Mladen Bizumic On The Intersection of Photography’s Past and Future

By Song-I Saba

Mladen Bizumic (b.1976) began documenting his life as a teenager in New Zealand using now-extinct Kodak film. Decades later, in his 2018 book Photo Boom Photo Bust, Bizumic reflects on the rise and fall of Kodak, the giant of the industry that put cameras in the hands of millions and made "Kodak moments'' a part of everyday life.

These days, you can find Mladen working on his multidisciplinary practice from his airy, immaculate Vienna studio, exploring cultural shifts through the lens of photography with poetic precision. His work delves deeply into the intersections between the material and digital, often using the history of photography as a means to explore broader societal issues.

Through a series of photographs, collages, and installations that spanned over several years, Bizumic plays with the formal qualities of image-making, creating hybrid images that blend the material and the digital, the historical and the contemporary. His lens-based works are conceptually driven, using the history of Kodak as a means to explore larger questions about the impact of technology on society, memory, and identity.

In the text for his 2015 exhibition, Kodak: Reorganisation Plan, held at Georg Kargl Box in Vienna, it is noted that “Kodak invented its own "death". It is this death that Bizumic brings to life, exploring the cadaver of Kodak with a morbid and sometimes violent interest. On the one hand, he turns it into a contemporary morality tale … and on the other, he re-engineers its corpse, Frankensteining it into a new and artistic form.”

By revisiting Kodak’s legacy, Bizumic invites us to reflect on how we engage with technology, nostalgia, and visual culture as a whole. Personally, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Mladen’s work since I first visited him in Vienna three years ago. I speak with the artist again for DoBeDo in order to ask him about his undying interest in Kodak’s past, his extensive photographic projects, as well as what lies in the future.

SS: Your interest in Kodak started early in life, and you shot on Kodak 160 VC and 400 VC until they went extinct. How do you think shooting on film has influenced your - and your generation’s - visual habits?

MB: Kodak was everywhere in the 1990s. I began shooting with Kodak when I was fifteen. I recall the profound slowness of analogue photography—a process so deliberate and measured that it strongly contrasts with the rapid immediacy of today's digital imaging. My early fascination with Kodak 160 VC and 400 VC wasn't just a commitment to a medium but a deep immersion into a realm where each photo demanded careful thought, each click of the shutter a conscious act of faith. It is a well-known fact: Kodak now exists in a state of near-extinction. In terms of the analogue production, there was a temporal delay between capturing a photograph and revealing its content, dictated by the development process. It could take a day or even two to obtain my negatives.

Today, the pace is incredibly fast; everything has accelerated. This change is of course extended to how we relate to each other. I cherish analogue qualities, yet every generation has its own language, its own means of representing the world. For the painters of the past, the advent of photography presented a multifaceted potential, a transformation that irrevocably altered the course of art history. We have been living through a similar upheaval, one driven by the relentless advance of digital cameras and iPhones and, increasingly, the looming spectre of artificial intelligence. The slowness of analogue photography, with its inherent demands for patience and contemplation, has left an indelible mark on my visual habits. It taught me to cherish the unique textures of reality. For me, art, at its core, offers an empathic engagement—an invitation extended to others, enabling them to partake in the very experiences I hold dear.

SS: Yours is a conceptual study of a medium, a monopoly, and its demise. You are also interested in what followed; that interest is expressed in works such as ‘Where Instagram Lives’ or ‘Kodak Employed 140,000 People, Instagram 13’. What interested you most about photographing these sites of production?

MB: My works are deeply personal explorations of the seismic shifts within the world of photography. Kodak, once a titan with a workforce of 140,000, now reduced to a faint echo amidst the roar of digital progress, serves as a poignant reminder of how fleeting a monopoly on culture can be. But my fascination goes beyond the relics of fallen giants; it's about the haunting silence left behind. How do we create something new on the ruins of the past?

"Where Instagram Lives” is particularly close to my heart. It features hundreds of shredded CMYK photographs, each depicting the Luleå Data Centre, one of Meta’s many holdings isolated 150 km south of the Arctic Circle, symbolising the dystopian reality of our digital age. In this sterile fortress of the contemporary image factory, the ghost of analogue's past confronts the terribly unified image resolution of our Instagram present. What captivates me most about these data centres is their tangible physicality. They are built from countless servers, cables, and hard drives, making them the infrastructure of our new digital era. Today, human labour is replaced by automated processes, and the personal connection to each photograph is supplanted by the hidden logic of algorithms. Through my art, I seek to bridge these worlds—it's a highly experimental take on the transformation of photography.

SS: You have said that you choose to use analogue photography as a tool to communicate a distance between the moment of capture and analysis, even when the subject matter is digital, as opposed to it being a nostalgic decision. Are you personally ever nostalgic for material processes of the past? Have you ever explored that relation in the reverse?

MB: That's a great question! The material processes, with their deliberate slowness, aren't relics to be mourned but integral parts of a rich, intricate tapestry that still shapes my reality. The analogue, with its embodied rituals and inherent delays, allows me to engage with time in a way that digital immediacy simply can't replicate. In my series "MoMA's Baby," I've explored the reverse—the infiltration of digital sensibilities into analogue practices. This isn't just simple mimicry but a deliberate interplay, a synthesis where the immediacy of the digital weaves its way into the tactile realm of the analogue. The resulting work is a dialogue between the past and the present. For me, this relationship between analogue and digital isn't one of opposition but of evolving interconnection. It's a testament to how each medium informs and reshapes the other.

SS: In your book ‘Photo Boom Photo Bust’ you touch upon Jacques Derrida’s concept of Hauntology. How does the idea that all photographs are “hauntological”, unable to exist without the trace of an absent past, inform your work? What sets photography apart as a medium in this respect?

MB: From its very inception, photography has been enshrouded in a paradoxical blend of the haunted and the scientific, the objective and the subjective, the past and the present. It emerged as a medium promising to capture reality with an objective precision, yet simultaneously it complicated the meaning of that same "reality" making it intrinsically haunted. The photograph, as an imprint of light, is a scientific achievement that paradoxically reveals the intangible. This hauntological dimension of photography is an attribute that sets it apart from other disciplines. Unlike painting or sculpture, which might represent an idealised version of reality, photography is indexically linked to the real, and the absent underscores its unique place in the realm of visual art. For me, photography, as a medium, is uniquely suited to this exploration of hauntology. It is a testament to the paradox of presence and absence, a tangible artefact that speaks of what is no longer there. That said, I find myself presently engrossed in delving into volumes that contemplate the alternative "futures" of photography, such as Vilém Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Ariella Azoulay's Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. These works, filled with profound reflections, are most worthy of recommendation.

SS: The book outlines a dramatic cultural shift from “preserve memories” to “share experiences” when it comes to photography as a popular pastime. What are you drawn to capturing and photographing most in your own life.

MB: I enjoy combining relics of past images with present ones, creating a sense of temporal coexistence in my collage series such as 'Heritage Creation' and 'Sometimes Old, Sometimes New.' These images are unfixed and unsettled, visual enigmas. I'm interested in why something becomes a cliché, a collective, popular voice, so obvious that it becomes invisible, fitting perfectly within an algorithmic logic. What's truly interesting is what doesn't fit the existing model—the glitch that, once recognized, becomes fixed. I appreciate the unfixed, the unknown, believing that if it's interesting to me, it might be interesting to others as well.

Currently, I'm captivated by fragile UNESCO sites, which remain vulnerable to the climate emergency despite our preservation efforts. Equally compelling are the manicured lawns of golf courses—meticulously maintained yet starkly contrasting with the natural landscapes they replace. These spaces reflect colonial legacies, illustrating how the West imposes its will on the environment, reshaping it to fit aesthetic ideals and recreational purposes. My focus now extends to how to depict lithium, celebrated as a ‘green’ alternative for batteries yet fraught with environmental contradictions. Its extraction, while ostensibly supporting sustainability, reveals a troubling reality: a deeply taxing process on the environment. This paradox, where a material lauded for its benefits comes at a substantial ecological cost, mirrors the broader absurdity of our time, especially when sodium-based batteries are cheaper, widely accessible, and more sustainable than both traditional fossil fuels and lithium technologies.

SS: In an interview with Fiona Liewehr, you mention a new term, “nowstalgia”, do you think that a hallmark of today’s culture is a yearning for an idealised present?

MB: Today’s culture is characterised by a relentless pursuit of immediacy. This pursuit often manifests as a desire for an idealised present—to capture and preserve the fleeting moments of now. It is a reflection of our anxieties about the passage of time and experiences that seem more vivid and fulfilling in retrospect. However, art is not about quantity; it is about quality. In this sense, everything remains the same as it was 100 years ago.

SS: "Lászlò Moholy-Nagy predicted that the illiterate of the future would not be the person unable to read or write, but the person ignorant of how photography signifies.” (p. 113) This prediction holds even more weight in the age of the internet, AI and deep fakes. Do you worry about these new technologies and their impact on our ways of perceiving reality?

MB: I fear that László's prediction has proven to be entirely accurate. The issue extends far beyond the act of perceiving reality; it ventures into the realm of shaping existence itself according to dimensions yet beyond our imagination. May fortune extend its reluctant hand to us all!