Alienation, Authenticity, and the Human Scale: An Interview with Stan Douglas

This interview was conducted on the occasion of the Saastamoinen Foun­da­tion Keynote lecture by Stan Douglas titled The Black Mirror or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Photography, conducted in September 2024 at Dance House Helsinki. An internationally renowned Canadian visual artist living and working in Vancouver and Los Angeles, the work of Stan Douglas often explores complex issues of identity, history and culture, particularly in relation to colonialism, politics and social structures. I had the pleasure of speaking to him after attending his lecture.

ALI: You speak about “unintelligent” automatism and abandoning the notion of photographic objectivity. Given your interest in historical reenactments and the role of technology in contemporary society, how do you see photography’s “alien, inhuman nature” as a tool for challenging traditional narratives and inviting viewers to reconsider the past?

STAN: Photography is an inherently uneven way of viewing. For centuries, there has been a desire to identify with that apparatus in the West, and for mysterious reasons, still to me, as a way to identify with the technology and disavow the messiness of human vision, which is pretty much based on vision, which is very much easily distracted, very much individualized.

The universalizing nature of the photographic or optical image has been compelling for many people in the West. So, the alienation I speak about is a way of making things that seem familiar look strange – which is the classic definition of the alienation effect. We’re looking at photographs all the time. They have a certain quality, a certain type of field, and a certain kind of tonal range. And these images have, for example, too much detail in the shadows, too much detail in perspective – there’s too much detail generally, and so much going on. So it’s almost like a ‘paranoid vision’ where everything is significant. We’re not quite sure where to look because everything is equal, somehow, instead of depth of field saying, “Look at this, don’t look at that.” So by taking away its familiarity, we can see what is being depicted in a different way.

As I say, photographs are everywhere, even though more and more they get conventionalized in such a way that we don’t recognize the attenuation of the possibilities as compared to when you had a 4x5 camera with a flash, you had to expose manually, you had to set all the settings manually, the possibilities are endless, but it is tough to control. The image you get from a phone with artificial intelligence is a form of artificial intelligence-generated computational image. An engineer somewhere is determining what a good photograph is, and people accept that for convenience, even though by doing so, they lose freedom.

Software-driven technologies are mediating how to make a photograph and how to make an image, as opposed to you, who, as an artist, photographer, or image-maker, is trying to wrestle control away from that technology. In that sense, technology has been your mainstay. When working with technology, especially in new media, there’s a tendency for artists and creators to become fixated on the technological aspects, often neglecting the social and political implications of their work. But that’s not the case with you; you are very much grounded in a certain type of social, political, geographical, geopolitical narrative. Do you feel they are at odds with each other, or do you think they very easily lend themselves to each other in the way you practice?

The less you know about how technology works, the more prone you are to reproducing convention. If you know how the nuts and bolts work, you can work against convention in the way you make images, and you can do that by knowing how the technology works and the possibilities of what it’s not doing. I like to play with those possibilities. Technology here is an end. It’s a prosthetic thing, an extension of bodies and perceptions, but it is not a substitute for that. And that’s the problem with photography in general, where people think it’s a substitute for or is equivalent to, our perception.

Talking about technology in this way aligns with your thoughts on the phenomena of history and memory-making, the processes of documentation, and the dominant narratives that have emerged, where Knowing it enables you to reconfigure it; perhaps it is also a way of leading your interests to generate retroactive continuity and find alternate ways of reading the archive against the grain.

The same goes for things like identity, group identity, and national identity to understand how heterogeneous it is. At some point, some person or group of people decide to ossify what their identity was, and people who were born into that accepted it as being ‘national’ [identity]. However, when you break it apart, all these constituent parts make it heterogeneous. The same goes for technology. The same goes for history. If you accept what you’re given, you don’t realize possibilities; you don’t realize how things may be shared, for example, between different technologies.

During your lecture yesterday, you talked about Helen Lawrence, and you talked about the fact that you spent significant time and resources in developing software or technology – what was striking for me was that the scenography or the staging of Helen Lawrence as a play of embedding live actors in a virtual set, could very well be seen as being prototypal of the large-scale virtual productions that have become popular in major motion pictures. How does that way of developing technology become part of the larger framework of techno development within art, cinema, and its expanded spaces?

I began Helen Lawrence in 2008, I had been working on a different film project, but then the funding fell through because of what 2008 was. But I had this idea that there was money for theatre, so I could do the same thing on a different scale than what I’m used to. I realised that if I could leverage that money, I could realize what I wanted. At first, I tried to use those resources for a broadcast film. But those resources kind of dried up, and theatre almost became the last resort. And it has not to do with money; I do have a definite love for theatre.

One idea that I had back then, which I attempted to develop, was to do a virtual location scale. It’s apparently quite common in the building business currently, but it was very rare back then. So, I wanted to build a massing model¹, or a low-resolution model, of the entire city block up to two floors. So by doing that, I wouldn’t have to do a storyboard to say, build this, but I could walk through those locations and say, this is the thing I want to see. You know, just like a photographer would. Even when I’m working as a filmmaker, on set, I like to see what’s there and show us what I see there. And so I took this approach to making it.

Of course, it could have been more efficient, as you have to build so much that you often end up not using a lot of those things. But it was on a cusp where things were efficient enough to make that happen. Now, using things like game engines is much faster; back then, it was a bit more challenging. We have apps now, but we had to build new technology to make things record or playback on a phone. But this has a lot of commonality with how it was in the vanguard of the kind of technology being developed.

The technology I used for the stage was first conceived for virtual camera tracking in the studio. I got an iPhone in 2007 that had an accelerometer. And if I could velcro this to my camera, I could track the camera. Of course, it was way more complex than that, but it was my first intuition. But it all came from that moment. But of course, the industry being what it is, has way more resources, and they really surpassed what I did. But Early on, we were generating images for a latency of less than two frames, which is way better than what they’re doing in the industry now, around five or six frames.

Large-scale studios, communications platform medias, or communication technologies are entities with massive infrastructure, and the technology they are developing is more often than not for a neoliberal capitalist model – a financialized model. As an artist, you may not consider that a goal. Do you think of or place yourself in that juxtaposition of this being another way of developing technology? Or for other purposes?

I think almost like an artisan. I have a lot of help, but I know how it all works, and I can do it myself. So, working with these technologies is not necessarily about the economy of scale or producing fantastic worlds; it is about breaking things down to a scale where my collaborators and I can work. Otherwise, it’s just going to be beyond reach—I can’t build an entire city from history, but we can make these virtual sets and then do it that way.

Could it be that these ‘human-scale’ technologies that you have made accessible to you, by principle, could become accessible to artists? You have worked on several scales, from making films on a $50-$100 budget and your first photography projects involving only three to four people, to your current projects involving dozens of people in different capacities. When you talk about ‘scale as being flexible’, is it possible to think of these human-scale technologies as a critique of platformised technologies that are generated to scale?

Technology has been made quite accessible in many different areas. One way to do this is to distribute the work to people so they can still work on things on a big scale. They could do so without using resources, say, the real estate resources of the company; they could do it at home and bring it to them. Or they can be a piecemeal worker, doing bits and pieces and bringing that to the larger company. As opposed to doing that, I’m taking that use into my own hands, as opposed to contributing to a vastly large-scale, tailored operation. I’m bringing that to something that’s very, very small because those resources are there like they didn’t make non-linear editing systems for independent filmmakers. Still, independent filmmakers could use those resources to get their things done.

For example, the Internet was not a commodified space but made entirely for something else. Only with the World Wide Web could that commodify it, and change it quite radically. Those uncommodified internet spaces are still there. They’re just not accessible to us all. They’re sometimes, somewhat mysteriously called the dark web and make it sound evil, but it is not; it’s just not available to conventional search engines and quantification. I don’t know much about it, but I heard that they’re doing a story about rural societies in Brazil that have persisted for the last 300 years and that they have their internet, which we don’t have access to.

Could you talk about your relationship with Jazz and Noir? I couldn’t help connecting it to cyberpunk reality – as a techno-relational aesthetics, of how you are reading, but then reconfiguring histories, and developing new ways of examining them, or as you have said in the past, of ‘assisting viewers’ by ‘putting a burr in their minds’ where an inevitable reality unravels in their minds.

I do think about jazz as a more contemporary form, going back to more recent moments. Looking at free jazz and what it meant in the European scene in the 1960s and 1970s was a revelation when I was looking through an archive and saw this one image of downtown Vancouver, with these old cars and guys with fedoras. And I thought this looked like a film, a Noir Movie. But of course, Vancouver was part of the film Noir world – a part of the post-war world. And that whole situation was really about a cultural climate of post-traumatic stress. People had either been in the war, been around the war, or been at home, suffering, rationing. They were doing all kinds of things they were not proud of to get by.

In a way, these situations create the personalities of the femme fatale and the tough guy in film noirs. And it kind of got into the whole Helen Lawrence thing when I came across a screenplay by Chandler, called “Playback”, a Film Noir set in Vancouver. The narrative of Playback was a bit messy, even though I was interested in looking at that and concerned about the copyright implications. But that got me into this new understanding, which may be obvious, about what Film Noir was… It took me on a different journey – just about the song that’s being put up, and that’s the sort of the ongoing metaphor, of how in Helen Lawrence, we see the puny actors on the stage, but these gigantic cinematic visages on the screen.

Considering artists working in photography and contemporary art, especially those committed to exploring the geopolitical underpinnings of the world, there is almost a fetishization of truth and accountability, which, in a way, extends within photography in terms of ‘not touching up’ the image. But you are working with staged reenactments with computer-generated imagery. And so, how do you navigate these conceptualizations of authenticity?

Conceptualisations of authenticity in photography have always been fake, because from day one, photographs have always been constructed. Back in the days you had apparatuses to hold people still for tableaux photographs, or even in documentary photographs, like the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 was posed. In fact, there were two versions of that because two photographers were stationed separately. The photograph of six United States Marines raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in the final stages of the Pacific War is a staged photograph. Then, for example, at Tiananmen Square, where journalists were stuck in the same hotel, they had the same vantage point, and we saw the same thing from different points of view and all the same event, with very subtle differences.

When I was in art school studying photography, people would file out their negatives, so you could see the edge of the film strip to prove that no cropping had been done at all, as if to prove that the photograph was exactly what they saw on the street in that decisive moment. But it is all fiction, it is all cropping, editing, and staging. But then taking a photograph, of choosing where and when in time and space you would like to make an image, is an act of artifice too.

Your work has a lot of research, and there’s a lot of planning, there’s a lot of construction. How do you navigate, or how do you compromise between the amount of research that is going on at the back end and how much of that you let come to the front?

All that becomes part of the Mise-en-scène at the end; and all that is present, even though it does not be foregrounded or can’t be; and aspects can be forgotten, aspects can be highlighted based on the needs of a certain time. I was always offended by the Roland Barthes essay, ‘The Third Meaning’ (1970), where he talks about as if he discovered features in Eisenstein’s stills. And of course, looking at the stills is not the same as looking at the film, but the things he discovers, are the things decided by the production designer. They are the ones who think about the material culture of a given situation. And it’s not that it was unknown like something in reality – It’s actually something that they made as a possibility for the filmmakers – that they could use it or not, and that is something that was set up by the mise-en-scéne.

So by having this research I do, these things I set up in the studio that I do, maybe not everything gets used, but it’s there as a possibility. And having that there is part of the palimpsest of what the work is about, it allows me to focus on that (or not), and in a sense, to play. So I know that certain aspects of the work will be captured by the camera (or not), but I’m able to play, and the musicians can improvise based on trusting that the general concept will come through.

Being represented by a leading gallery allows you to do work at an ambitious scale and also make work that is not necessarily for sale. In contrast, the white cube model in Finland is a minority element in the art scene. Here, the artists and artworks are largely supported by grants from the ministry or private foundations. Especially in light of recent cuts to arts and culture funding, can artists maintain a practice driven by internal motivation in such an environment?

I never thought I would not have ‘another’ job. I worked in various jobs – I worked for a long time at a museum in Vancouver, first in the AV department, then in photography. That’s how I learned to do a 4 x 5 photography – but I never thought, “hang on, how can I possibly make a living as an artist?” That happened, and it’s wonderful, but I’m still waiting for the shoe to drop, “Oh, sorry, Stan, this is not really a viable economy for you”. So I’ve always prepared for that to happen at some point, but I never expected that to be the way forward.

The problem with the market is that people are constantly pandering to the market and doing what the market expects. The worst is people come to it late, and those who are in the market already successful, they were doing their thing before, which was taken up. And if you try to join that party. You’re just way too late, and you can’t really join that party.

The problem with government funding sometimes is that they will have mandates, which artists anticipate, and these artists would only make work if they get grants, only make work that abides by the rules of those grants, because sometimes they have certain thematic requirements, for example about engaging communities and whatnot. And I think that’s unhealthy, as opposed to allowing artists to be free in terms of what they need to explore. If you’re accountable to a market and beholden to government mandates, that becomes a problem too.