Eat the Camera
A Conversation with Zach Nader
I first discovered Zach Nader’s work back in 2016 when he was using video editing software to remove cars from car commercials. In 2017, I curated his still and moving image work into an exhibition at Esther Klein Gallery in Philadelphia alongside Sophie Kahn, entitled Phantom Limb. I’ve always appreciated his ability to expose process, make a commentary on the tools he was using and the image culture at large, but also, and perhaps more importantly, transform that kind of one-dimensional conversation into something about form and creative intervention.
In this conversation, we discuss what it means to throw sand in the gears of image automation, how to locate the self in a hyperimaged world, and machines with no need for human input.
DE: Over the last decade or more, I’ve understood your practice as the misuse of image-editing software by misdirecting its automated functions. Can you give me a high-level understanding of what underpins your work and what you’re thinking through right now?
ZN: When I think back about 15 years to when I was finishing school, one of my main questions was how I could take the photographic image apart and then put it back together in some new way. That initially started with physical manipulation of the printed image, then quickly moved to darkroom and in-camera experiments, and then shifted more into software. My video optional features shown (2012) is a good example of how I was thinking back then. I took a bunch of car commercials, cut them up, used the then novel content-aware fill tool in Photoshop to remove any cars or people from those clips, and then stitched it back together into a video. I was really interested in what would happen if the main reason those commercials were created was removed and what sort of story would begin to emerge. Another key element was that it was slow and clunky - I had to go frame by frame, and that closeness and time with each image would end up being significant to me and where I was headed.
Over time, that core sense of how an image can be understood, shifted, and used as a bucket to store all sorts of things remained, but the emphasis on software misuse receded. I became concerned with thinking about additional ways to disrupt or temporarily step outside of the image/world feedback loop that Vilém Flusser wrote about. Around 2022, I began to understand my practice in terms of every object acting as a potential screen for images to pour through and stick. This led me to making more sculptural objects, experimenting further with UV printing on a variety of surfaces, and ultimately treating my image building as more of a hybrid painting/sculpting practice.
Currently, I’m looking at ways to increase the friction in image creation and viewing. That has meant making ceramic objects and printing on them, building photographic sculptures and drawings that resist reproduction and require in-person attention, and making things that create the opportunity to question how our vision is calibrated. I want to make work that feels grounded materially, tells stories about how images and cameras function in the world, and think about ways we can build our own tools and images that might provide us all with some alternative pathways forward. I’ve become especially curious about how a larger public thinks about and understands their own memory and experience in relationship to a world full of images, and am developing projects to bring that larger sensibility into some of my work. I think how we navigate an imaged world independently and collectively is one of the most important questions of this moment.
DE: Right. I can see how you’re trying to resist reproduction in the ceramics, specifically, which have a hand-molded quality to them.
Haunted Shapes is striking for how domestic and vernacular its vocabulary is. You had an exhibition at the University of Wisconsin last year of this work, and for the installation photographs, it’s decidedly more physically elaborate. Including assemblages of ceramic, vinyl, and UV prints. What’s drawing you toward the tactile and the everyday right now, and does that feel like a response to anything specific about the current image environment?
ZN: That shift towards the tactile started years ago as I began to understand how much of the photographic world was created exclusively by and for machines to monitor, surveil, or otherwise make decisions that had no need for human input. This gets used anywhere from warehouse and distribution centers to policing and military use. Joanna Zylinska has written extensively and Trevor Paglan has made work about this phenomenon, and the 2021 film ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE looks at the surveillance aspect in great detail. I began looking for ways in which my and a viewer’s involvement were essential to the process. In the 2019 show, psychic pictures, I was carving into wooden panels before printing over them, and I’ve continued on this trajectory.
Since then, Large Language Model AI systems have become prevalent and have greatly impacted and accelerated image production. Ghost in the Machine is a striking new film that walks through the history of these models, their impact on people and the material world, and gives a framework for understanding how power operates at scale in regards to using images to generate new realities. In my work, I’ve started to look for ways to make human presence both necessary and palpable.
Haunted Shapes is a way of thinking about the images from my own life and how I can locate myself within this hyperimaged world. The show is full of ceramic rocks I call viewers that both observe and carry images around while they turn colors, contort, and have expressions from overwrought and saccharine to eye-bulging despair. How big is the rainbow is an arc of ceramic shapes and carvings with images printed over them, and is a way of considering how our images and memories are refracted and ever-changing. There are UV prints on Dibond that are scraped and etched into, and there are more traditional photographic prints on the wall with broken ceramic cameras jutting out of them. The idea that every image is also a capture device, taking on wear, generating data about a viewer, and essentially a fun-house mirror has led me to making these crude ceramic boxes that suggest the form of a security camera. A few months after this show I was fortunate enough to have another, LightLoupe, that more explicitly focused on this thread of home surveillance and security.
DE: The more we’re inundated with images, be it photography or AI-generated images, the more I feel compelled to move away from them. I’m having an allergic reaction to the ubiquity. Similar to what you’re saying about presence, I think, the next wave of really interesting art will require attention. A certain kind of sitting with something. I’m thinking of the Simone Weil quote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Because of this, I’ve actually found myself going to more painting and sculpture exhibitions lately, which has been fantastic because I’m not as versed in those canons as I am with photography and related media.
In a hyperimage world, there’s a shift in scale (amount of images circulating), but also in context (what the images do and who or what they are intended for). Do those feel like the same problem to you? What are the ways that you’re resisting this?
ZN: I do think there is fatigue for many people, casually and critically engaging with images. When I think about just the images we physically see—the social media feeds, the advertisements, friends’ dogs, kids, and vacations, influencers, government propaganda, movies, news images, and the memes and silly videos we send each other - it is too much for any person to process. And, that is before we begin to think about the Ring and Flock cameras, police body cameras, toll roads, your grocery store’s security system, the warehouse’s automated robots, and the seemingly infinite torrent running through, over, and around our lives. Sarah Sze is someone who keeps making great work in this space. Her show at the Guggenheim a few years ago made physical what it might look like to be inside of an image system and gave a path for images to loop back and be re-encountered in a way that felt meaningful. Her thoughts on using this as a way to locate oneself and each other in time and space have been hugely influential on me. That show did a good job of highlighting the limits to human understanding of scale as you’ve defined it—there is a tipping point where context matters significantly more, at least for us, and it seems that we are well into that zone.
In my work, the materiality necessitates the presence of a viewer, but also requires me to more deeply engage with each individual image. Part of my work is finding and preparing a home for those images, a place where they can sit and not participate in the larger image economy. That has included printing on paint and sticking that paint on rocks, adhering an image to a generic shape of a house that my ceramic viewers carry on the floor, and building a giant camera and the wall with chunks of images flowing in and out. I also find myself thinking about how an image might wear out or become exhausted. Or, as they become more load-bearing to how we understand and navigate the world, where are there still opportunities for rupture?
One of the projects I share with my students at Hunter is Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Sunsets from Flickr, which was highly influential on me and particularly relevant to this conversation. I’m always struck by how many people pose in front of this artwork, seemingly far more than most artworks, to mimic the act of taking one’s picture at sunset in a beautiful place. That impulse to keep feeding the image machine, to be a part of that cycle, especially in front of an artwork attempting to grapple with the enormity and implications of our hyperimaged world, is really fascinating. Is there anything we don’t want to image and why might that be?
DE: Seeing is knowing. To photograph is to confirm, and the lack of confirmation is comforting for anyone uncomfortable in the unknown, which is most of us. This might be a tired question in the photography community, but can you expand on this idea of memory? I ask because I think there’s something here that might be interesting to expand upon that is unrelated to the traditional ways images are either captured or generated.
I had a conversation with a curator a year or so ago about how she’s really interested to see what the next wave of image-makers address in their work once we, culturally, get past basic understanding of these new methods of image-generation; when we get past the novelty or self-consciousness of technology. This is an interesting prompt and it seems like this is where your mind is already at.
ZN: For me, it has to be memory with something else—in the sense of how does memory trap us in the past or give us the opportunity to build a different future. And, how do we know ourselves and our own stories? I’m less concerned with what was than how we come to believe what was. We know that trauma greatly impacts memory. If someone remembers little of their childhood, it is likely they went through something quite traumatic. I think our current imaged world inflicts a fair amount of trauma on us all and makes it difficult for us as a group to rationally engage in how quickly our world is being reshaped. This gives tremendous power to those who own and control the systems of image creation and distribution. I often think about how we can use these photographic tools in broader, hybrid approaches to storytelling. Right now, Pieter Schoolwerth, Le’Andra Leseur, and Pap Souleye Fall are taking approaches to locating a body in their work with clear, but limited use of photographic tools that I find quite engaging.
Working past novelty to a place of deeply engaging with the tools and material is essential. It helps that more and more people are understanding the importance and movement of the image in this moment. Alessandro Sbordoni’s recent book Beyond the Image On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century does an excellent job of explaining where we are and sets the stage for different ways we might break, retool, or escape our current setup. Ultimately, I think we need to consider if we should simply eat the camera, that is, refuse the current apparatus from camera to software to network to user. Perhaps Flusser was partially correct, and learning to program the apparatus isn’t enough. I still think it is important, but can only work as one of a set of tools and approaches. Piplotti Rist has talked about all technology being a bad copy of our human senses—that feels right to me and seems like something unlikely to change, no matter how high the resolution goes.
DE: Much of your actual practice seems to be about working through the apparatus, even if adversarially. I think about something I return to often, which is that good art requires something to be at stake for the artist. What do you actually put on the line in the making? Do you even agree with my framing?
ZN: I think of it in terms of how an American socialist still has to have a job and buy things. The system is too large and comprehensive to step outside of for very long. An example where I think this works well is American Artist’s piece Security Theater from 2023. That work had visitors to the Guggenheim surrender their phones into one of those secure pouches in order to enter the work. Inside, you see surveillance footage of everyone else walking around the museum, and categorized with machine learning software. Viewers get to momentarily step outside of this field of vision while seeing how the interior of the system functions. The piece also has the advantage of forcing you to be without your personal device until you walk back down to the bottom to have it unlocked. This flipping between types of visibility and presenting them so starkly works well.
One of the reasons the opportunity to have a solo show is such a privilege is that it offers a similar amount of control. I can show works that change dramatically as you approach from across a room, insist you walk to the back in order to view a video that is framed by the rest of the show (like in my 2019 show psychic pictures), place objects on the floor that require you to be constantly thinking about how you physically navigate through the room, and a thousand other small details. I think part of what is at stake for me is finding ways to engage in these questions I have about how the image/world feedback loop works and how to interrupt it, how my own memory and experiences are shaped, and how do we all navigate a world in which everything is functioning as a screen. Then, I find ways to take these personal explorations and create a framework that other people can see some of their own experience refracted. As the image apparatus continues to rapidly expand and dictate so much of our lives, it becomes very easy to become fatigued, complacent, or to just see these systems as inevitable. I look for ways forward for myself and the rest of us to regain agency and throw sand in the gears of automation.
Alan Warburton’s RGBFAQ is another piece I often share with students as it gives a great overview of the computational image. Towards the end, Warbuton asks quite directly if we have been incorporated into this imaged world or are still able to retain some distance. This is something I think about, but more in the way of how can we go back and forth, and how might we know where we happen to be in any given moment? The frame of an exhibition really gives me the opportunity to play with this and set up situations where belief can shift.
DE: What are you working on now? Tell me about the new Einstar 3D Scanner and what you’re thinking about right now.
ZN: I’ve been teaching an undergraduate class at Hunter for a few years now that focuses on painting and photographing 3D models in Adobe Substance. That led me to making 3D scans with my phone, and more recently, into getting some more capable hardware. I’m still in the beginning stages with the scanner, but I can see a lot of possibilities with incorporating these scans into video. It reminds me of when I first learned to use a view camera. In one sense, it wasn’t that different from the other cameras I had used, but it captured a lot more information and allowed for a lot more manual control and shifting of the image. I’m excited to see where this leads me.
Overall, I feel like I’m in a more experimental stage right now. I had two shows last fall and am looking forward to an artist residency at the Queen Rose Art House this summer. I’ve been expanding on the work in Haunted Shapes, making more ceramic cameras and viewers, drawing more, and thinking through some book ideas. I do have an excerpt from a brand new video, A Glass of Noise up on my website. And, spider webs, I’ve been making more acrylic spider webs to hold things.
DE: Much of your earlier work responded to the advertising world, but one thing that has always resonated with me about your practice is a certain kind of curiosity embedded in the work, a kind play, and even at times humor. All of this falls under the umbrella of what I call risk. Which is, as I see it, a willingness to push out into unfamiliar territory. Play and risk go hand-in-hand. I don’t think there can be one without the other. Would you agree? Talk to me about what the role play has in your work?
ZN: An idealized, aspirational world as presented through the photographic has long been important to me, and for some time, I felt that this was best explored through advertisements. My first two shows in New York were built almost entirely out of altered advertisement images, and I thought about them in the way Jasper Johns would talk about the flag, as “a thing one already knows.” Over time, I became less rigid about categorizing pictures into the reasons why they were initially made, and began to use personal and advertising images together and interchangeably. I’ve also shifted from someone who primarily made photographic prints for the wall and video to someone with a much more flexible approach to material and installation. Looking back, I can see that sense of play and experimentation in the early work, but as I’ve become comfortable with my role as an artist, I’ve become willing to let more of that shine through.
I agree with you that play and risk go together, and also that they are essential to making art that is worth engaging with. The form and tenor of that play is different for all of us, but without that curiosity driving towards something at least partially unknown, artwork and life become formulaic. One of the joys of being an artist is being able to set up questions for myself and see how they might be addressed, and then discovering new questions and outputs in the process. The early days of a project can be complicated, but they also hold so much potential and freedom to just see what happens. I wouldn’t want to keep doing this if it wasn’t still fun to see what would happen when I try something new. My studio is a place for play, and I find my way through much of a project in the act of making. It is important to me to fall down, find new pathways, and seek out the uncertain as I work.
DE: That book is on my list. Thanks for giving me a nudge to buy it.
You teach in the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter, and you’ve already mentioned Umbrico’s Suns as something you share with students, which I think is a smart move, because it holds a mirror up to the very impulse students have to document it. Can you speak more about your role as an educator? How do you see your students responding to the issue of attention and image saturation?
ZN: I’ve had the opportunity to teach at a few different places since I moved to New York, but Hunter is my longest job at 8 years now. I have noticed a shift in the last few years in all of my teaching jobs where students have moved further into longer and slower storytelling, physical installation that incorporates video or other computational work, and a near total rejection of AI LLM’s, even as a tool to explore. I would say the students who do want to make work that directly deals with attention and image saturation do so in a way that zooms out and looks at systematic production and use of images within the physical and social networks that make our hyperimaged world possible.
Being an educator adds some stability to my life as an artist, and gives me an accountability for my ideas in a much more frequent way than exhibiting artwork does. I meet with students weekly, and it is consistently enriching. Learning where my concerns and theirs overlap provides a really exciting ground for all of us to work together.
DE: In an ideal world, when it comes to what your life looks like and how to manage to fashion a life from your practice, what does sustainability look like?
ZN: In my ideal world, our country would provide everyone with health care, and the arts would receive significantly more public funding. For now, teaching does provide a good balance where I get to do fulfilling work, earn a living, have access to equipment and resources, and be engaged in an art world beyond my own personal practice. Striking the right balance between teaching and studio time is something I have to evaluate every so often.
While there is always chatter about the viability and necessity of living in a place like New York, the opportunity to interact with so many artists and see such a diverse array of artistic practices being exhibited is a priceless opportunity. Right now, I wouldn’t trade more space or a more affordable life for that, but that isn’t a choice everyone gets. It helps that my wife has been very supportive of my goals, especially when we first moved to the city and had to figure out how to make that work. I wouldn’t be the artist I am without her continued support and a strong community that helps each other with friendship, studio visits, and job opportunities. It also doesn’t hurt to have a 4-year-old who thinks making art is about the coolest thing anyone can be doing.
Something that I think would help me, and a lot of artists, is more artist-run spaces here in New York. There are fewer and fewer places where we can show more experimental, less commercially viable work. So, if anyone reading this wants to chat about starting up something—send me a message. Artist-run galleries, reading groups, publications, and workshops really feel essential to keeping art risky in a good way.