»In Vorher-Nachher-Fotografien fehlt das Ereignis, ob natürlich, menschengemacht oder in einer Verschränkung von beidem. Was in diesem Dazwischen festgehalten wird, ist eine Verwandlung des Raums, die nach einer architektonischen Analyse verlangt. Eine solche räumliche Interpretation aber ist nie eindeutig.«
MARIE GLASSL: I’d like to start with a very simple but fundamental question. Why before-and-after images? What was your initial interest there and where did the idea for Before & After come from?
INES WEIZMAN: All before-and-after images are directly linked to a place and its transformation. Their history takes us right to the beginning of photography and its instrumentalization. Before-and-after photos are mainly architectural or urban representations of conditions in the process of change—hence always a starting point.
We were both always fascinated by photographic collections, documentary footage and concepts of archiving and collecting. Years ago, we began our work on the celltexts project, a collection of over five hundred books written in prison for which we also built an online library catalogue and an exhibition installation. While reading and researching, but also packing and unpacking the books of this library, we explored different ordering systems and taxonomies. Among the authors were many Soviet dissidents who spent many years in confinement. It is horrific to think that present-day Russia has continued the violent suppression of reformers and opposition leaders in prisons and labor camps. Unfortunately, the celltexts project continues to grow while fewer and fewer writings or messages can be detected from prisons today.
EYAL WEIZMAN: Another example is our work with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, where we looked at the Sednaya prison in Syria, trying to reconstruct the inhuman conditions and architecture of the prison together with former inmates who in the darkness of the space mostly remembered things through sound. The prison was designed and built in the 1970s by architects from East Germany.
INES: It might seem to lead away from the point of before-and-after images but our work with prisons connects to East Germany and my research about 1970s and 1980s dissidents and activists of the Soviet era—a history that has never been fully acknowledged and processed in the aftermath of the fall of the iron curtain and Germany’s reunification.
MARIE: Was it in the context of this research that you came across these before-and-after documentations of East German cities which you mention in the book and that for some years seemed to be ubiquitous?
INES: Yes, because their emergence surprised me. Perhaps understandably, the euphoria about the new economic and cultural prospects did not make research on the meltdown years of the Soviet regime very interesting and relevant. On the other hand, a lot of archives and libraries were destroyed in that period of the 1990s and early 2000s; many people lost their jobs and an enormous cultural vacuum was created. Before-and-after images seem to have embraced this vacuum.
MARIE: That is an exciting thought... Were before-and-after images a means of replacing or modifying memories and their preservation and documentation?
INES: Maybe I have to tell a personal anecdote to explain this. I think my actual interest in before-and-after images began with a book in our family library that my father used to flip through with me, Bilddokument Dresden: 1933–1945 by Kurt Schaarschuch. We also write about it in our text. It is a book of before-and-after images depicting Dresden before and after the 1945 destruction by British aerial bombardment, which also resulted in the collapse of the famous Frauenkirche.
The image of the church in ruins was familiar to me because it had remained almost untouched in its state of destruction, a pile of rubble, until the mid 1990s. East Germany had declared its ruin a monument to the war. Only when the reunified Federal Republic decided to reconstruct the church, did this monument—a striking memorial to the consequences of the horrors of fascism—disappear. Postcards and history lessons in the GDR always used a very specific viewpoint to present the site. What I found so astonishing about the photographs in this book by Schaarschuch was that he took a completely different perspective. When taking the pictures in the mid 1930s the photographer had positioned his camera a little further away from the church, foregrounding the sculptures of two boys carrying some objects that were placed on each side of the staircase leading up to the Johanneum building on the Neumarkt. The figurine closest to the photographer wears a coned hat.
And what a beautiful coincidence—the two figures, unlike the church, had survived the airstrike and could afterwards help him re-position the perspective of the before-image amid the rubble. The underlying message of this book was a promise for the reconstruction of the destroyed city.
MARIE: And was that a promise for a perfect restoration of a romanticized past? A “going back to the way things were” or, rather, a promise to build a glorious new future from the ruins of the past? What made you start to question the purely documentary status of these before-and-after photographs?
INES: In the immediate aftermath of the war, the wish to restore the cities to their condition before the war was born out of trauma. Even if a church like the Frauenkirche was shattered to pieces, the initial instinct was to collect its few remaining stones and architectural details, and to store them in such a way that they could be pieced together again. It was only later, with the project of nation building, that the idea of using the destroyed cities as a starting point to design a future city, burying the past, took force.
In the early 2000s when I began my doctoral thesis, trying to describe the enormous transformation of everyday life and the consequences of the fall of the Berlin wall in the arts, architecture and cities, I felt a certain unease about those before-and-after city monographs that had been produced everywhere about former East German cities. Berlin: before & after, Leipzig: before & after, Erfurt: before & after, Dresden: before & after… I gave my very first paper on this research during a conference at the Architectural Association where Eyal and I met for the first time. Eyal had dozed off when the lights were turned down, creating our own before-and-after joke.
These monographs were published in the New Laender of the Federal Republic in the later 1990s and were often sponsored by governmental institutions, or municipalities. They were always based on the logic of producing the most pronounced visual difference between a photograph of the city before 1989 and a photograph of the same site about ten years later in its freshly renovated state. As a series of before-and-after images placed on opposing pages, they had to reach for the most dramatic effect to show the radical transformation that had taken place.
These photographic oppositions made the streets, houses, courtyards, and monuments that had once formed the invisible and familiar background of our lives look embarrassingly dilapidated, grey and dirty. I say this with a bit of a sarcastic undertone, but after the reunification new voices everywhere spoke about the “poor condition of the East German cities,” and we all agreed that “a lot remained to be done,”—as if overnight we had appropriated what can be described as a prerequisite for westernization: the Western point of view. The moment of transformation began not with the laying of the first brick, nor with the whitewashing of the old grey walls, but with the appropriation of a new way of seeing, which was demonstrated by the logic of the before-and-after photograph.
When these publications and the rhetoric of the “Western gaze” appeared, something was clearly missing in this form of simplified and ideological narration.
MARIE: It almost feels like an undoing or erasure of history, right? This rearrangement of the before according to the wishes and ideological standards of the after is much more of a manipulation than a documentation. In your book we see three different photographs of the site of the Frauenkirche—why is that?
INES: Yes, I asked Stefanie Elsel, a former student of mine, to try to re-enact the same photographic angle of view adopted in Kurt Schaarschuch’s images. The many before-and-after city monographs illustrate how photography created its own interpretations of the cityscape and played a part in rewriting and correcting urban historiography. They represent urban development not as a continuation of the past, but rather as a process that is clearly in dialectical contrast to it. The before-and-after photography after reunification is paradigmatic of the history of German urban planning, in that it tried to testify to and illustrate the rapid ideological changes, the “revolutions” and reversals. These images of the city depict not only how a place had changed, but also a new ideology. So, while the before was represented as dreary, old and hopeless, the after was meant to represent the new era and the country’s political awakening. Yet within its own chronological logic such a procedure leads to a paradoxical confusion of eras. When newly renovated candy-colored nineteenth century town houses are placed next to snapshots of the grey, severe structure of the socialist city, it is as if the original before had performed an incredible chronological coup, now repositioning itself after the after-image. These photographs manipulate the past: What happened in the gap between the before and the after is the erasure or devaluation of East German or Soviet, architecture and the societal vision of its urbanism.
Today, over thirty years later, neo-liberal urbanism has created a kind of temporal dyslexia. And perhaps we need to see some connection between the conservative values that are symbolized in the petit-bourgeois or aristocratic architectures of castles and reconstructed mediaeval urban centers and a populist political landscape that is anti-migrant, anti-modern and localist.
My father used to share these images with me as a warning of what happens when one lets a political system like National Socialism take over. I am disturbed by the fact that many in Dresden, mainly from the new radical right, now frame these images as a justification for German suffering and that the first demonstrations of the right-conservative party AfD began right on the reconstructed historic ensemble outside of the Frauenkirche…
MARIE: It would be fascinating to follow up in some way on how these sites are almost haunted by history and how reconstruction leads to architectural and political restoration… Eyal, what was your interest in before-and-after images and is there a direct relation to the work of Forensic Architecture?
EYAL: Obviously the idea arrived through the work of Ines. Thinking about before-and-after images started well before I founded Forensic Architecture. But when I did, I realized that before-and-after images are the entry point to investigating urban events. One could say that before-and-after photographs are the intersection of two technologies in the moment of their transformation. The first before-and-after photographs we found emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century when cities were undergoing the most radical change. Modern city planning as we know it today begins as a way of systematizing infrastructure. The city turns into a certain type of technology.
At the same time, photography emerges as a means of documentation. The modern city and the camera emerge as twin technologies at the very same moment, and from that moment on their history is entangled. Since then, any understanding of the intersection between photography and the city needs to start with before-and-after photographs. They are the first building block in the analysis of urban events of the type that we work with in Forensic Architecture: Here is the situation before a killing. Here it is after. Here is the situation before a bombing. And here is the building after. What we realized is that before-and-after images are an attempt to capture an event through architecture: The event is missing—but at the same time the event is implied because it is bracketed between the pictures.
MARIE: In Before & After you begin your analysis with the early stages of photography. What is the specific relationship between before-and-after images and the development of the technology of photography itself?
EYAL: Very early photography and daguerreotypes needed a long time to be registered. So, all the people moving in front of the lens got erased. This type of camera cannot capture a snapshot. One of the very first famous daguerreotypes shows a street scene in the Boulevard du Temple in Paris where we see no one in the street because everyone has been erased by their own movement in the long exposure. The only two people that remained are a man having his shoes shined and the shoeshine boy. Already in that instance the labor relations that exist in the city are manifested. The fact of the city as a technology to produce social hierarchy is embedded in this moment.
We need to look at the way in which an event—an event of destruction, an event that leaves a trace, a political event or political transformation—is manifested through architectural transformation: state one and state two. We need to read the delta factor between them as a process or as an event.
Forensic architecture is exactly that intersection between photography and space, between 3D modelling of the city and the media within it. I think that is why, when starting Forensic Architecture, I needed to go back to Ines and ask her about before-and-after images. I felt that this moment holds the kernel of how to understand this intersection of media and the city that is at the heart of Forensic Architecture.
INES: In Walter Benjamin’s writing we find this concept of dialectical images that appear while “the true image of the past flits by.” The past is “flashing up for only a moment,” almost like that unexpected memory triggered through a certain sensation that is captured so beautifully in Proust’s writing. But for Benjamin the dialectic idea appears in the moment in which the movement of thinking comes to a halt. He calls it the break in the movement of thinking. It does not happen randomly; rather, it is found wherever “the tension between the dialectical opposites is at its greatest.” He writes about the development of the dialectic at a standstill in his essay “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” for which he kept collecting material and wrote fragments until his death. Benjamin also refers in this essay to the importance of Daguerre’s early photography and the fact that the presentation of his new photographic technique came shortly after his famous diorama burned down in 1839.
Daguerre had captured the scene of the shoeshine boy as well as other photographs of Boulevard du Temple from the roof top of the diorama theater. When the fire broke out, the flames apparently spread so rapidly because of all the combustible materials in the building that the whole building crashed down after only half an hour.
It made me think of Paul Virilio’s theory of the accident as the locus of modernity. Every invention also carries its own negativity. The invention of the train also invents the train crash, the invention of the plane the plane crash. Photography also holds this negativity, a moment of death. Susan Sontag wrote about the photographs of people that seem always haunted by death. If we look at images of aerial reconnaissance flights, they already imply the vulnerability to bombardment. Photographs are often the only evidence for the existence of a place. The act of capturing a specific moment in an image contains the intention to produce its after.
MARIE: I wonder if there is a general difference between your readings or evaluations of the relation between the before and the after? Ines, in your cases the after-image is establishing a new norm; the invention of a better or a more beautiful past that has not really taken place. It’s a retrospective manipulation or whitewashing of a past that was actually different. While Eyal, if we try to look at the event of a bombing, or destruction and violence, the before seems to be the more peaceful, the better place, that has been lost in the act of destruction.
Do your readings of before-and-after images come from different directions or are they set in different places on the line that connects restoration and destruction?
EYAL: This is very interesting… Of course, in my work, diagrammatically, the before is better than the after. In Ines’ work the after is better than the before. It’s a beautiful, simple observation. But I would argue that also in the transformation of post-Soviet cities a crime has been committed between the before and the after—even if it looks nominally better. More specifically—to say it with a pinch of salt—the crime of capitalist-colonial urbanism and the erasure that comes with the devouring of the East by the West and with rewriting its past. There is an ideological indoctrination in the idea that “if it shines, it’s better.”
Still, the event is held in the gap between the images. We see a picture of a wet floor and then afterwards it’s dry. The real process is one of gradual transformation; there could be a point of rupture which you don’t exactly catch. The metaphor of the water slowly evaporating helps us to think about cities and ideological transformations as they get registered in an already existing fabric. Cities are events, not objects.
In forensics we see both: the slow crimes of environmental transformation that are often associated with colonial histories and the cases where we understand the crime as a sudden event. They are very different, but both are captured in before-and-after images or bracketed between them. And both events are outside the capacity of a single frame to capture.
A frame in photography is both space and time: It’s not only the space where the camera is; it is the time the camera is. And that framing is a political choice, it has its ideologies and its own military logic, its economy etc. The attempt in before-and-after images is to look at an event outside the frame. We need to ask how to look outside the photographic frame—and it is always a matter of probability, a matter of estimation and approximation; an uncertainty that contrasts with what seemingly gets registered.
The reading of photography is always political and ideological, but reading outside the photograph is an incredibly important part of what we call the post-photographic: the space between a huge multiplication of images that arrive to us from a multiplicity of screens, and through everything that is being projected at us.
How to see outside the frame is how to connect those images. I think that photography has shifted from looking at the frame to looking outside the frame. This important transformation is already hinted at in before-and-after photographs: What matters in them is not what you see, but what is invisible—how state A becomes state B. There are multiple ways in which that could happen, and imagination needs to also inhabit the space of the gap.
MARIE: Ines, you mentioned before how before-and-after images introduced a new “way of seeing.” Similar to processes of power these before-and-after images are productive, they influence the way we perceive and understand; the gap is an open field of interpretation. Eyal, would you say that there is any way around them? Can we avoid the technology of a medium that is so much at the root of our means of interpretation—or can we only try to question its hegemonic reading?
EYAL: Well, in a way, you cannot not use it. When you look carefully at media, it’s always there.
Take an example that happened since writing the book: We were looking into the interviews with the police officer who shot and killed Mark Duggan in a street in Tottenham. The killing of Mark Duggan in August 2011 caused one of the biggest protests in the history of England. And there were no cameras, there were no photographs, but the police officers interrogated were describing that event as if they were looking at a video. Their imagination was already photographic and videographic.
A police officer was saying: I’m panning over the scene. I notice Mark Duggan, I am zooming in on his hands and I keep on looking, my eyes are fixed to the gun that is in his hand. He’s pushing the gun forward. He’s straining his hand. I think he’s going to shoot me. I shoot once. He still holds the gun in his hand. I shoot a second time. Two shots. Mark Duggan is mortally wounded. And the next thing I see is that I don’t see the gun anymore.
The gun disappeared between two frames. Twenty-four frames per second in a standard video and in the police officer’s imaginary one, his testimonial video. Between two frames, the gun has disappeared. When they looked at the body of Mark Duggan, there was no gun next to him. The gun is what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin—the object driving the plot. They’re chasing Mark Duggan because there’s a gun in the car. They look at the gun, they shoot him because of the gun. The police officer saw a gun—and then he didn’t see the gun anymore, it is like a vanishing act in an old film.
Again, the event is in-between two frames. Even videos are before-and-after images—because what gives us the perception of time is the small gap between the frames. You have two frames, and there is a split-second between the frames. Our brain fills up the gap, because the frame rate is somehow geared to the speed of our neurological perception. Because of our own limitation, twenty-four frames are enough. The gap between the before and the after is where this whole story is. How could we miss the event? Did Mark Duggan throw the gun in a 24th of a second? Obviously not. We found the gun was likely moved, that material was manipulated, images added, deleted and cut out. But again, the political question was positioned in the gap between before-and-after images.
Whatever scale you’re looking at, there’s still a gap in representation. What before-and-after images teach us is that we need to look outside the frame and look at the gap between them.
The way you write history, the way you connect these dots, the way you criticize these thoughts, understand them, and connect, fill the space between them, that’s the work of the historian. Historians must paint a picture of continuity. The illusion of movement is history—movement between before and after data points.
We don’t know what has happened, but we need to fill that gap. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about twenty-four frames per second or about three data points across ten years. There is always a gap that needs to be imagined. And this act of imagination is where we stand.
INES: Of course, there is a difference between the use of before-and-after images as illustration and their use as evidence. One is ideological, or polemical, as it intends to simplify a much more complex history of economic, cultural and political transformation. That’s why historians of photography, architecture and the city need to look outside of their frames, they have to begin with the reconstruction of the scene that is depicted in the image, its angle of view, the time in which it was photographed, and find clues that are hidden in it. Remember that for years the photographs of Charles Marville were celebrated as nostalgic images of the old Paris. But only when the perspectival views of his camera were juxtaposed with the city map was it shown that Marville’s photographic gaze had followed Haussmann’s plans for the future reconstructions of the city. His photos were already led by a knowledge that the city was about to undergo change, a change that was yet to come—a monitoring or anticipatory staging of events that were about to take place.
It was his gaze that transformed the present into the future, long before the city was actually destroyed and rebuilt anew.
The photographic gaze not only documents, but also manipulates. Take, for example, the famously unresolved case of Roger Fenton’s pair of photographs “The Valley of Death.” We have a scene in the book where we picked up Errol Morris’ reflections on the location of the cannonballs, about which Susan Sontag had famously written in Regarding the Pain of Others. Questioning their immediacy or possible manipulation by Fenton, both authors collide over the question of which of these images is the before and which one is the after image.
MARIE: I loved that reference because Morris is so eager to open up the possibility that Sontag might have mistaken the order. He does all this extensive research, not so much to prove that she is actually wrong, but to show that the seeming facticity of the order of things is a small probability rather than a necessary truth.
If you look at the history of the vertical gaze, if you go back for example to Bertillon’s police photography, this whole idea starts with the wish to objectify the gaze. To take the human perspective and subject out of the picture frame, while Morris doubts that photography could actually ever be an objective medium of truth… That is interesting if we take into account that today’s satellite images promise absolute neutrality or objectivity and that the human figure as the subject, spectator and creator of contemporary photography is now disappearing again —but in a very different way than its absence in the early photographs.
INES: Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War are considered the first systematic documentations of a war through photography. But what is so strange about them is that we never really see any war action. Fenton depicts harbors, roads and landscape views, but also troops and military equipment and mortar batteries, even shelters. But no fighting scenes. That makes sense, as back then the whole technique of photography was awkward and precarious. Not only was Fenton travelling with his van of equipment, but he also had to view the scene from under the dark cloth covering his pin-hole camera. Rather than being war photography in the classical sense, his work with the cannonballs on the road is rather a testimony of the construction of an image as an illustration and documentation of the war scene.
MARIE: He shows the material signs or traces of war rather than the war itself.
EYAL: Yes, but Morris’ observation about the fact that photographs of war can be staged is also extremely contemporary. He is hinting at the possibility of a faked image already during nineteenth century warfare. Fenton took that picture around Sevastopol in 1855 during the Crimean War. Today we are all confronted with new before-and-after images of the exact same area where the Valley of Death is, or very close to it: the before-and-after photos of the Ukrainian bombing of the Russian headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. We’re still in that same geographical area and even with the technology of satellite imagery in hand, we’re still reading history in before-and-after images. The problem of the deep fake has definitely not left us; if anything, it has become much more explicit.
When you have before-and-after images, and when the gap between them exists and needs to be imagined and interpreted, this also leaves the political space open to different narratives. One of the most heartbreaking cases of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been the bombing of the Mariupol drama theater which has also been captured in devastating before-and-after images. Before we see the building from above with the word “children” written on both sides of it. After the bombing we still see the writing “children” on both sides and the entire building destroyed with dozens and potentially hundreds of casualties inside.
And that single event has led to so many interpretations. The Russian line stating that it was bombed by the Azov Brigade, the neo-fascist Ukrainian group of militants absorbed and partially integrated into the armed forces—that it was staged as a provocation. In the work that we do around the incident together with and led by the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST), a Kiev-based organization, parts of whom are hosted by us in Berlin, we are trying to find every person that was possibly there at the time of the attacks. At full capacity, the drama theater was a shelter for up to three thousand people.
Three thousand people enter this building and the building, at this moment, becomes a city—a city at the scale of the building. The building had its own parliament and decision-making forum, it had its own hospital, and its own school, and its own kitchen. All of this means a huge logistical effort.
It is exactly about inhabiting that space between the before and the after. All this political organization existed between the before and the after but is left invisible in the pair. But how do you inhabit a space of which you don’t have any photographs? The reason that this case is known only through before-and-after photographs—rather than through many ground-level photos—is that the Russian military cut electricity, so nobody could charge their phones. And there was no signal. Plus, anyone that left the city afterwards needed to have their phone checked for photographs they had potentially captured of the events in Russian filtering checkpoints. If suspicious photos were found, you might be arrested or worse.
So, there is almost no photograph of the in-between of the before and the after. That space, that city exists only in the minds of the people that lived in the building, the city in a building. A city that miraculously was run by this committed commune. We tried to piece together that community of practice—between the before and the after image, in a moment of wartime crisis democracy.
In March 2024, it has been two years since the bombing, and we and the CST are still only halfway through piecing together what has happened there.
MARIE: Since then, another after-image has emerged: the destroyed theater fenced in by Russian forces and hidden from sight, an act that again enforces blindness and masks an event of violence… There is another case in Before & After, a pair of images from Miranshah in Pakistan, where we can’t see any visible difference. That’s an interesting example because in all the other before-and-after images in the book we can actually see the change and there is an explanation for it that we can follow through.
But in this one pair we’re not able to register the change or its result, mainly for technical reasons. With the Mariupol theater, there is that very intentional, forceful erasure of any imagery that could possibly tell something about the gap in-between. This leads to the question of witnessing. In both cases, witnesses did describe the event and were able to locate the scene of the crime, even in a moment when technological means fail to represent it. What does that mean for your work and how has that factor changed through time?
EYAL: Testimony is one of the very important ways to fill the gap when you have no evidence, meaning that you have no trace. Some events happen when there are no cameras, some events happen when there’s no electricity; therefore, you cannot take photographs or digital images unless you have an analog technology. If you point a camera at a soldier or a policeman, you could be shot; in prisons you have no cameras, and some forms of torture leave no sign.
Often you need to reconstruct things from memory. Then things become even more complicated, because the before and after of traumatized memory is also an extremely difficult one. First, we need to ask, what is trauma? I mean, we all experience difficult, sometimes shocking memories. We carry them with us. Most of us have had to deal with these and sometimes they return to us as flashbacks.
Trauma in our work means violence or shock so severe that the order of time and of recollection is interfered with. Violence that erases its own traces. That is our working definition of trauma: Violence so severe, an earthquake so total, that it destroyed the instrument that could measure its volume. What is violence so total that it destroys the instrument of its own measure when the instrument of recollection is human memory?
We did a lot of work together with psychotherapists to understand that. When you experience a severely shocking event, all the neurological information channels switch into survival mode, it’s like an alarm or panic button in the brain. And other parts of the brain, which are sequencing the before and the after, or the after of the before, are less active. Therefore, a traumatized memory would very often be encoded as floating in time and space, as not belonging to time—as something which is outside of time.
When you want to interview somebody who is outside of time about what happened during the event, you get into these incredible paradoxes. The nearer you get to the most violent part of the testimony—which is the most important, sometimes, if you want to mobilize it politically or judicially—the more the essence of that recollection is erased.
People remember what happened to them before the event and what happened after—but the event itself is missing. There are ways of trying to trigger it and of trying to work through it. But every form of encoding, whether it’s memory or photography, is complicated and has its own limitations and thresholds. There is no simple answer to the question of absence.
INES: Also, in documentary practice, heritage preservation, or activism testimony, the creation of a before-image—with the intention of comparing it to a condition of a site in the future—is an important method. When we work in the Centre for Documentary Architecture on documenting historic buildings, often shortly before their destruction or renovation, we combine methods of cartography, archaeology, architecture and the forensics to find traces of larger-scale geopolitical processes within the micro, almost molecular, scale of surface materiality. We look at historical photographs of cities, or a building, and try to document their present condition, because we know that the site will soon undergo a transformation. This resembles the method of the historical photography societies of the mid-nineteenth century, which felt the urge to document what seemed in danger of disappearing very soon. Re-enacting the viewpoints of historical photographs while awaiting the transformation of the site implies a kind of unwritten contract, an act of care. At the beginning of photography there was this fear that photographs could “steal the soul” of the subjects it portrayed. When I think of those publications of before-and-after photographs, the before is missing just as if a bit of the soul of the place was stolen. When we try to return to the sites we photograph or document over time, we believe in the agency of buildings and the possibility of hearing them speak.
MARIE: This “material witness” is a very interesting aspect of the work both of you do. You start from these different directions, but still you share this idea that something has been lost in between the images, that there is this gap—the event—that needs to be traced, read and interpreted because it cannot be fully captured, neither in the before nor in the after. Can we say that in a way before-and-after images do the impossible: They don’t represent the invisible, but enable what is absent to come into view?
INES: In a very recent work I looked at a photograph of a modernist building that was built by an Austrian emigré architect in the early 1930s in Haifa. The building got demolished in the 1990s to make space for a new building. But the preservation authorities of the municipality had made it a condition that the new building had to include the reconstruction of the old. That reconstruction was done without much care for the original building details. The construction site was even abandoned, leaving behind a giant concrete shell of the (new) old building. But the fascinating thing was that the condition to reconstruct had led to an initiative to photograph the building shortly before the demolition. The original images got lost and I began my search through a set of faded color copies. Among the photographs, I found a striking detail from the interior of a room-high wall painting of a French tricolor that probably originated from the early 1940s. It was surprising to find a French symbol in a British Mandate building of this time. I was able trace it back to a performance by the African-American-French performer Joséphine Baker, who in the midst of war had travelled between North Africa and the Middle East. The story of Baker was somehow hidden between these two buildings, their before and after.
MARIE: How do we operate in cases like these that leave no trace? Either because they have deliberately been erased like in Mariupol, or because they are outside of the field of aesthetic perception, or have simply been forgotten and faded away over time? What do we do if the before—or its image—has been lost, has been buried under the developments of history progressing, or maybe has never existed, because it has always operated outside of the field and technologies of imaging or aisthetic representation?
EYAL: To respond to this, I will go back to the question of environmental and colonial violence and the way one can understand them through before-and-after images.
We are currently working on the German genocide that took place at the turn of the twentieth century in an area of Africa that used to be called Southwest Africa, and is today Namibia. This was one of the few German colonies in Africa, which were given to Germany as a mandate after the Berlin Conference in 1884/1885. Germany’s was a late, but very fast and determined colonial project, in the frame of which land was stolen from indigenous people. The rebellion against the colonizers was stamped out with full racist force. After an extermination order was followed through by the Schutztruppe many of the Ovaherero and Nama people were wiped out.
We have already found mass graves and concentration camps, locations of indigenous homestead and villages, old cemeteries, etc. But something that is extremely important to us is the environmental, climatic effect of colonization. Colonization is environmental change and in a certain sense climate change. Namibia is at the forefront of processes of worldwide desertification. It just happened faster there. But why is it happening faster there? In what way is the drying up of former arable lands or the phenomena of bush encroaching into former pastoral landscapes, landscapes with a lot of grasses, connected to the genocide?
To imagine the before, we needed to understand what the weather—the climate really—was like in 1904, how it was on the eve of the genocide and how it is different from today. How do you do that when you have very few meteorological stations? We look at old photographs. Many of the photographs show human figures: a German officer standing or sitting on a horse, an indigenous scene. But behind them there’s an entire landscape. There are bushes, trees, grasses. What are their densities, how much water do they need? You can reconstruct or approximate the annual or that year’s precipitation from a spatial analysis of their distribution. Of course, the camera was only where the colonizers wanted it to be and there are entire areas that have not been photographed. The camera and the gun of the colonizers went hand in hand. But still something was captured.
We compared the old photos to contemporary ones. That’s why we chose to reconstruct the before through oral testimonies. We work with big landscape models and ask people to furnish it through their inherited memories of the way that landscape used to be. How oral tradition remembers this landscape. You need to mediate between those two things.
Looking at the state of the landscape today we see an incredible transformation. But the transformation did not happen overnight. Our understanding of the “ecocide”—that is the destruction of the environment—aspect of that genocide is that the removal and destruction of the Ovaherero and Nama people, the removal of the pastoral economy and the fencing of the frontiers led to or at the very minimum significantly contributed to ongoing ecological destruction that directly and materially links the present with the past. Environments are inter-temporal—they are not only events in the past but continue to resonate with the present. When you walk through the landscape of today and get scratched by an invasive species, that scratch is the direct material connection to this period of settler colonialism and its ensuant genocide.
Looking at the before, there’s another kind of theoretical problem. The before is always the benchmark against which the after is measured. But the before is never a situation outside of politics. It’s not a state outside of violence, but always a consequence of a previous before. It’s not neutral. That landscape in the very early years of colonization is a managed landscape. A landscape that reflects the culture that lives on it. Even if this is a large-scale open landscape, for indigenous communities it was a sort of garden. People were caring for and tending to it, understanding and interpreting the environment, and kept it in a particular way. Therefore, it’s not a natural landscape, it’s an anthropogenic landscape, a designed landscape, and its loss is just like the loss of a city—an archaeological loss, because the landscape is a piece of designed culture.
We were talking about satellites as this almost obvious technological gesture of contemporary positivism. In Namibia, we could only find very few places where the cameras of the colonizers provided us with an insight and where people could remember. We decided that the only way to do this project was to—figuratively speaking—send a satellite back into the past, back to 1893. The way we’ve done that is to combine calculation and mathematics with indigenous knowledge and memory and anchor it in ground level photographs that allowed us to recreate the vegetation coverage of the earth—as it would have been seen by that satellite in 1893.
This shows us that combining technology and indigenous knowledge allows us to arrive at places that are magnificent in terms of the possibilities of approximation.
MARIE: That is extremely interesting because it brings in a completely different aspect of the tools that you are using. You make it very clear in Before & After that the tools you are reading with or interpreting with are almost never independent from those who exercise violence… We still need to answer Audre Lorde’s question whether the master’s tools can ever dismantle the master’s house.
That remains such a simple but strong argument. The interpretation of the gap can of course turn into an act of counter-forensics. It can threaten an official statement, but it can turn into the opposite… these technological means are equally used to hide violence or cover up acts of injustice. I am wondering if combining these means with testimony and indigenous knowledge also offers new possibilities regarding the technologies of interpretation. Can these techniques somehow threaten the imbalance of who has the means and hegemony of reading?
EYAL: Before-and-after photography is a tool amongst many tools to engage with these problems. I think that when one comes to the question of technology, one has to develop a more nuanced understanding. For example, text and writing emerge roughly during the agricultural revolution. They emerge together with hierarchy, enslavement, patriarchy, and many other things that we are better off without.
Still, writing, like any technology, can be inhabited in a critical way. Cartography is another example. We tend to give too much ground to colonizers by understanding the map as a colonial instrument because colonizers used it. In fact, maps and many forms of indigenous cartography preexisted colonialism, and cartography existed already in different cultures long before it was appropriated and weaponized.
Does that mean we need to give up on it? That we need to leave it to those that occupied it? Maybe we rather reclaim it! I think we need to have a slightly more nuanced way of speaking about these things because otherwise critical inhabitation, or the use of technologies, is in danger of becoming a binary thing: human speech is as authentic an act as the registration of a camera or digital camera or satellite camera. Testimony, by definition, is a mediated process. There is no testimony without a space, an audience, sometimes a camera or a microphone; and the way it is conceived is always already through the institution’s protocols.
There was never an age of innocence, of the unmediated and non-technological. There are critical ways of inhabiting technology, there are revolutionary and de-colonial ways of inhabiting technologies. But I think we should be careful about posing them as alternatives to each other.
One of our partners in Namibia works to protect the intellectual property of indigenous cultures when their knowledge is being appropriated by big pharma industries to produce medicine. This is really a question of appropriation and they’re now claiming parts of the profit made through traditional knowledge.
The indebtedness that contemporary technologies have to indigenous knowledge means that some technologies have been non-colonial at some point, before they’ve been colonized. And we need to know how to extract and honor that.
MARIE: Readings of before-and-after images, documentary architecture as well as traumatic experiences all reconstruct an empty or lost space in-between two images. In your different fields, is there a connection between filling this gap—through retrieving memory—and healing? Between reconstruction and reparation?
EYAL: In contemporary jurisprudence there is a movement towards understanding the gap in memory as evidence in its own right. The erasure is caused by a kind of process that Matthew Fuller and I in our recent book Investigative Aesthetics call hyperaesthesia.
We know the phenomenon of anesthesia. Anesthesia is when you become numb, while hyperaesthesia means over-sensing. That moment where information is arriving at a speed at which you cannot process it, signal piles upon signal, trace erases trace, violence erases its own traces.
Before, in cases of both sexual and political violence, a witness that could not remember was dismissed as an unreliable witness. These days there’s an attempt to understand problems with recollection as evidence in its own right.
In psychotherapeutic trauma response there are different schools of thought. One of them is about habituation, meaning that one needs to reenact the trauma, return to it and learn to live with it. The other school prefers integration. Because traumatic memory is a disassociated memory, it is not anchored in space and time but is floating unmoored. This school recommends reembedding this fragment into the contextual story, that is to rebuild the world around that fragment, around the event. It’s not about returning to or reenacting the event but building its connective tissue to one’s life, so that it can actually exist in the past, as a recollection, rather than be always present in the present so to speak.
A lot of thinking about trauma and healing is built into ideas of restitution. Restitution—for colonial crimes, for racial violence, for sexualized violence—is a very current question. Trauma response is almost like a psychic mirror of the thought of how restitution, for example, of lands to the descendents of genocide victims in Namibia, does not simply mean giving the same field back, because that field—after desertification—is now dry and cannot support life.
We need to understand what return means. What is a “right of return”? Is it a return to the past? Is return a spatial term or a temporal term? Can one return to a situation as it was? So, for example, there’s an enormous amount of discussion within the Palestinian liberation movement around the meaning of reparation and return? In other diasporic cultures reparation may not even refer to a certain process of repatriation. It means another process in which the past is actually acknowledged and engaged and lived with. In other places, return and restitution mean environmental repair, the return to or reparation of a certain relation of people, culture and language to place.
I think it is always up to the affected community itself to define and to sketch the contours of what reparation should mean.
INES: Architectural design and the practice of building is also always torn between the potentially opposing efforts to preserve or to change and accommodate for a future generation. The preserved ruined site, or the photograph of the before are sometimes the only links to the past. They remind us of the necessity to return to them and to engage with the story they tell.
MARIE: That brings us back to the difference between gradual transformation and the moment of rupture you mentioned before Eyal. Or maybe to the relation between history as a sequence of catastrophes and the single event.
When looking at before-and-after images, violence often appears as one sudden moment of change. The event is seen as a cut in the tissue. How does this relate to the fact that every before is always only one instance in a whole chain of befores; is always the after of another, often violent past?
EYAL: First, we have to ask how we define violence and how violence is actually adjudicated and politicized. What is violence? A separate act or incident of eruptive violence that, effectively bracketed by before and after, creates an abnormal situation. Violence is then an abnormal eruption seen against the order of things as they should be, as they are naturalized or normalized to be. But of course, we need to put some pressure on that. What do you call normal? A state of ongoing repression in some places, a state of massive inequality and ambient racism, which should never be seen as the benchmark against which an act of infringement is being judged.
Are there acts of violence that are simply not registered in the material archaeology of the city or in the material archaeology of media and photography?
Again, let’s look at ambient racism. Let’s look at systemic forms of violence that actually exist as the norm rather than its rupture. What we see is two photographs of a state of crime. Firstly you have a photograph of a city in which, as in any city unfortunately, forms of systemic racialized violence, economic violence, inequality etc., are operative as formative forces. Simply by looking at the city, you can read so much from what is happening ambiently. Secondly, we look at an eruptive violent event. And there is indeed a problem with prioritizing forms of spectacular, explicit, or eruptive violence—because they normalize the ongoing and steady forms of violence.
I think that if we want to be within the paradigm of before-and-after images, that is the problem we need to look at: the before is not a neutral benchmark. It’s not the normal or norm against which the abnormal is articulated.
INES: In my current research I am confronted with a similar situation. I look at colonial architecture of the 1930s and 1940s, but also at sites of military battles and conflict during the Second World War in North Africa and the Middle East. It is connected again to my interest in Joséphine Baker’s activities that I mentioned earlier in relation to the tricolor found in the Haifa Casino building. Baker had signed up for the Free French forces (FFL). She was travelling —assigned as a spy—not only alone as a woman, but also as a black woman and a Jewish woman, as she had converted for her last marriage. Imagining that she travelled this region among war battles, among racialized and colonized violence, turns every image and scene I find in historical photographs into a key to understand the precariousness and danger of her activities.
I work with image archives and often with images taken by the military forces, the colonial, or occupying forces, British, French, Dutch, but also German forces. As in Eyal’s case in Namibia, often it’s the colonizers who had cameras and equipment and whose footage and photographic works have survived for their own reasons. I never see an image as an illustration; rather I zoom deep into their scene and backgrounds, trying to find their location, the time in which they were taken. I ask how they relate to an advance or a defeat that is registered in military history or in other stories I might find in written memoirs, newspaper articles and perhaps film footage. In the frame of this research, an image of a street scene struck me and led me to a work of digital restoration of the image. In 1935 Willem van de Poll’s photograph captured five people passing through one of the gates to the souk of the Tangier kasbah. They seem to be returning from the market. Further right in the image, a European woman is the only one walking the other way. The characters seem unrelated, each in his or her own world. Crop marks on the contact sheets found in the photographer’s archive suggest he wanted to crop the figure of the European woman from the image. Her presence in the frame may have interrupted the orientalist scene that van de Poll had spontaneously tried to capture. But rather than being an act of decolonization, the crop reinforces the colonial imagination. Removing the European woman creates the impression that the local figures may be thought of as ancient or out of time, though all these figures, colonizer and colonized, were caught up in the maelstrom of colonial modernism. Restoring her figure from the crop marks scribbled over them was a careful act of digital restoration to a “before” the photographer’s editing suggestions. With this act I also thought to challenge the notion of ownership of the image.
In my archival research I look for familiar landmarks, street names, dates. These photographs trace the European gaze similar to the East German before-and-after images. Sometimes the photographer caught the eyes of their subject across a colonial divide. I often feel modern architecture can look back the same way. When looking at archaeological sites, it is often very difficult to be sure about the state of their ruination. Is the damage on a temple in Carthage the result of a military action of the Second World War or has it occurred earlier? When war photographers depict gunshot holes and broken building parts of ancient sites, I am often thinking of Fenton’s images of the Crimean war in which the before and the after seem to be confused, or at least not be properly assigned to a historical moment.
MARIE: Thinking about contemporary benchmarks of imagination and visuality: Is it possible to transfer the before-and-after paradigm to the visual and digital landscape of today, to relate it to machine vision and synthetic images? Are we today confronted with another type of before-and-after images: The before or benchmark being all the images of the world turned into data sets, and the after being images that are created on the base of this information, that are determined and haunted by their visual “ground” or origin?
EYAL: When we think about machine vision and learning, we’re also looking at the relationship between existing data sets and prediction. The possibility of predicting future probabilities according to existing patterns like visual patterns, behavioral patterns, movement patterns, investment patterns and many more.
If you want to use automated vision to find for example a certain kind of banned munition like we did with Forensic Architecture, you need to train a machine vision classifier, an algorithm, in identifying that shape. For it to identify a particular shape as this shape, the machine vision system needs to be shown several thousands of images of the object, perhaps more.
It is similar to teaching a child to identify objects by showing the common denominator between all the multiple perspectives and all the possible states of say a phone: a dirty phone, a colorful phone, and so forth. In a certain moment the child will get to the point of recognizing that all those things are phones. And then, they are able see the next phone and recognize it as such.
This is a very simplified way of discussing how a classifier can go online and identify something. But what if you say: “This is an angry face”? Remember Trevor Paglen’s brilliant work on images. And then having people look online at angry faces. To create that classifier, you need to outsource labor, so probably you will go to a place where labor is very cheap when you ask people just to label angry faces online.
But what if one culture has a different perception of an angry face? And what if racialization makes us see people who appear angrier than they are? That’s where all the fear, prejudice and bias is being boogered in from society and reproduced: you know, garbage in, garbage out.
This is a very interesting way of projecting the problem of before-and-after images. Because we’re not talking about two images anymore. We’re speaking about millions. And again, we are thinking about the problem of interpretation as looking outside the frame.
MARIE: When we spoke about Marville, Ines mentioned the monitoring or staging of events that are about to take place. The anticipation but also the construction of a future. In a way the event between the before-and-after images is also always an empty space where a new future is about to take place. Can we use space in between the before and the after, in which this future is being decided, as a disruptive or speculative break?
Can the “before” create a space where all these ideas and preconstructions inherent in the structure of the past could be questioned and used as tools of anticipation? Could we thus try to predict things based on the past and the information in the gap in which this future is decided—similar to military simulation or training? For example, because an event is about to happen and people need to react to it in one way or another.
EYAL: I think it would be a wonderful thought experiment to speculate about simulation and the way you constitute your parameters. It’s like those training sites; when you try to understand an object through how dense it is, how tall it is, what kind of cultural imaginary is projected onto it. We need to ask in what way is training an act of anticipation. Does it mean turning anticipation into instinct? I think that is the basic idea of training.
You go through a narrow street; you know that in the training there were snipers in the upper floors. That becomes an instinct. When you go into a real city with living people you call for air support and destroy those top floors already way before anything has happened. The parameters have been set in a way that conditions our behavior, or at least nudges it toward a certain direction. We would need to study all the bias in the training: All the cultural, political, racial bias would effectively materialize itself in the before-and-after images. It might actually be through the way the “before” is communicated that we get a glimpse of what “after” might be possible in the future.