Optographies of the 21st Century

What would we see if, suddenly, at the back of an eye, on a retina relentlessly exposed to the stream of billions of images constantly passing between the screens of a connected world, this incessant circulation were to freeze, stop for good, and become indelibly engraved, like a scar that the iconosphere in which we live would have left in a gaze, so that it bears witness to what we can and cannot see? 

In the time it takes to read the question I just asked, nearly 500 hours of videos will have been posted on YouTube alone.1 To try to imagine, to get a picture of this tsunami of images, whose immensity has only grown since the Covid pandemic, we could do a simple calculation: the accumulation resulting from such a tidal wave amounts to 720,000 hours, i.e. more than 80 years of video every day. The equivalent of a lifetime’s worth of film is poured daily onto the internet. 

Let us suppose, as Walter Benjamin suggested, that an “entire life” could take the form of a succession of images. In the instant autobiography “which people say flashes before the eyes of the dying,” we would then see, at the last moment, all the stills of an existence streaming by quickly and creating the illusion of a film, “like the little books with tight bindings [the flip books, also known as kineographs] that were once the precursors of moving pictures.”2 Could the author of Berlin Childhood, who wrote these lines between 1932 and 1934, have imagined that a century later entire lives would be devoted to watching countless entire lives and filtering their images, in an attempt to expurgate everything that is added every day to the worldwide circulation of the visible? This is precisely what the “cleaners” of the internet do (they are usually referred to, euphemistically, as content moderators).3

Sarah Roberts has devoted a pioneering study to these invisible workers whose task is to monitor the sewers of the Web for a pittance. One of those she interviewed, nicknamed Josh for reasons of confidentiality, tells about his difficulty in sharing his most traumatic experiences as a viewer who looks for or in place of other eyes: “You don’t really want to talk about it. You kind of feel like you spent eight hours just in this hole of filth that you don’t really want to bring it into the rest of your life. [...] We just kind of keep it [...], you don’t want to pass your burden on other people’s shoulders.”4 While secrecy reigns over what goes on in these sewers, the veil has begun to be lifted thanks to journalistic investigations—starting with an article published in the New York Times in 2010—and lawsuits that “the garbage collectors of the internet” have filed against major social media companies.5 Following the case filed in 2018 against Facebook by Selena Scola, a former “cleaner” whose complaint subsequently turned into a class action in the United States, lawsuits have indeed multiplied in recent years, particularly in Africa, where the social media company (renamed Meta in 2021) outsources its content moderation: The Guardian reported on legal proceedings by employees of subcontractors Samasource and Majorel (recently acquired by the French group Teleperformance) in Kenya and Ghana. The testimonies gathered are chilling: the plaintiffs say they suffer from “significant psychological trauma and/or post-traumatic stress disorder” due to their constant exposure to “highly toxic” images (“child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide, and murder”) that they had to view in order to “maintain a sanitized platform.”6

If images can circulate on what I have called the “road networks of the visible” (les voiries du visible), it is therefore on the condition of this dark economy of the visible, this “shadow iconomics” (iconomies del’ombre):7 the road workers who manage the traffic of images must be made invisible precisely so that their work can produce pure visibility, purged of all its dross, all its waste. “The goal of this book,” writes Sarah Roberts in the introduction to Behind the Screen, “is therefore to counter that invisibility and to put these workers and the work they do front of mind”. She meets them, collects their stories, but keeps “their names and other details […] pseudonymous”, as are the companies they work for. Understandably, since “content screeners” are often “compelled to sign” nondisclosure agreements when they are hired and they are therefore liable to prosecution if they breach confidentiality. 

Beyond their contractual silencing, content moderators undoubtedly suffer from a structural erasure, as if their forced anonymity were due to their very status as intermediaries destined to disappear, embodying the mediality of the medium as such. What, then, would be an appropriate representation, if any, to imagine the faces—the eyes—of those who watch so that we can see and not see, see on condition that we do not see? When she travels to Eastwood City to continue her investigation in this “special economic zone” of the Manila metropolitan area, Sarah Roberts stops in front of a monument which, as indicated by the golden plaque affixed to its base, pays tribute to the “modern heroes” of the outsourcing industry: wearing headphones, these three faceless figures represent the call center workers whose massive growth has transformed the Philippines into “a nation on the line.”8 The monumental aesthetic is reminiscent of the socialist realism of yesteryear. In front of these statues glorifying the facelessness of outsourced voices, Sarah Roberts tries to imagine what a similar representation of content moderators might look like: “the artist would have to find a way to demonstrate absence in a bronze,” she writes, but also to depict the spectral return of traumatic images, the “suffering” caused by “a flashback from an image seen on the job”. Indeed, how could an image represent the very invisibility of those who go unseen while also imaging the return, the haunting of images? 

Sometimes, while leafing through a book on Google Books, we come across the image of a finger, one or two phalanges, a fingernail at the edge of a page: these are accidents through which the hand of the invisible workforce that carried out the digitization resurfaces and abruptly reminds readers of its existence, like ☞ manicule that, instead of drawing attention to a passage in the text, points to the very condition of the medium’s existence.9 The workers’ bodies appear in fragments, broken up. Fragmentation is also what Lauren Huret stages in her 2018 video installation titled Portrait en sainte Lucie (Lesley AnnCao), based on the artist’s research with content moderators in Manila. This portrait of a modern-day Saint Lucy draws on the traditional iconography of the martyr, whose eyes, torn out during her martyrdom, are often depicted as carried on a platter. In the video, the content moderator holds a smartphone-shaped tray in her left hand: a pair of eyes move around on it, looking from one side to the other, widening, closing; in short, they live their lives, happy or unhappy, we don’t know, but cut off from the other pair of eyes we observe, which are less animated, almost lifeless, blinking wearily on the young woman’s expressionless and somewhat resigned face. What Lauren Huret shows us is the alienation of a gaze, its dissociation or its splitting in two; in a word: its being detached, i.e. both disconnected and assigned to a specific function.10 

Rather than a martyr with detached eyes, one of the content moderators Sarah Roberts spoke to sees herself as the reincarnation of a figure common in Welsh folklore between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries: “I use to call myself a sin-eater,” she says, “like I was absorbing all of this negative energy”. But content moderation, in its properly visual dimension, could be better understood in the light of another myth or legend, one that flourished in the years that saw the birth of forensic photography: the optogram. 

The history of the optogram—or rather “the fiction of the optogram,” as Georges Didi-Huberman puts it in an article that traces its origins in France from 1870 onwards—is in fact a kind of scientific folklore that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century.11 One of the first explanations of the optographic principle was published by British photographer William Warner in The Photographic News on May 8, 1863; he reports that, having read the account of the murder of a young woman, he sent a letter to the Scotland Yard detective in charge of the case, suggesting the following procedure: “if the eyes of a murdered person be photographed within a certain time after death, upon the retina will be found depicted the last thing that appeared before them, and […] in the present case the features of the murderer would most probably be found thereon.” William Warner added that, four years earlier, he had made “a negative of the eye of a calf a few hours after death,” on which he identified, after examining it under a microscope, “the lines of the pavement on the slaughter-house floor.” In the years that followed, the press reported several cases of murder supposedly solved using the technique that soon became known as optogram (the term first appeared in German, Optogramm, in the writings of physiologist Wilhelm Kühne in 1877).12 The popularity of this fiction (the fact that it began to be refuted in those same years did not change anything) is attested by the almost folkloric nature of some of its versions; in the October 29, 1869 edition of The Photographic News, we can read this information sent by a correspondent: “The mistress of a house was cleaning a large cod fish, when, to her astonishment, she discovered an exact representation of a fisherman in the eye of the fish.”

Very early on, the legend of the optogram moved from forensic photography and medicine to literature. In 1867, in his short story titled Claire Lenoir, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam placed in the hands of his eccentric character (Dr. Tribulat Bonhomet, “Associate Professor of Physiology”) a “mysterious short article” found in a local newspaper, which mentioned “surprising facts” whose authenticity had been confirmed by the Academy of Sciences in Paris: “It can be asserted that the animals destined to our nourishment—such as sheep, lambs, horses and cats [sic], conserve in their eyes, after the butcher’s death stroke, the impression of the objects they have seen before they die. It is a photograph of pavements, stalls, gutters, of vague figures, among which one almost always distinguishes that of the man who has slaughtered them […].”13 Jules Verne’s novel, The Kip Brothers, presents a later literary echo of optography in its dénouement, since it is “in the depths of Captain Gibson’s eyes” that the “faces” of his murderers appear, on the “enlarged retinas” of a photograph of his head.14

The optogram, as Georges Didi-Huberman writes, is “the freeze frame on the last image” (l’arrêt sur la dernière image). It is the final still of that “entire life” in the form of a film that Walter Benjamin (among others) imagined unfolding before the eyes of a dying person.15 How, then, might its legend shed light on the visual experience or ordeal of today’s content moderators? 

The videos they watch, as we learn from reading their testimonies, are fragmented into still images. As Max (another pseudonym) explains: “The way it would work, we would get the videos in batches of ten. And each video would, thank God, would auto-generate maybe thirty thumbnails, so you wouldn’t have to watch the majority of the videos, just the stills. And you’d do a batch of ten, submit, and move on to the next batch. I would do anywhere from about 1,500 to 2,000 videos a day.”16 After a day of countless and often terrifying slices of life that freeze on their screens, the cleaners find themselves alone with “the phenomenon of something disturbing from their workday invading their psyche when at home”. 

But it is not only the flow of images that is fragmented and segmented: as we saw in the detached eyes of a modern-day Saint Lucy, it is also the assembly-line gaze of the industrial viewers that is divided and fragmented, as they watch on behalf of others, so that others, the viewees, can see or not see. The optogram is the fantasy of seeing through the blind spot of the other’s gaze as it becomes severed, as it crystallizes in a material inscription. 

Optography is, in fact, the absolute heterology of vision or viewing (absolutus in Latin means detached). It is the dream—or rather the nightmare—of being able to see seeing itself. To see what the other sees, which would only be possible if they no longer see, on the condition of a final freeze frame of what they just saw. 

What has been seen: that is what we would so much like to (not) see, driven as we are by a voyeurism of the gaze of the other. If some optographer today were to succeed in photographing the back of the eyes of those who populate the pages of Behind the Screen, we would see the unbearable, the intolerable.