Javier Hirschfeld Moreno

Obfuscating that we might see, by Azu Nwagbogu

  “Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just”

Victor Hugo

There are phrases, words, terminology and images which represent an ideology that capture the imagination of a period in time. They become hot topic for discourse in social circles and debate on social media where they trend and oftentimes eventually die an inauspicious death. At other times, they serve to transform the way we think and reorientate our preconceived and accepted notions on what is right and fair and just and acceptable. One such evolving term is moral equivalence and its variant, moral relativism. None of these ideas are new but in this present time there seems to be an on-going interest in debating double standards and their application in contemporary society. This is especially evident with contemporary visual culture in relation to image and representation of the majority world peoples from Arab and African nations where displacement and emigration are commonplace.

The Sheltering Pixel by artist, Javier Hirschfeld (Malaga, Spain) is a refreshing iconoclastic photographic project in which the artist proposes to “make people aware of the double-standards in image and representation”. Hirschfeld disrupts the natural order of image production by making carefully considered portraits of Senegalese youths and then edits; not by enhancing the aesthetic visual quality rather he denatures with equal contemplation each image file by pixelating the eyes, the very soul of every portrait ever taken. It is through the eyes that emotion and essence are translated into portraiture and we are deprived of this visual information. It is brutal and magnificent.

Hirschfeld’s work explores deeper questions about the profligacy of image production at a time when consuming images, content and stories in digital formats is all too easy. It is rare to get a chance to appraise work that is self-referential and self- critical in questioning the cultural status and power of both the subject photographed and the gradient of the structures that has ennobled the image maker above its subjects. We are jolted into assessing the ethics and inequalities that are glaring in the way European and North African minors are protected by data-protection laws whereas African kids are not conferred with the same safeguards. It is perhaps not surprising that Hirschfeld has produced such carefully considered iconoclastic work. His background is revealing. He worked for seven years as an editor (five years with the BBC) and would have no doubt seen enough of the usual clichés associated with capturing Africa to begin to form another view. He also cites Caravaggio and the Baroque artists as incipient creative references but credits Oumar Ly, Malick Sidibe, Seydou Keita “artists outside the so-called history of art” and the young Omar Victor Diop as major influences on his way of seeing. A sense of injustice he barely disguises in our conversation about his work.

With The Sheltering Pixel Hirschfeld has produced an emotive body of work without deploying the usual tricks employed by photographers; heavy with easy juxtapositions and sequencing that allow for other considerations in their appraisal. By introducing pixels — which still contain digital information — he confers identity in layers through the coloured blocks of data scrambled within each pixelated area. The effect is simulated imbrication of stratum of identity that is charged with multiplicity of meaning. The Senegalese youths as the subjects are stripped of their usual identity loaded with preconceptions and given an abstract form. Where are the poverty lined features on the faces, the smiling African kids with starry eyes, the foreboding and menacing youths, the longing hopeful eyes that wish for friendship and travel? We are deprived of our usual dose of clichés and misrepresentation and left with our own prejudices and expectations. In seeking to transverse beyond appearance and representation Hirschfeld gradually diminishes the limits between the image and the referent.

It was Paul Klee who offered: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible”. Obfuscating portraits of African minors make us witnesses of the stark duplicity in the way African kids are deprived of what is considered to be the right of every kid in Europe and North America.

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Who protects the protector?, by Vicente Luis Mora

Moral norms cannot protect one without the other: They cannot protect the welfare of one fellow´s man without protecting that of the community to which the individuals belongs.

Jürgen Habermas, Europa, Fin du siecle

In his 1991 essay Gestures, Vilém Flusser reminds us of something essential about photography which we often mistake or mystify; far from its supposed “objectivity” or “impartiality”, photography is, even technically, one of the most subjective arts. For the Prague-born Brazilian theorist, photography has many concepts inherent to it, amongst them – and particularly so in the case of Hirschfeld’s “Senegalese” artwork – that of place. The place, says Flusser “is the basis for consensus, for the inter-subjective knowledge”, when it comes to taking a photograph. “When we ourselves and the man behind the apparatus are on that basis, it is not that we see “better” the situation, just that we see it in an inter-subjective way and it is in an inter-subjective way we can perfectly see ourselves.” That is to say, by being aware of the place where the photographic operation takes place, we not only become aware of the subject being photographed but also of the subject taking the photograph (namely, us).

There are few photographic projects where this claim makes as much sense as it does in The Sheltering Pixel by Malaga-born photographer Javier Hirschfeld. The aim of his images is to make people think about cultural status – not only that of the Senegalese youngsters in the photographs but also, and above all, about the colonial and postcolonial status of the image taken itself. The cultural weight of the places, both on arrival as well as on departure, gain a metacritical presence in these image and modify them. Hirschfeld is aware that in Europe and North America the images of minors are systematically safeguarded by the data-protection laws, whereas this protection does not exist for the youths of Africa. Hirschfeld’s project makes his western gaze, or rather his developed gaze (because Senegal is also part of the West, something which often gets forgotten), protect the photographed subjects to the same degree in which it would if they were European or North American children. Thanks to digital photographic technology, the inter-subjectivity mentioned above by Flusser gives back the rights of equality and respect for the photographed children.

In El lectoespectador (2012) we already referred to the profound semantic weight that the technique of pixelating has. The pixel – the smallest element of visual information – today has the meaning of an elementary particle in an image, with the same metaphysical resonances on our collective imagination. The pixels have, as the very interstices of the matter also have, a seemingly contradictory dual capability: to join and to separate at the same time. Protons, fermions, and bosons shape reality: they join together the objects in its particle glue and, at the same time, make some things different and free from others, differentiating subjects, and objects. The pixel develops an identical operation to the image: enough resolution and detail creates the image by accumulation, building it through observation at a certain distance (like in pointillist art, for instance); but when the pixel becomes vast, large, elementary, it brings about the wonder of distorting the image and making it invisible. We often look at a digital image and, if it lacks due definition, we say that it is pixelated (as in the case of Hirschfeld’s work), forgetting that they are all pixelated. There are many artists who have pixelated their subjects (Anthony Gormley, Vik Muniz, Inti Romero, Kamil Mirocha, Barbara Baldi, Joeri Booms, Peter Buecheler, Bárbara Bargiggia, Gio Holgersson, Haiiro Sushi), but in most of those cases their investigations only occupied (which is no small feat) the areas of the conflict between aestheticism and identity, with a small number launching into the matter of preservation of privacy.

Hirschfeld goes even further, incorporating the geopolitical dimension, in which he plays with the duality referred to beforehand, akin to the elementary nature of the pixel: the largest parts of his images are well defined, but the central parts are sub-pixelated, making the contemplation of the portrayed face unfeasible. The Basque poet Rikardo Arregi tells of the frustration that pixelation brings about: “Now, when I please, I can see you, in dreams codified in pixels, although, if I enlarge your photograph, due to the lack of kilobytes, the most attractive details turn pale”. The face, and in particular the eyes, is the most appealing object of any portrait, as it is the object that reveals the subject, the place that inevitably presents the inter-subjectivity, the contact of our eyes with the being of the other. A scripted identity, in short. But here the identities of the Senegalese boys are protected: now the pixel no longer defines them, instead it distorts them. The digital definition is not at the service of the unveiling of the other, but at its concealment. That way we are left without seeing, deprived of any subjective reference. We do not know whether the thick blocks of earth-coloured hues, shades of brown, distort the colour of the face or that of the earthy environment. They stand in the way between our gaze and that of the boys (even between theirs and the photographer’s gaze), reminding us that photography is not only the art of showing but also, and at the same time, the art of hiding. But that masking has the aim of showing a political inequality. It clearly shows that from the developed countries we do not look at our children in the same way as at the juvenile poor. Simply by not having anything, they do not even have visual protection. They are unprotected before our eyes, before our postcolonial gaze of visual aggressors, who exercise no moral restraints once the well-armed borders of geographical comfort are surpassed. Hirschfeld imposes, thanks to the pixel, an ethical filter, a moral restraint on our habit of looking at without looking after others. He abandons the act of looking. He shows us his vulnerability as he is no longer sheltered by his photographer’s vision, which has been voluntarily censored. The question that remains now, as a result, is who will protect the protector of the unprotected? I’d like to believe that we all will.

 1. V. Flusser, Gesten. 1991/ 2.  Rikardo Arregi, Debe decirse dos veces; 2014,