporary photographic practice. JPEGs taken for wonders. Smoke plumes without embers. Footprints crossing the beaches of abandoned resorts. Hands that point at nothing in particular, and the gullible eyes that follow the lead of pointing index fingers. There is indeed something awkward to the snapshot’s belatedness. Its untimeliness. The ways in which, the second the shutter clicks—or that our thumb melds with the appropriate region of our phone’s liquid plasma displays and the resultant file is uploaded to a distant server—the instant we sought to “capture” has passed by and something else enters the frame. Someone blinks, the rubble dust envelopes the scene, the light changes, the hoodie we saw underground bearing the phrase “THEIR DESTINIES WOULD INTERTWINE” disappears behind an arriving subway’s blur, the wind cajoles a neighboring branch we hadn’t before noticed into the family portrait. Photography then remains, contrary to the terms in which it is sold to us by Silicon Valley manufacturers who stress its total immediacy as an instrument for perceiving the world, a stubbornly untimely pursuit.

 

Can we not also say, “It’s always too late, whenever you start to index”?

e-flux Index is a new print journal surveying the breadth of contemporary culture through e-flux’s publishing on art, theory, architecture, film, criticism, and art education.

Editor
George MacBeth

Managing Director
Hallie Ayres

Design
Remco van Bladel

Layout
Sixing Xu

Senior Publishing Consultant
Mareike Dittmer

Senior Design Consultant
Atelier d’Alves

Image Editor
Peter Sit

Contact
index@e-flux.com

 

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#2
July 2024
With: The Editors, Charles Tonderai Mudede, Anna Kornbluh, Adeline Chia, Juan José Santos, Xin Wang, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Salmaan Craig, Maddie Hampton, Jamila Squire, Seth Wheeler, Evan Calder Williams, Anya Sirota, Claudio Medeiros, Victor Galdino, Jason Read, Luis Camnitzer, Ecosistema Urbano, Noah Simblist, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art, Denny Mwaura, Oraib Toukan, Antonia Majaca, Sylvie Fortin, Hallie Ayres and more
#1
March 2024
With: The Editors, Jason Read, Peter Sealy, Jacinda S. Tran, Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Vasıf Kortun, Yuriko Furuhata, Xinyue Liu, Boris Groys, Juliana Halpert, Zdenka Badovinac, Christian Nyampeta, Feza Kayungu Ramazani, Nicole Starosielski, Iago Bojczuk, Nkule Mabaso, Serubiri Moses, Pietro Bianchi, Sonia D’Alto, Jennifer Piejko, Sami Khatib, Oxana Timofeeva, Jenny Wu, Sandra Neugärtner, Novuyo Moyo and more
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