The Ringling Museum of Art Presents Metadata: Rethinking Photography from the 21st Century

On view through Aug 28, 2022.

Curated by Christopher Jones

Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Art.

The term “metadata” is used to describe the information that travels with a digital image file but is unseen within the image itself. This data includes the details about the digital photograph’s creation, its ownership, and how it is situated within structures of order. In our networked digital environment, metadata is accessed by both human users and artificial intelligences. Software algorithms orchestrate what images we see and exchange while collecting the valuable data generated by our interactions. “In our moment, dominated by image-based social media and surveillance, we are becoming increasingly aware that understanding the information that circulates unseen around photographic images is just as important as seeing what they depict on their surface,” said Jones, Curator of Photography and Media Art. Metadata: Rethinking Photography from the 21st Century is an exhibition that explores new paradigms for understanding the ecology of the photographic image. 

The exhibition features work from the past decade by an international selection of artists and visual activists that are working to make palpable the unseen information, or metadata, that undergirds the image regime. This includes not just the tags or descriptors attached to image files, but the power relationships, biases, and economic interests that are not always visible in the image itself. The exhibition emphasizes an expanded concept of photographic practice that includes research-based projects, installation, conceptual work, and activism as well as analog and digital photographs. Artists featured are Mohsen Azar, Viktoria Binschtok, Mladen Bizumic, Joy Buolamwini, Jason Lazarus, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Lilly Lulay, Trevor Paglen, and Penelope Umbrico. Metadata: Rethinking Photography in the 21st Century will be held at The John and Mable Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida from March 5 through August 28th, 2022. The exhibition is curated by Christopher Jones, Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Art. 

For more information, visit: https://www.ringling.org/museum-art

Umbrico_Sunset Portraits from 8,462,359 Sunset Pictures on Flickr on 12_21_10_detail_2010_5

Penelope Umbrico (American, born 1957)

Sunset Portraits from 8,462,359 Sunset Pictures on Flickr on 12/21/10 (detail), 2010

machine C-prints, 10 × 15.2 cm each

Courtesy of the artist