Moments that Never Happened

Visualising high finance

Abstract

This paper aims to put forward and reflect upon the implications of the uncertain nature of images conveying the world of high finance. The rise of globalisation, digitalization and complexification of the financial system coincided with the development of new image-making practices. Considering that the move from analogue to digital enabled the ceaseless presence of the visual in social and political dimensions of everyday life, and highlighting the timeliness and ontological status of the images that circulate in today’s digital circuits, Paolo Favero (2018) suggests that images must be looked upon as ‘present’. The contemporary financial system’s opaqueness and multilayered nature produces an ecosystem difficult to visually grasp and ambivalent with regards to its place in time. Is a ‘decisive moment’ even possible in a quasi-anonymous and never- ending flux of financial flows and stock market trades? This paper will focus on Edgar Martins’ work on the subprime mortgage crisis “This is not a House” (2008) and Andreas Gursky’s depictions of stock exchanges. If, as Georges Didi-Huberman (2000) advocates, whenever we are before the image, we are before time, before which time are we in these instances? This analysis explores in what way the digital fictional characteristics of these photographic works contribute to a collective visual sense of the current financial system – a reality that seems to not exist in a specific time or place but is ever-present.Following W.J.T. Mitchell (2006) and Alfred Gell (1998), Paolo Favero (2021) reconsiders not only the role images have in ‘narrating’ and ‘representing’ but also in ‘performing’, ‘acting’, and ‘doing’. Subsequently, this paper will further explore if and how these works have contributed to form a collective memory on this subject.