I will begin with a memory from the 1980s, a period when Romania, under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, was more isolated than ever. For a young man with artistic aspirations, as I was at the time, traveling abroad and making international contacts seemed unthinkable. However, I discovered a way to get in touch with artists and people eager to communicate and participate in projects and exhibitions around the world. It was the international mail art network, which I discovered by chance.

I got involved and actively participated for almost a decade in this utopian network, where anyone with access to the postal system could be an artist. If in the art world those who control the official scene are museum directors, critics, curators, gallery owners, or collectors, in the world of mail art, those who decided what was mail art, that is, what could circulate through the postal network, were the postmen who stamped the correspondence and the mail carriers. They decided what was acceptable and could circulate or what could not circulate through the postal network. Beyond this filter, there were no other selection criteria.

Mail art was a marginal and alternative movement to the institutional art system, dominated by museums and galleries. Only in recent decades has it begun to attract the attention of art historians and curators, being recognized – thanks in part to its direct connection to the Fluxus movement – as one of the most important artistic trends of the second half of the 20th century.

The network gave me the chance to free myself from the absurd political and economic context in which I was living and to communicate with artists from all over the world. It wasn’t easy: every day I had to pass through the increasingly aggressive filters of communist postal censorship.

Through this network, I met many interesting people; the most important one for me was Shozo Shimamoto, who, despite restrictions, managed to visit me in 1985 in Timișoara, where I was living at the time. Shimamoto had been a founding member of the Japanese avant-garde group Gutai (in the 1950s) and, at that time, in the 1980s, he was one of the most active mail artists, with correspondents on every continent. During the two days we spent together, we talked a lot about performance and mail art. I confessed my disappointment with the uneven artistic level of the network: I sent elaborate and personalized works, but often received in return simple photocopies, reproduced in hundreds of identical copies.

His response – which amazed me at the time – was that it didn’t matter so much what you sent, but the fact that you sent something. More important than the aesthetic value of a work was keeping the network alive.

Reflecting on this later, I understood that for him, as for other mail artists, the network itself was the work of art, and the objects (of mail art) circulating through it were its vital cells, like bees – individual entities, but inseparable from the collective whole that is the hive.  

For me, the mail art experience was probably the most important artistic experience of those years. It taught me to express my ideas visually, through photography and photomontage, and to function in a networked context – essential preparation for the transition to the digital age, the internet, and online life that was to follow.

What is happening now with photography – especially social photography – has many similarities with the mail art phenomenon. Then, as now, the network provided a cheap and flexible space for expression for many cultural outsiders, some of whom just wanted to communicate with someone in another country or collect strange objects (without money, just paying the postage); at the same time, the network was a platform for radical artists who challenged the official art system and, at the same time, a political tool for artists living under dictatorial regimes in Eastern Europe or South America.

Today, the photographic flow of social networks is mostly frivolous or self-referential, but at certain moments in history it can become deeply socially and politically engaged. Photography is undoubtedly the dominant visual language of the present. Due to the huge volume of images produced daily, the power of photography no longer lies in the single image – as was the case with iconic images in the history of photojournalism – but in ensembles and streams of images, in which associations and combinations of meanings generate messages and emotions that are more complex than each individual photograph. Images are no longer objects, but particles of information circulating in a fluid system.

I find myself thinking more and more about exploring the origin and evolution of the idea of photography as part of a broader visual construct. In the age of social media, photography has become the most widespread language of contemporary communication.

For younger generations, who dominate the digital space, sharing photos is no longer linked to their value as objects, but to the experience they convey. Many young people today communicate more easily and quickly through images and emojis than through words.

In the magazines, books, and screens we browse through every day, images follow one after another, and their meanings melt into each other, generating new meanings.

“Every image has a border. It is a singular document, a record and a piece of information. But as part of a flow, as an everyday visual practice, a more nuanced visual literacy emerges. As visual discourse, social photographs are a means of expressing immediate feelings, ideas, and experiences – a means sometimes more important than the precise purpose of a particular image.”

As the visual environment becomes increasingly fluid, photographs are perceived as particles of an expanded visual language. The same image can appear in different contexts, acquiring multiple meanings. The devaluation of photography as a unique image in favor of an “overall image” shifts the focus – and responsibility – from the photographer towards other entities: image editors, algorithms, and their designers.

“The legacy of cubism, absorbed by popular culture throughout the 20th century, finds a vernacular expression in the smartphone, as the online community intuitively adopts the principle of reunifying fragments into a mental image.”

I notice more and more contemporary photographers and artists are using photographs/snapshots to create visual narratives that transcend the meaning of a single frame, just as writers use words in their texts or musicians use notes to create musical compositions. The abundance and ubiquity of photography as a medium are aspects that artists working with it cannot ignore.

However, if we look back at the history of photography, we will see that there have been photographers, artists, art historians and theorists for whom photography was a fragment of a larger visual construct. Below are just a few historical and contemporary examples from a much larger number in which photographs were used as fragments of a whole:

• Eadweard Muybridge, with his Human and Animal Locomotion series and the San Francisco panorama (1877), composed of 13 images joined together.
• André Malraux, with his Imaginary Museum, a virtual construction based on photoreproductions that create unexpected connections.
• Aby Warburg (Mnemosyne Atlas) and Gerhard Richter (Atlas), who used photographs as fragments of thematic panels and an overall concept.
•   Propaganda exhibitions, from Pressa (Köln, 1928) to The Family of Man (New York, 1955), conceived as coherent photographic installations, in which each photograph had its well-defined place, like a piece in a mechanism. 
•   Artists who construct panoramas from dozens or hundreds of images, such as David Hockney, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Ed Ruscha.
•   Artists who work with found photographs, collections, and archives of images – John Baldessari, Christian Boltanski, Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad, Erik Kessels, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Joachim Schmid, Taryn Simon, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Eva Koťátková, subREAL, etc.
•   The practice of photomontage, from the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Constructivists to contemporary artists such as John Stezaker, Daniel Gordon, and Lucas Blalock.
•   Contemporary artists such as Trevor Paglen, Hasan Elahi, Marco Poloni, Jules Spinatsch, who use a large number of surveillance images or photographs (non-human photographs) taken by robots, drones, satellites, Google cars, etc.

Photography as a fragment of a whole also concerns me from my perspective as an artist. Over the past 25 years, I have developed numerous art and research projects based on collections and archives of images. In long-term projects such as Reconstructions, Synapses, Echoes, Open Sky, and Old People Feel the Weather in Their Bones, individual photographs function as visual elements that, together, create meaning in an overall image.

* While searching for a title for this text, which could be a possible research project in the history of photography, I first thought of the title of David Hockney’s retrospective at the Royal Academy in London in 2012: “A Bigger Picture.” However, in my search, I discovered that one of the musical hits of recent years bears the same name (The Bigger Picture, by rapper Lil Baby), albeit with a completely different, much more politicized meaning.
I consider this coincidence significant: the search for a “bigger picture,” both aesthetic and political, is, I believe, one of the defining concerns of contemporary art.

Translated by Andrei Mateescu