Beeldarchief

Visual Pattern Recognition. Diagnosis of the Current Dutch Public Imagination

What is imaginable in Dutch society today? How do we think about tricky issues like politics, environment, Islam or gender? To which extent are the public debate and the anxious or optimistic state of mind shaped by visual patterns as articulated in daily
newspapers and weekly magazines? Are press photographs just an incoherent collection of pictures that register the chaos of real everyday events? Do they lose their value at the end of the day? Do they have any weight in our global society which is dominated by television, internet and rapid information exchange? Or do press photographs form series, clusters and sets that together configure a shared visual memory which tunes our emotions and develops opinions and ideas in certain directions – without us being aware of it? Does it matter at all, given the pain and happiness of ourselves and other people? In short: why is the impact of visual data a blind spot in the so called visual culture in which we live today?

Intricate questions that require a meticulous and time consuming scientific process of collecting, classifying and comparative interpretation of a large amount of compatible visual material. To articulate the weight of some urgent, worldwide issues – such as ‘violence & safety’ or ‘global viruses & health’ – it will be necessary to define first of all their own visual context and the aesthetic, formal or conventional conditions under which they appear. The domain is heterogeneous, layered, permanently on the move and shifting. Looking carefully has primacy in the historical formalist analysis of the cultural morphology of visual material – and this view will be rewarded with unknown, but nonetheless efficacious visual patterns that will affect what our eyes shall see and our mind will think. That is why serials of ‘boundaries & bars’, ‘bodily inscriptions’ and ‘Muslim women’ shown in this small exposition unexpectedly turn out to be accompanied by serials like ‘birds’, ‘VIPS’ and 'men-with-vegatables' (sometimes women with vegetables are presented, although relatively less often). Each of these six prototypical categories is part of a more extensive pattern of its own and includes a variety of alternative visual sets. In the forthcoming pilot study the pattern recognition of this domain as a whole will be taken into account. Tracing these visual signals on the one hand and training the sensibility of the elite towards pattern recognition on the other hand can be understood as complementary to figures and diagrams and will make possible a more complete understanding of the current formation of the Dutch public imagination.

This exposition is a small, teasing selection (September 2004 – June 2010, based on a pool of approximately 1000 pictures, last update 18.07.2010) of the daily growing collection of current Dutch press photographs originating from Dutch newspapers like de Volkskrant , NRC Handelsblad , Trouw , and weekly magazines such as Vrij Nederland , De Groene Amsterdammer et cetera. Although the purpose is to arrange a representative collection, it will be – due to the current conditions – far from being a complete inventory.