Post-Witness
(2026)
I once asked a friend, “Are you planning to make an album? Like one you’ll release on streaming services?” They were a bassist in a jazz-funk band. Their answer bewildered me: “No, we’re just not that type of band. We do live performances.” How could one not want their art embalmed in recording resin? How do you prove your existence to the world?
The need to record is why I gravitate toward photography. How do I preserve myself? How will others remember me if there is no evidence? Photography has always been one way I wrestle with mortality, which is why I struggled to understand my friend. We seemed to exist in separate ontologies. I wanted an artifact that would live beyond the experience – but they seemed content with the experience as is.
To me, preservation feels more like an interruption in the process of life. A flower entombed in resin survives because its participation in change has been terminated: it cannot wilt, rot, smell, or become soil. Photography is similar in this regard. While an image doesn’t stop the world from changing, it produces another version of it which cannot. The children never land from the swing and the cloud never leaves the frame. A photograph therefore does not preserve life but rather acts as evidence that life occurred.
Sometimes that evidence outlives the memory it was meant to protect. I often find photos from years ago and recognize my own life without remembering the day depicted. The archive survived but the memory didn’t – and at that point I have to ask: is this evidence even worth holding onto?
Photography is increasingly becoming detached from witnessing.
Automated cameras, satellites, and other surveillance networks can record and register enormous portions of the world without someone ever looking at the image and deciding it matters. Human attention has given way to systematic acquisition – or worse – exploitation. No datum is left unturned. It is seemingly unlimited extraction.
“Post-Witness” hijacks the aesthetics of these surveillance systems, but the photographs themselves are intentional. They might appear to come from some disembodied tool like a 360 Google Street View camera, but the witness – myself – has not actually disappeared. I was there. I chose where to stand and what to notice.
I’m incredibly interested in the gaps between sensor and witness, storage and memory, and information and knowledge. Just because we have the ability to record more of the world doesn’t mean we know it more completely. A camera can register an embrace without understanding love. It can record bizarre, candid, human moments without knowing the meaning behind it. An archive can retain a life without remembering it.
What does it mean to witness in a post-witness visual culture? What happens when the image can outlive both the moment and our memory of it?
And, in a culture increasingly unwilling to let anything disappear, can something end without believing it has been lost?