About Time: Sensing the Crisis in Nophoto’s El último verano

A vast and often contradictory field of irony, fear, cynicism, willfulness, resignation, optimism, outrage, empowerment, to name only a few, were some first responses to a shared condition collapsed into a term readily identifiable to others living through the same: la crisis.  

 

In the summer months of 2012, the members of Nophoto photography collective launched their online project El último verano (The Last Summer) in response to the Spanish government’s most aggressive cutbacks to social programs in democratic history. Published online as a working project before its exhibition the following fall, the original weblog brings together some one hundred images framed in its prospectus as an uneasy farewell to summer leisure in expectation that vacation will become an exceptional privilege in the coming years. Counting on daily online submissions of video and photography from nine participating artists (Jonás Bel, Paco Gómez, Jorquera, Carlos Luján, Juan Millás, Eduardo Nave, Eva Sala, Juan Santos, Juan Valbuena), the project aims to convey the impact of the crisis on everyday life while Nophoto’s members were apart from one another, traveling to different destinations in Spain and abroad. 

After the cutbacks announced by the Government last July 11^th, NOPHOTO has decided to document the evolution of the most discouraging, inhospitable summer in our recent history. In case there would be no others after this one. In case summer disappears from our lives. Therefore, this blog narrates an unsettling state. Its contents are fragile and discontinuous, associated with the precarious nature of the times we live in. It aims to describe and recall the emotions of that experience on its way to extinction, which we call summer. (Web)

 

Imminent losses organize the present in El último verano, losses that have not yet been incurred in every case but are often sensed as the structure of what is to come. The images portray everyday happenings in life as they disappear in the wave of reductions to public spending on healthcare, education, social services, and pensions, and amid labor reforms that favor “flexibility” or pluri-employment across sectors. In them, viewers find ways of life that no longer are and others perceptibly on the cusp of disappearance in the tide of aggressive neoliberal reforms. They comprise a collective document to a parenthetical time, or summer on standby, in the middle of a grave crisis. At first sight, the hodgepodge of matters treated in the project proves difficult to summarize with any certainty, other than as a portrait of the burdensome ethos of the crisis and its burgeoning sense of loss. Some photographs address the growing phenomenon of emigration while others provide accounts of personal reflections on memories and the imagined future. Documents to economic hardship and social exclusion, in a similar vein to what Germán Labrador Méndez has called subprime life histories in circulation in the media, are the subject of select images, but not all, such as Jonás Bel’s portrait of a worried construction worker on the record rate of unemployment (“27 de julio, Madrid. 5.693.100”) or his comment on the growing numbers of homeless in Madrid (“26 de julio, Madrid. 1.863”). Suggested in the project description, these prospects are often pessimistic, captured in Paco Gómez’s photograph of a white flag flying over a castle and in the caption, a father’s explanation to his son that “Spain has surrendered” (“11 de agosto, Antequera. Málaga. Rendición”). The project’s heterogeneous contents do not lament the disappearance of summer leisure, per se, in a labor market that requires perpetual work. Rather, they provide a collective reflection on the structure and sense of precarity, fragility, and the retreat from social wellbeing. As such, the collective losses sensed in El último verano are plural and in no way reducible to a single set of contextual features or losses across the photographs, but extend to disappearing ways of life often portrayed through the photographers’ affective attachments to them.

Fig. 1. Eduardo Nave, “23 de agosto, Cheste. El verano pasado.”

Fig. 2. Jonás Bel, “21 de agosto, Madrid. Se vende.”

It may come as no surprise, then, that within this shifting terrain of expected losses in times of crisis, several images draw from personal memories and worn photographs from the past as they speak to an uncertain present. Others imagine the future for today’s youth and tell the experience of the elderly in reflections on the passing of one generation to the next. It is a present evocative of many times, memories, and predictions in such a variety that Eduardo Nave’s sad remembrance of his grandmother’s choice to retire from splashing in the pool at age eighty-eight (fig. 1) (“23 de agosto, Cheste. El verano pasado”) shares its place in perceptible symbiosis with Jonás Bel’s spliced image of “property for sale” signs in Madrid (fig. 2) (“21 de agosto, Madrid. Se vende”). This unlikely comparison, as any other in the project, works to remind viewers that its exploration of the subjective experience of the crisis extends well beyond losses attributable directly to the markets and governance. Instead, what structures the sense of fragility in the photographs are the subject’s affective ties to disappearing ways of life, in sadness and disillusionment, joy in escape and appreciation of what one still has. Thereby the project gathers together subtle moments from the sensory pleasures associated with summer, in Eva Sala’s untitled photograph of a napkin from an ice cream parlor (“19 de julio, Gandía”), to uneasy moments of concern for others, in Paco Gómez’s disturbing encounter with a kind man who suffers a psychotic episode moments later (“30 de julio. Rascafría. Madrid. Desesperación”). Viewed in its entirety, El último verano is an estranged and estranging collective portrait of the historical present in waiting, a kind of impasse framed for viewers as the doldrums of summer during times of crisis.

An impasse, writes Lauren Berlant, consists in a historical present of the ordinary, everyday occurrences “shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on” (8). Unlike an event punctuated by transcendental importance, the impasse for Berlant is comprised of the usual and sometimes banal happenings of everyday life experienced as a perpetual crisis in which subjects find themselves adapting to new circumstances as best they can, aiming to get by. This is not to say, however, that the impasse is of menial importance. For, as the photographs show, the subject traverses the everyday structured by an ongoing crisis in which social wellbeing, if not survival, is at stake. In Spain, government in the interest of neoliberal economics has induced greater poverty, precarity, and downward mobility, which inflects the substance of portraits on the collective losses recounted in El último verano. In its imaginative stories and socially committed documentary portraits, among others, El último verano sketches out a kind of impasse through loss due to “social catastrophe, when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust” to new terms of daily life (200). It portrays, in other words, the burdensome ethos of a crisis in medias res in which minor daily occurrences prove largely significant for the ways in which they are inflected by the crisis. I am particularly interested in these photographs, drawing from Berlant’s notion of the impasse, for their compelling demonstration that adaptation in an ongoing crisis bears no specific formula, but consists in surveying the present, assessing one’s affective attachments to ways of life, and whether consciously or not, making adjustments for economic survival. To Berlant’s argument, I will add that these maneuvers in the impasse in El último verano are developed intimately in relation to times that evoke other temporalities in this affective survey and reconfiguration of the subject’s estranged relation to the present. In them, viewers are witness to an unsettled present destabilized by macro processes developing elsewhere, in government and the markets, but which condition affective responses located here in the experience and perception of subjects, presented in text and image.

Summer itself is a kind of impasse, not only of escape from daily routine and work, which often involves travel, as the photographers based in Madrid were apart from one another. The summer of 2012 also marks a specific historical present in which this hiatus is synchronized with the government’s recent announcement of further austerity measures before adjourning for vacation, which anticipates that the fall season will bring more bad news; it is the sensible structure of the moment’s historicity in the present, of a crisis with more to come. Juan Valbuena provides a poignant observation on how the long duration of the summer months equated to a cyclical holding pattern as Spain faced a potential bailout from the European Central Bank. The photographer comments on the fluctuations of interest rates and the markets in his image of a laptop computer screen that displays headline news from El País on the rising risk premium, which has served as one thermometer for the crisis (“20 de julio, Madrid. Otro viernes negro”). In the caption, viewers learn that another Black Friday is the product of the weekly rhythms of state administration and its power of decision to intervene in the markets: “This has gone on for months: on the weekend the smartest guys in Europe meet to save the Euro, on Monday and Tuesday things calm down… on Wednesday and Thursday they don’t know if they should bail us out or drown us, and Friday looks like the apocalypse…” The administrative time cycle of state and European governance structures the sensible burden of the crisis in weekly repetition, which amounts to yet another Black Friday. The cyclical tempo of a perpetual crisis on the brink of disaster translates into factually reported news that, for Valbuena, determines the temporality of lived experience, particularly, of speculations on a grim forecast for the future. In Valbuena’s photograph, news of the European Union’s power of decision to intervene with a rescue package for Spain is responsible in part for conjugating the temporal outlook for the immediate present and future. That is, the sensible mood of the historical present portrayed in Valbuena’s photograph—or, the micro experience of a temporal impasse marked by crisis—is inflected by macro processes, economic policies, and reported news of forecasts. Indeed, as further conversations on the possibility of a bailout package for Spain were delayed until even the fall and winter months, the Black Friday lived in repetition extended well beyond the summer vacation hiatus. As such, the cyclical temporality of the impasse is sensed first as an affective intensity for a present that perpetually hedges on the brink of disaster.

As other images convey, specialized knowledge of macroeconomics is not required to sense how the opaque abstractions of market fluctuations translate into lived experience. Far from the markets, the mood of perpetual crisis may be found in the most imaginative of narratives. In El último verano, viewers discover ironic plans on how to prepare for an apocalypse, just in case, by buying less at back-to-school sales or by escaping to a paradise island until heavenly bureaucrats manage to sort out “all hell breaking loose.” For, even consumerism and bureaucracy will survive the end of the world in this eschatological imaginary. Along with the project’s moments of irony such as these, the images include accounts on the inflection of the crisis in everyday perception, in Jonás Bel’s uncanny encounter with an extinct species that seems to laugh cynically at humankind (“2 de septiembre, Madrid. Extinción”). So too does Paco Gómez perceive the present as an estranged time that has met its end in his lighthearted account on training his family to inhabit Mars as a more hospitable planet than Earth (fig. 3) (“18 de agosto, Embalse del Burguillo, Ávila. Curiosity”). The science fiction fantasy, told with humor, recalls the photographer’s fond memories playing at the beach, as his children do now, in what collapses futurism and memory into an intergenerational narrative of difference and nostalgic loss from one to the next. In these photographs, the familiarity and strangeness of everyday experience, recounted with imagination, proves a sensible indicator of how the crisis has come to bear upon different spheres of life, indeed ungrounds them, and often serves to structure this experience and perception in contradictory ways. These choice images propel imagination into the future from accounts of the past, from Gómez’s childhood and Bel’s reference to the extinction of species in pre-historical times, both of which are inseparably collapsed into the subject’s assessment of the present as an uneasy, inhospitable time to be living in. 

Fig. 3. Paco Gómez, “18 de agosto, Embalse del Burguillo, Ávila. Curiosity.”

In other images, stories of downward mobility are not simple grievances on the deteriorating conditions of material comforts, as one might expect. Rather, they expose the remains of a naturalized belief in forms of historical progress, understood as the expected improvement of economic conditions and the quality of life from one generation to the next. Jorquera names seven differences between his father’s circumstance and his own through a double image of a photograph taken of his father in the foreground to the Twin Towers in the Manhattan skyline in 1974 (12 de agosto, Nueva York. “Las siete diferencias”). Faded in yellow and cyan colors that visibly mark the passing of time, the double image places into evidence, too, a doubling of the photographer’s circumstance and his father’s at the same age. Instability in the job market, paying rent for life instead of owning one’s home, and uncertain retirement plans are underscored in the seven contrasts in the quality of life between two generations, between past and present. The image’s relay between two times is marked by the concluding point in the caption on the presence and absence of the Twin Towers, the only historical referent mentioned in these seven points, as the foremost symbol of American capital now gone. Whereas Jorquera’s father had his photograph taken in front of the towers as a souvenir for his travels to New York, the photographer himself “saw these same towers fall, live on television” in what relates the passing of one generation to the next through a historical event in which the absence of the towers today is relationally invested with a disappearing way of life. The experience of the subject, related in terms of quality of life, is recounted in Jorquera’s photograph as grafted within a macro narrative of economic dominance and its decline. The biopolitical dimension of this history, one of a father and son and their experience in two times, is cognitively associated with a macro history of hegemonic political power and capital sustaining a belief in better times to come. Jorquera’s photograph and text suggest provocatively in this doubling of image and tower that the decaying remains of a historical narrative on capitalist-driven progress are embedded within this intergenerational transference. In it, the perceptible loss of great expectations for better times is sensed first with disillusionment.

As viewers may begin to see, several images speak of an intergenerational inheritance, whether from the experience of the elderly, children today, or uncertain speculations about the future. Such is the case in Paco Gómez’s photograph of his father picking tomatoes from his oversized garden (“30 de julio. Navaluenga, Ávila. Los tomates”). Gómez remarks that his father’s experience as a child “created a fear of hunger,” which persists today as he tends his garden that could easily feed over ten families. In a clear allusion to the years of dictatorship, the caption relates the disproportionate size of this land to its owner’s childhood experience marked by hardship and a lack of food. As such, the photographer observes that his father has started to teach his grandson how to care for the garden, noting that this knowledge, with upkeep, could provide them with a source of food and the pleasures of “zucchini and cucumbers to die for.” Teaching care in this tender narrative at once underpins an intergenerational transference of knowledge in a return to rural ways of life while it fuels unsettling projections about the future conditioned by the subject’s experience in the past. In this sense, the crisis may evoke a sense of return to the historical past, in hunger or economic strife, as the conditions from which to prepare for the perceived future, even if the precautions seem disproportionate, like the dimensions of the father’s garden in the photographer’s view. The knowledge taught from grandfather to grandson is, in effect, a care for the inheritance of the historical past, though prompted by an affective response in the fear of hunger. In this sense, viewers may begin to see contemplation of responsibility in one generation to the next that perceives in the future the experience of the past and, perhaps despite it or in preparation for it, develops forms of care in the transference of knowledge that adjust to projected needs.

Perceptions of the present, past, and future often coexist in the impasse of the financial crisis as it is experienced in the first person. Indeed, different senses of time serve to structure the present impasse in these photographs, whether in teachings on care, disillusionment for the loss of better times, or the sensed unending repetition of disaster. Eva Sala provides a reflection on temporality and the future in her photograph of a fortune-telling machine seen during her travels through India (“27 de agosto, Rishikesh. Pasado-presente-futuro”). Studying this mechanical box adorned with Hindu deities, a clock at center, and several electric switches and gauges, the viewer gathers that a willing client would pay to hear a recording of one’s fortune spoken through the attached headphones. Fortune telling or the prediction of the future is staged here, albeit unconvincingly, for economic gain. It provides the machinic outcome of a future that is already recorded at present, available to those willing to pay a fee—and thus, is observed with irony in the photographer’s simple caption, “No comment.” But, the photograph also suggests the sensible outlook of an uncertain future in times of crisis, which is outlined in the project description to El último verano. As such, the photographer relays the unpredictable as expected, in which the temporality of an uncertain present opens up radically to associations with the past as a projection of the future—a temporal symptom of the crisis. Similarly to Gómez’s father who perceives the future as an echo of his childhood experience. Similarly to market projections that speculate about the future and no eventual end to a perpetual crisis. And, following the growing trend of emigration, similarly to Jonás Bel’s wonder about whether the granddaughter pictured in his photograph, accompanied by her grandfather peering through binoculars at the horizon, will one day move to the Americas and remember these moments fondly from across an ocean (“10 de agosto, Cabo Sardão (Portugal). Porvenir”). For, the circumstance of the crisis, it may be said, unsettles the present in anticipation for an uncertain future that often establishes the tone of perception for the subject in the present from both memory and experience. In all cases, the sense of time prompts action as subjects modify their practices, routines, and habits, making adjustments for survival as fit.

As these temporalities and their moods mediate perception, viewers are reminded that the consequences of the crisis today are also material and corporeal. Practices come about with adjustments made to one’s own way of life. In his play on the genre of advertising, Juan Valbuena turns the camera lens toward himself for an ironic announcement written in the third person, which sells the photographer as both a service provider with experience in “travels, family albums, and group projects” and an appealing object of consumption with qualifications and references (“13 de septiembre, Madrid. Hombre anuncio”). His shirtless self-portrait mimics the genre of auto-photo snapshots circulating primarily on the web and social networks—often, as is the case here, taken of one’s own reflection in the mirror—in which self-image is constructed for public consumption. Valbuena stresses this comparison with humor in a description of his youthful tastes (“who still prefers cola-cao over coffee, and rub-on decals over tattoos,” pictured on his shoulder). Here, however, the construction of self is quite literally a product for sale. Valbuena’s announcement for the “artist for rent” calls attention to the market logic of utility in which a given photographer’s work to produce albums for clients is more valued than the same photographer’s artistic production, a point reiterated in a separate image in which he reports feeling “welcomed and well paid” as a wedding photographer (“3 de agosto, Bilbao. Bienvenido y bienpagao”). In this manner, and in the suggestive popular reference to prostitution in the term bienpagao, the personal details included in this announcement on the subject for rent not only underscore the objectifying character of the markets, or bodies and services trafficked as merchandise; Valbuena’s self-portrait also augments marketability, with irony, to the extent that it brings to the fore self-objectification as valuable know-how in a competitive market. This point on the knowledge of selling oneself brings me to another image in comparison.

Eva Sala publishes a photograph and text of a house for sale in rural Asturias (“22 de julio, Godina”), which in its straightforward visual framing of the property and the language used in its description, draws from the genre of advertisements to sell real estate in market competition. True to this model, the advert highlights the uniqueness and advantages of the property in a succinct economy of words: “Views of the sea. Coal stove. Workshop,” including an orchard. Sala twists this genre, however, by personalizing it, by providing information on the current homeowners (her aunt Ana Mari, uncle Manolo, and their dog Ringo) and her positive experience picking plums in the orchard, otherwise excluded from an advertisement of this kind. If Sala’s photograph seems misplaced within this project, it is because it reminds viewers of the unclear distinction between the prescribed role of the artist as author of artistic production and, in contrast, the photograph’s mimicry of an advertising genre in which the traces of artistic authorship are erased. In this sense, Valbuena’s and Sala’s advertisements shuttle between the signature of the photographer as artist and the plain use value of photography for the market, to sell and make a living. Whereas Valbuena’s announcement moves towards self-objectification for marketable value, Sala’s advertisement takes the object for sale and personalizes its competitive features. Both images highlight playfully, in other words, the entrepreneurial know-how of marketability, whether “selling oneself” as an object or service-provider, or positioning an object or service for sale in market competition.

Viewed in this manner, these lines of exploration contribute to questioning the inflection of capitalist exchange in social experience and artistic creation. Economic self-sufficiency in these works is exhibited through the knowledge and practice of marketability—or, the positioning of objects and selves to be desired in competition. In them, the uniqueness, qualifying features, and use-value of the house and photographer operate to produce desire through a double movement that personalizes the object and objectifies the person as competitive capital in each. Viewers may witness, in other words, the operative mechanisms of a market that conjugates the images in the construction and critique of desire in market competition. According to this logic in the images, the more self-objectified the subject, the more desirable he is; the more personalized the object, as well. Nevertheless, as the images exhibit the construction of subjects through the knowledge and practice of economic survival, we are reminded that this is not merely a matter of representation, but bears material consequences. For, both photographs and their captions exhibit the molding of entrepreneurial subjects in the idealized image of neoliberalism’s fully autonomous, homo oeconomicus in order to survive in market competition. Enacted and critiqued in these photographs are specific practices of self-sufficiency that underpin an entrepreneurial knowledge on how to position an object or subject to be desirable for their competitive capital. That is, they draw from ideal practices molded in the image of a fully autonomous subject, by which I mean one imagined from neoliberal economic policies demanding self-sufficiency and flexibility to market demand. It is a form of self-sufficiency in neoliberal thought, I will add, following Foucault, in which the autonomy of one’s work in a precarious market shares its place within the presumed autonomy of all citizens’ social wellbeing that has inaugurated cutbacks in government funding to public education, healthcare, pensions, and social programs as a whole. Practices and knowledge of market competition and desire in this case, which Berlant would call adjustments made for survival in the temporal impasse, form an inextricable part of the shaping of subjects in the likeness of neoliberal doctrine’s ideal citizen.

The financial economy, however, marks a terrain of economic activity that extends beyond the material exchange of services and goods alone. One of its properties of projection, or speculation, depends on economic forecasts about the future of investment and, on a macro scale, possibilities for development. Big business and its decisive power to stall or foster development is portrayed in Paco Gómez’s stunning photograph of a young woman, eyes closed peacefully, lying down on train tracks (fig. 4) (“24 de agosto, Arroyo-Malpartida. Cáceres. Vía muerta”). In a corporate decision made based on profits and losses, which “develop some areas and sink others into misery,” the caption explains, the train to Lisbon will no longer pass through this small Extremaduran village, which will certify its extinction to become a ghost town. In this manner, we learn from the text that the calm expression of the photographed subject plays upon the viewer’s expectations for risk in which life and death are at stake—the great perceived risk of her position despite her relaxed state, and her tranquil, pale countenance that suggests no risk, as the train will no longer pass through these rails. High risk, in economic and political decisions on development, has determined that it proves unprofitable to invest further in the town’s connectivity to the Peninsula’s two capital cities. In this manner, the viewer’s speculation about the girl’s serene expression and the sensible risk that her position conveys—as either a portrait of the dead or a death to come—is embedded within a greater history of waning ways of life for the town’s residents due to macro scale political and economic decisions. It provides an image of a certified death between two times, within a temporal parenthesis whose outcome is known to us at present. In doing so, it relays between the subject and the collective experience of the crisis as loss, from the photographed woman to whole ways of life for the town’s residents. In this story of modernity and development, and their micro scale consequences, corporate and political decision-making is called into question for values driven by profits, investment, and risk, as a collective present on the verge of extinction for this small town.

Fig. 4. Paco Gómez, “24 de agosto, Arroyo-Malpartida. Cáceres. Vía muerta.”

Until now I have addressed some terms of the markets and neoliberal governance as an account of perceptible losses and adjustments to life in El último verano, but if the photographs provide some indication, these inseparable spheres of activity should not be treated independently from that of the media. As the catchword crisis has been coined in circulation in the media, El último verano often takes up the news as its point of departure in its heterogeneous account of the crisis in everyday life. As summer unfolds, some photographs are grounded in specific events reported in the newspapers like the seasonal wildfires in Spain’s arid inland, the deaths of Neil Armstrong and Santiago Carrillo, and even relevant debates in daily sports news. For the exhibition “El último verano” held in Madrid the following fall season, Nophoto issued a lengthy newspaper compiling these images in a printed format that presents itself as an alternative news source on the collective experience of the crisis, not least the relation of this experience in tension with that of the daily news.

Fig. 5, Eva Sala, “23 de agosto. Rishikesh. Sacrificio.”

Three exemplary images come to mind, which offer straightforward criticism of the government’s discourse on sacrifice in austerity measures, circulating ad nauseum in the mainstream media. Eva Sala’s compilation of press headlines on “sacrifice” during her travels abroad provides viewers with a photograph of a statue in India in which the figure’s hands peel apart the skin of a trap door opening to the heart (fig. 5) (“23 de agosto. Rishikesh. Sacrificio”). The repetition of news headlines on “sacrifice” in this caption echoes a similar repetition in the statue whose red trap door is designed to open and close, exposing the heart time and again. It is a form of repetition that draws from talk of sacrifice in the news as one measure of the government’s battery of cutbacks to social programs over an extended period of time. Likewise, the predominant discourse on sacrifice is addressed in Juan Santos’ photograph of an anonymous subject wearing a tee-shirt that critiques the political rhetoric in the media on Spaniards having outlived their means: “I live above my possibilities, but very much below my level” (“25 de agosto. Casillas de Coria, Cáceres. Posibilidades”). In it, the photographer uses the camera as a tool to reject critically the dominant discourse on the government’s economic policies that equate to “a loss of intelligence” in Santos’ words. That is, both posit a critique of the government’s discursive strategies to justify austerity measures, the saturation of this discourse on sacrifice in the news media (i.e., a saturation troped with irony and critique), and the gulf existing between this discourse and the markets’ bearing on real lived experience.

Fig. 6. Carlos Luján, “14 de julio, Algorta. En sábado.”

In a third chosen photograph that grapples with the crisis explicitly, viewers find a critical response to the rise in police presence and violent intervention in civilian demonstrations protesting the government’s austerity measures. In his reflection on the penetration of the state into private life, Carlos Luján photographs the televised image of the anti-riot police, which serves as the colorful focus of an otherwise shaded living room (fig. 6) (“14 de julio, Algorta. En sábado”). The photograph provides a clear denouncement of the police state in the violent dispatch of force against protesters. But as the television brings public matters into one’s private home, the photograph also provides a suggestive Foucauldian turn on the invasion of self-policing into private life where the state ends, or of the molding of subjects in civil society through correction, whether imposed by the state apparatus or one’s own choice. In this sense, viewers return to the comforts of the living room and television pictured here, and to the question of democracy as a mediated spectacle—dually, in the photograph taken from home and in the image of the street, the loci in which political action blurs any clear distinction between the active and passive roles of the spectator engaged in political struggle against an authoritarian state. In Luján’s caption, this biopolitical struggle is mediated in affective terms, in police violence that aims to produce “apathy and impotence” among indignant protesters.

Folded within the contents of these photographs and captions are the complex interfaces between the media, the markets, and the government, which prove essential to understanding their critique. They suggest just how mediated and mediatized one’s experience with the crisis can be, if not representative democracy itself, even as it is lived in the first person through a saturation of data and discourse in the news that does not correspond to the subject’s experience and perception in the present. This gulf contributes to the estranging sense of the temporal impasse. For, in countless other photographs, one finds a similar tension between the (macro) quantities and measures of the crisis so prevalent in the news media today, often cited directly in the titles and captions of the photographs, and the macro’s immeasurable effects in lived experience. There exists, in other words, a tension that requires unpacking here between that which is measurable, indexed in textual citations of economic figures and statistics, and that which is unquantifiable by market fluctuations in subjective experience—the affective ties to ways of life and livelihoods on the verge of disappearance.

Nearly six million unemployed. A 15% increase in prostitution. A 62% increase in services provided for the needy. These quantities of figures and statistics cited in El último verano prove insufficient to convey the true impact of the crisis, which perhaps it goes it without saying, is where the images do their interpretive work. Yet, these data are often presented to viewers as if borrowing from the paradigm through which they are presented in the media, as endowed with an instrumental function to convey, albeit inadequately, their implications for lived experience. For example, the dire outlook for the arts and culture sector is recounted in a personal narrative in Eduardo Nave’s “16 de julio, Madrid. 53 fotografías,” in which the closing of the gallery where he exhibited his work amounts to much more than the cited value of his fifty-three photographs held in temporary storage. These photographs have nowhere to go for the moment, he acknowledges discouragingly, not a warehouse, much less another gallery. Similarly, Juan Valbuena’s caption to his photograph of an abandoned movie theater comments on the impact of the VAT tax increase from 8% to 21% on cinema ticket sales, which anticipates the closing of movie theaters in downtown Madrid, except for perhaps the commercial cineplexes in shopping malls accessible by car (“13 de julio, Madrid. Sueño de una noche de verano”). The percentage increase frames the pessimistic outlook for film under the aegis of market competition, which Valbuena laments as an expected loss for the city’s cultural offering if one compares the revenues of blockbuster theaters to those of independent film houses. Told through his personal desire to live one day within walking distance from a movie theater in downtown Madrid, Valbuena’s reflection frames his own expected loss, and the disappointment it evokes, in relation to that of Madrid’s cultural landscape. With a separate measure, in Eduardo Nave’s black-and-white portrait of a traveler with his suitcases in Madrid-Barajas Airport, the photographer quantifies the distance of his brother’s separation from his wife and son—precisely 8,003 km—before a flight to the Americas where he has been relocated for work (“11 de septiembre, T4 Barajas. Muy lejos”). The growing phenomenon of emigration is captured here as an intimate story in which quantified distance indicates but cannot adequately describe the emotions and uncertainties of separation. All three narrate some form of personal loss in the immediate present and future, reported in percentages and numbers, and the photographers’ affective ties or responses to them.

These images find their particularity of the quantifiable in economic losses, percentage tax increases, or kilometric distance, and their immeasurable effects: in the unsettling doubt about whether one can continue making a living from a current profession; in truncated desires interwoven with the expected denuding of Madrid’s cultural scene; and in missing a loved one far away. In the photographs, viewers are reminded that micro narratives comprise intimate portraits of a greater history that cannot be quantified or measured in the data presented to us as the rise and fall of markets; and, yet, the abstractions of numeric figures in these works indeed provide some index of their real lived effects as they are invested with the terms of loss, separation, and speculation about the future. Nowhere more prevalent is this economic inflection observed than in the framing of moments of friendship and enjoyment presented in calculable terms. In a piece that captures an afternoon spent with a gathering of friends, Eduardo Nave provides a lively, accelerated stop-shot video of a paella cooking on a wood stove, with itemized prices for each ingredient to serve fifteen to the sum of 21.68 Euros (“24 de agosto, Cheste. Paella para 15”). Contrary to austerity measures, Nave comments, this is the price of one day of happiness with others. In an inversion to some previous entries, in which the measureable is presented as quantifiable evidence, here we have leisure quantified in calculable terms, or territorialized into an economic and political domain that reports calculations amid austerity and as it does so, fails to describe the value of joy in a community of friends.

Mediated measures of the crisis—of statistics and rates in the news—tend to structure the artistic relation of everyday life in El último verano as the very framework through which many images are constructed and textually described, even though these quantities fail to relate their incalculable consequences in subjective experience. In them, the reporting function of the news media conjugates these images in their account of the measurable as an index of the immeasurable consequences of the crisis through numbers and data. Taken quite literally, no specialized knowledge of economic indicators, the Ibex 35 stock index, or other indices used to report, analyze, and make speculations about economic cycles, are required for the layman to read the news and understand that the abstract calculus of the markets may equate to “another Black Friday” or intimate losses. By “index” I have in mind both its literal sense as a reported indicator of market fluctuations and the term’s semiotic definition. The index, in semiotic terms, is the sign that points to something other than what it places into evidence, cited in the classic example as seeing smoke and interpreting the presence of fire. To elaborate on the semiotic definition in affective terms, not only does the sight of smoke index an unseen fire, but it likewise transmits a sense of danger to the viewer.

I view in El último verano an indexical relationship between the images, which often draw from news reporting on the crisis, and the project’s presentation as a newspaper that suggests the experience of reading an alternative news source on the crisis in photography and video—literally, in market indexes and indicators of the macro economy and their indexical function to relate to subjective experience untold in these numbers. The artistic project as index, in other words, offers viewers multiple regimes of signs produced within macro processes—what Deleuze and Guattari would call machinic assemblages in the market, the media, and the government—and their signifying chains in the micro relation of experience. Simply put, the mood of the impasse portrayed in these images indexes an inseparable sphere of activity among macro players in the markets, the media, and the government that conjugates the terms of these losses as they are displayed and narrated for viewers. As such, Jonás Bel provides a photograph of a column of smoke rising above the Manzanares River Park in Madrid as an affirmation that “[a]lthough the city seems to be arrested under the stifling heat, alarming signs constantly arise” (“20 de agosto, Madrid. Inquietud”). A certain anxiety, or unsettling state to borrow from the title of Bel’s photograph, arises from reading signs of crisis in the everyday, of recognizing interpretive signs of disaster indexed in one’s own milieu; it is one of the project’s organizing principles and the impasse’s very ethos. The indexical structure of the project itself captures this anxiety of interpretation for one’s own expected losses in which the contents of many photographs grapple with the representativity of numbers for their false equation to subjective experience in times of crisis. To borrow from the concept of the index in Bel’s photograph, El último verano provides portraits of the smoke traced to an unseen fire, or the direct bearings of the crisis in subjective experience sensibly traced to a scene of activity concealed from view in the markets and politics, one that is necessarily mediated through news of the crisis. Thereby the documentary aim of El último verano is constructed not as a form of reporting, but of translating macro processes for their less visible effects in the everyday. It is a form of translation that aims to bridge this indexical gap between measurable signs of disaster reported in the news and their immeasurable effects—at times, affects—in subjective experience.

This translation from the measurable to the immeasurable, from the macro to the micro, shares its place in the figurative capacity of each image to evoke other entries in the project—across El último verano between the part (image) and the whole (project), and beyond it, between individual and collective experience. First, across the project, viewers find that the works echo and speak to, or indeed index, each other. For example, if not Nave’s comment on his gallery closing above, then viewers find several other critical responses on unemployment, such as in Juan Millás’ critique of the symbolic violence inherent in the need to abandon one’s profession, reinvent oneself, or have a backup plan in times of crisis, which he critiques with sarcasm by proposing to sell giant Spanish flags (“26 de julio, Santander. Plan B”). On the arts and culture scene, if not Valbuena’s comment on film revenues, then in Juan Santos’ interior photograph of an abandoned theater he remembers fondly from his childhood (“25 de agosto, Casillas de Coria, Cáceres. Fue en ese cine, ¿te acuerdas?”). And on displacements, if not in Nave’s portrait of his brother’s departure, then in Jorquera’s shot of sailors wading in the sea as an imagined limit to the growing phenomenon of emigration, paraphrased in the caption’s allusion to the urgent cry “man overboard” (“16 de julio, Fuengirola. Nos echaremos al mar”). If not in Jorquera’s photograph, then in the intimate portrait of Maira, a friend forced to return to Brazil, or in the photograph of a car packed to “take the music elsewhere,” and so on. Through their indexical gestures, the images begin to piece together across entries as a greater narrative on collective losses. These stories, told and retold differently, form an open constellation of images that complement and at once stand in for other stories untold here. Their indexical character, in other words, connects these stories across several other images at once, as parts of a shared history. It is through their ability to evoke other visual and textual narratives on affective attachments to loss—in sum, to index other stories—that the many parts of this project assemble a greater social history, as both those pictured in this project and those unpictured here.

Juan Millás captures this indexical relationship between the self and the social body precisely by calling attention to the scission between news of the markets and their lived effects. In his entry “13 de agosto, Muros de Nalón, Asturias. Esto sí es un paisaje,” Millás posts a graph of price fluctuations in basic goods such as meat and grain, taken directly from the daily press. His self-authored caption reflects on the concept of landscape, which he remarks, was historically a juridical and economic concept of the commons before it was an aesthetic object of contemplation. For Millás, the work of the photographer “consists in desegregating those elements of information with landscape value (that is, economic, political, ideological), faced with what is nothing more than the remains of insubstantial decomposing matter” from an accumulation of the past. This is why, Millás proposes, his choice of image does not provide any distinguishable icon as an aesthetic image of landscape, but nevertheless as a topographic landscape of sorts, it marks the estranging, shared “horizon we have before us.” Millás interprets the measurable landscape of graphs and numbers, literally and figuratively, as an index for shared lived experience, or a common horizon for the future. He elaborates further by proposing that the foreignness of the graph bears its likeness to the familiar as an abstract indicator of the effects of a shared crisis, one that despite its opacity and power to disturb ought to be confronted as a collective history.

If we keep in mind that economic time-cycles operate within a logic of short- and long-term predictions for the markets and investors, which in Spain offer a pessimistic outlook on the possibility of recovery, then these images place into evidence time as it is experienced by the subject in a temporality radically open to projections about the future and the experience of the past. So too does the present provoke reflection on the past and future in light of sensed losses and affective attachments to disappearing ways of life captured in the project title, on documenting “The Last Summer” as the photographers have known it. It is in this context that the project description on documenting the expected loss of summer leisure may be read as an indication of the future projections implicit in the temporality of the crisis. Thereby the present is faced with expected losses, ones that have not yet occurred in all cases, but which prove likely from perception at present. As this horizon of possibilities is shared, as Millás and many others suggest, the inheritance of history from one generation to another opens up to the question of collective responsibility in this transfer. The many present times in El último verano, in other words, comprise an assemblage of individual experiences that may be read, and at times are indeed presented in this manner, as a collective inheritance.

Speaking at many times and with many voices, El último verano calls attention to the labor that this assemblage accomplishes as a composite translation of quantifiable, cold facts into the terms of subjective experience; and it does so through the terms of loss that piece together singularities of individual histories within a shared circumstance. Their indexical character, in other words, is for viewers to interpret in the relation of the temporal impasse as a collective history. When I refer to the translation of data into subjective experience, economic or otherwise, I have in mind the artists’ work of interpretation, often on the impact of the crisis, through contextual displacement from the measurable to the immeasurable, and vice-versa, and the anxiety that arises from this interpretive disjuncture between reported news and the experience of the subject. Translation, in this sense, is never an equivalence between two contexts, but a movement from one to the other that in the case of El último verano deterritorializes the abstract function of the quantifiable to reterritorialize it in affective terms. Even within the project’s presentation for viewers, this labor of translating data into personal histories is exhibited in the project’s design through the final presentation of these contents as a newspaper, which provides visitors with the translation of forms from one genre rewritten into another, or from a genre founded in its claims to objectivity (i.e., the news media) against another that privileges the experience and reception of the subject (i.e., art). Translation, in other words, involves the artists’ movement across this indexical gulf from the media saturation of percentages and numbers corresponding to charity, unemployment, homelessness, gross domestic product, risk premium, and so on, to the domain of affective responses unique to the framing of each image, and vice-versa. This movement may be considered itself a kind of mapping that brings micro histories of the crisis into the domain of terms expressed abstractly for what is inseparable from them, or the macro histories of the crisis.

This double movement bears its own responsibility, as not just any translation will do. As such, Juan Santos suggests that the work of art that aims to portray the experience of the subject within a greater social history bears some ethical considerations in its translation from one context to another. In one entry, Santos critiques the photo project by North American photographer Jill Greenberg, pictured in his own photograph, in which she provoked children to tears in order to portray her frustration with the Bush administration and Christian fundamentalism in the United States (“1 de septiembre, playa de Ereaga, Vizcaya. Nos quitan los caramelos”). In Santos’ view, Greenberg’s project trivializes, if not infantilizes, the affective responses to political frustrations, rather than portrays the gravity of their social effects, which prompts his reply to request new portraits of “all citizens who feel swindled with what’s being taken away from them these days, and it’s not exactly candy.” The work of this translation, in other words, is implicitly an ethical project beyond the final aim of viewer legibility in which the artist brings one context into the language of another to show them for what they are, as inextricably linked together—the political as subjective experience, and the statistics of the crisis as a greater social history.

Taken up together, then, the images frame their contents across entries as figurative parts of a greater narrative in each and across the others. This feature marks their second, indexical function. That is, they may be read as fragments in conversation with others, which in translating facts and figures into subjective experience, do the work of assembling multiple personal stories on the crisis as a collective history, both those told here and those untold within the limits of the project. That their imagistic capacity and repetitions across images evoke other entries in the project invites viewers to perceive these images’ radical openness to represent others unpresented here, in a greater social history at large. In other words, their figurative, discontinuous quality invites the viewer to interpret them for what is seen and goes unseen within their frames. The images comprise an assemblage of viewpoints on the historical present in which the photographs frame the becoming-past of current ways of life, and following Berlant’s argument are indeed sensed first in the affective relations to loss or appreciation, as they also demonstrate some adjustments made for survival. They tell the story of a direct relation between the macrohistory of the crisis in neoliberal governance and the microhistory of ways of life temporally inflected, if not determined, by the former. This impasse is constructed in El último verano within temporal boundaries, as a state of living in-between the expectation of greater downward mobility, precarious work and life, and increased flexibility of labor. Their terms, in other words, are not translated into subprime mortgages or the Euribor rate, but into the loss of one’s house and the most intimate details of the struggle for survival; they are translated in El último verano as the horizon of a shared experience that separates loved ones and conditions one’s possibilities to find fulfilling work, that places material limits on one’s desires and shapes ideal subjects through practices and knowledges with prescribed economic roles. In method, then, the deterritorializing movements of the assemblage provide an incursion into a biopolitical terrain that inverts the economic “exteriority” of abstracted macro processes by revealing politics’ direct relationship to real, lived conditions and their shaping of the sensible times through which subjects move. If the variety of these images provides an incursion into the experience of the subject as a shared, collective history at an impasse, the question of this parenthetical temporality posits not only the present as a sensibly estranged and estranging moment of uncertainty, as a time on standby in summer. It likewise exhibits a collective space in which viewers and the photographers themselves are immersed in working through change and perceptible losses as an ethical responsibility for a shared horizon. If one gets the sense when viewing El último verano, as I have, that “enough is enough,” then one might also be incited to question, is it about time? And if so, then time for what?