FALSE POSITIVES
A meditation on the broken promises of photography.

The contributions in this publication were developed during the six-week seminar The LiquidImage, taught by Adam Broomberg and Shailoh Phillips at the Master Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) in the academic year 2018-2019.

In this seminar, students explored the limits and potentials of the photographic medium from different angles. Each week there were readings and short experimental assignments, addressing the dynamics of blockchain and artificially digital scarcity, hybrid forms of expanded photographic objects that intersect with sculpture, virtual reality and performance, race and technology, traumatic collective memories and the unresolvable past, and the rise of non-human photography as we enter an era in which images are being made for and by self-organizing networked machines.

We take current and past failures as practicing grounds for unlearning entrenched conventions. This is a first attempt at engaging with future failure, with the unknown disappointments and destruction that is yet to come.

We seek ways to break out of a binary system of verification, to challenge a visual regime that eclipses our ability to picture a way forward. We must first mourn the future, starting by purging ourselves from the implicit expectations that linger on in photographic practices.

Participating Master Photography & Society students

Alexander Cabeza Trigg
Chris Becher
Gita Cooper-van Ingen
Walter Costa
Guglielmo Giomi
Mads Holm
Marica Kolcheva
Dmitry Kostyukov
Nola Minolfi
Ana Núñez Rodríguez
Olga Roszkowska
Shadman Shahid
Thijs van Stigt
Anastasia Zhetvina

Take a look at the Master Photography & Society Year Review 2018-2019 to see more of what our Master students have been up to.