Until very recently, images were hard to come by. They had to be made by hand and there were more things in the world than there were images of them. Moreover, images used to have magical powers-they could heal or hurt. They not only shared in the powers of what they imaged, they amplified that power. Nowadays, it is not that we have more images than things in the world. It is that we no longer grasp the difference between things and their images.
For a long time, it was thought that the power of images derived from their similarity to what they imaged. It was also thought that the power of the image derived from the substance it shared with what it imaged. But photography destroyed such illusions. Photography allows us to see the difference between things and images of things, and between images of things and images of images. The art-image forces us to come to terms with the image’s relation to what it images. Its purpose is to indicate what has been left out in the process of making the image, what has been lost, destroyed, or mutilated in any act of making. The artistic photograph tells us more about the scene portrayed than a candid or documentary photograph of the same scene taken at the same time. Why? Because the experience of the artist is factored into the artistic image. The candid photograph can be turned into an artistic photograph by editing or being taken as the subject of another photograph or being collaged onto an other medium. Thus, is the image “worked through,” made to detach itself from its original scene, become an original in its own right, participate in its own unmaking. Thereby is the value of the original increased. New labor adds new value.
This, among other things, is what Hanna Hannah shows us in her tableaux.
She also shows us that every made thing has value even in its degraded condition.
Every made thing has value. This is true even of—especially of—waste, garbage, refuse, detritus, the orts, bits, and pieces of the world which have been refused, thrown away, cast aside, abjected. Think of the labor expended in acts of destruction: do even these acts of destruction add to the value of things destroyed? Is the abjected thing worthy of being redeemed?
The conditions of aftermath and abjection are more and more the normal condition of our world. More and more our world is made up of what has been thrown away, refused, abjected. Can these abjected objects be redeemed?
Look, and See.
Hayden White
Hanna Hannah 