Mishka Henner (born 8 June 1976) is a British and French artist,living and working in Manchester, England. His work has featured in several surveys of contemporary artists working with photography in the internet age. His work uses photography, found and networked imagery, satellite and surveillance systems, artificial intelligence and live data. His practice has featured in surveys of photography in the internet age, including Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Henner was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2013 and the Prix Pictet in 2014, and received the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Art in 2013.
Education and early career Henner studied sociology at Loughborough University from 1994 to 1997 and at Goldsmiths College from 1997 to 1998. In 2003 he visited Cruel and Tender at Tate Modern, a survey of twentieth-century documentary photography which he later identified as an important influence on his decision to work with photography.
Between 2004 and 2010, Henner worked with photographer Liz Lock on documentary projects in London and the North West of England and on editorial commissions for British newspapers. In 2008 they joined the documentary photography agency Panos Pictures, becoming Profile photographers for the agency in 2010. They left Panos in 2012.
During this period Henner became increasingly interested in how photographs circulate and are reused, and began working with existing imagery, online databases, print-on-demand publishing and artists' books.
Key works Since 2010, Henner's work has examined photography in relation to the internet, automated imaging systems and digital networks. Early projects used search engines, Google Earth and Google Street View, while subsequent works have incorporated online video, live camera feeds, eye-tracking, artificial intelligence and environmental data.
Photography Is In February 2010, Henner released Photography Is, presenting “more than 3,000 phrases that define one of the most democratic and ubiquitous of all art forms. Mirroring the ambiguous and untrustworthy nature of photographs themselves, each phrase in this book has been torn from the context in which it originally appeared. The result is contradictory and chaotic, frustrating and insightful. In short, it is photography, without photographs.”.
Reviewing the work in Fotokritik in March 2010, the German artist Joachim Schmid wrote, “The sheer volume and diversity of quotes are a great reflection of photography itself: sometimes intelligent, sometimes stupid, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, serious, funny, poetic, romantic – as diverse, different and contradictory as the people who utter them.".
In 2015, an installation of Photography Is featured in the Qu'est-ce que la photographie (What is photography?) exhibition curated by Clément Chéroux and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In the accompanying catalogue published by the Centre Georges Pompidou and Éditions Xavier Barral, the curators wrote that Henner's work inspired the exhibition:
"C'est probablement Mishka Henner qui a mieux mis en évidence le caractère pléthorique des réponses suscitées par la question <<Qu'est-ce que la photographie?>> En 2010, cet artiste, né en 1976, et qui, depuis près d'une décennie, explore les potentialites créatives de l'Internet, entrait le segment de phrase <<Photography is>> dans un moteur de rechereche afin de recueillir ses multiples occurances sur la toile. Le résultat est un livre d'artiste de 192 pages réunissant plus de trois mille réponses a la question ontologique - sur les trois millions et quelque générées par l'interface [...] Le présent projet s'inspire, a sa manière, du livre de Henner."
"The surplus of responses elicited by the question "What is photography?" is probably best expressed by Mishka Henner. In 2010, the artist born in 1976 who has spent close to a decade exploring the creative potential of the internet, entered the phrase "Photography is" into a search engine and collected all responses. The result is an artist's book of 192 pages containing more than 3,000 phrases responding to the ontological question [...] In a way, the present project is inspired by Henner's book."
In February 2016, the International Center of Photography in New York announced a site-specific installation of Henner's Photography Is. Spanning nearly 70 feet, text from the book was placed across the construction shed during the building of the ICP's new museum space on the Bowery until its opening in June 2015. Passers-by were invited to participate in an interactive experience via a live Twitter feed, contributing their own definitions and opinions on what photography is. The museum described Photography Is as "a surprisingly poetic and thought-provoking meditation on how the subject is discussed throughout our culture."
Fifty-One US Military Outposts In 2010, Henner published Fifty-One US Military Outposts and described it in the following manner: "Overt and covert military outposts used by the United States in fifty-one different countries across the world. Sites located and gathered from information available in the public domain, official US military and veterans' websites and forums, domestic and foreign news articles, and official and leaked government documents and reports." Writing in The Huffington Post in 2014, Peter Yeung wrote: "Henner takes these satellite images and then transforms them by altering and artistically-enhancing the colours, lending them an unexpected, lyrical beauty; without ever altering the specific physical details of images. He explains that projects such as these exploit 'loopholes in the vast archives of data, connecting the dots to reveal things that surround us but which we rarely see.' It is a role reversal, citizens rather than governments doing it, that exposes the ease with which any sort of information can be obtained."
A portfolio of the series was acquired by the New York Public Library in 2013 and was included in the Library's 2014 exhibition Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography.
Reflecting on the series in the British Journal of Photography, Paul Wombell wrote, "Mishka Henner has used freely available aerial imagery from satellite systems such as Google Earth for many of his projects. For 51 US Military Outposts, he used information available from official US military and veterans’ websites and forums, domestic and foreign news articles, and official and leaked government documents and reports to picture US military bases around the world. These bases are part of the semi-secret locations that mark the present power of the US military. Henner's intention was to depict this world from a military perspective, a world of pure strategy and logistics that controls space from above and below."
Reviewing an installation of Fifty-One US Military Outposts at the Carroll/Fletcher Gallery in London, George Vasey wrote, "We hover over the image, inverting the surveillance-like gaze – the watched become observers. The project shifts the public documentarism articulated by Frank and Lange towards the unseen spaces of private finance and security [...] The ability to navigate and edit data provides new conditions of political accountability in an era of information as capital. Henner’s work recalls Eyal Weizman’s reading of the politics of verticality in relation to the Israel occupation of Palestine. For Weizman, power is structured around a vertical axis by asserting sovereignty over the land (through archeology) and surveillance (by controlling the elevated spaces and skyline). Henner’s images of military sites dramatise this verticality by inviting the spectator to look down at things shot from above."
No Man's Land In 2011, Henner released No Man’s Land, a collection of photographs apparently showing sex workers around Spain and Italy, as captured by Google's Street View cameras and published as a print-on-demand book.
The work quickly gained notoriety online and featured on numerous blogs and news websites. American journalist and author Violet Blue described the work as haunting “snapshots of the unseen, and yes, the unheard” whilst Pulitzer Prize nominated photojournalist Alan Chin (photographer) described Henner as “a conceptual photographer-artist masturbator.”
Writing in Prison Photography in August 2011, Pete Brook wrote, "for traditionalists, No Man’s Land is a long way from the spirit of documentary photography [...] On Henner’s virtual tour, we cruise, at 50mph. We don’t stop, we don’t get out the car and we don’t get too close. We might as well be in another country … which of course we are [...] Henner’s work allows us to keep a safe distance. He even saves us the trouble of finding these scenes on our own computer screens; we’re detached one step beyond. We are cheap consumers." In a separate post, Jörg Colberg added, “Henner essentially is producing visual statistics, with the women in question being reduced to ciphers, to small, often blurred, shapes that come with a label."
In April 2012, Pete Brook published email correspondence between himself and Henner, in which the artist mounted a defence of his work. “There’s a section of the photo community judging No Man’s Land according to a pretty narrow set of criteria,” wrote Henner. “So narrow they’re avoiding one of the elephants in the room, which is what role is left for the street photographer in the age of Google Street View?”
In 2012, Henner published a second print-on-demand volume of No Man’s Land and was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Writing about the shortlist for 1000 Words Photography Magazine, Brad Feuerhelm wrote, “No Man’s Land would be a convincingly clever interpretation of lucid geography, technocracy (albeit with lightweight theoretical drive) if I had not seen very similar modes of dissemination before. Not only is it derivative but the project completes a vicious circle of unpleasant attitudes of human currency and a new attempt to denigrate women to that of commerce even further.”
Despite these negative reviews, No Man's Land was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2013 and several writers offered more positive insights. Reviewing volume I of No Man’s Land for Source magazine, Daniel Jewsbury wrote:
“I’d argue that Henner’s photographs articulate a very subtle but persuasive challenge to the manner in which we all become ‘resources’ to capital in the contemporary world, what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called a ‘standing reserve’: how, ultimately, we are all merely data to be processed and presented and somehow used. The prostitute, then, is simply presented as an instance of an ‘ideal subject’, as indeed she has been throughout the history of modern capitalism: simultaneously a small entrepreneur who is also her own product, and necessarily a consumer too. No Man’s Land, seen through this lens, is a layer on the map of technological capitalism, a cartography of its reach and its complex interconnections.”
In a lengthy article published in the online journal Circulation Exchange in 2015, Kate Albers reflected that the series “uniquely addresses the uncomfortable collision of public and private space and experience that now characterizes much of our collective lived experience, and wades, too, into the grim realities of the commerce and commodity of physical bodies in the 21st century.”
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