_IMG is a series of two books to date that present “the digital binary data of historical photographs as literature,” as the blurb on the artist’s website claims. Each book is based on a pre-digital photograph that was digitized, compressed as a .jpg, and archived by an official source. Mishka Henner opened the image file with a text editor and used the resulting ASCII character sequence as content for his book. Even though the resulting text is a hybrid that is no longer machine-readable nor readable for humans without the help of interpreting tools, the books nonetheless show the amount of characters necessary to define the picture. They also work as analog containers for saving data that could be used to recreate the files for displaying the images.
As both books also include a 5 x 7 inch silver gelatin print of the corresponding photograph, _IMG is also a reflection on originals and copies in photography and the historic punctum in analog and digital picturing. Furthermore, both photographs depict historical moments of passing and transition, mirroring in content the three steps of remediation present in the books: from analog image to digitally codified image to an analog version of the code.
Although _IMG is produced in print-on-demand, it is also an experiment with scarcity: the first volume was produced in an edition of ninety-seven signed and numbered copies (this corresponds to the number of years since the photograph was taken), the second one in an edition of twenty-five copies, and a possible third one could be published in only three or four copies (Mishka Henner, interview with Apod.li). The fact that Henner has, amazingly, already sold more than sixty copies of this series (as of 2021) could be due to this artificial rarefaction.
_IMG01 is based on a photograph of five Australian soldiers taken on a battlefield of WW1 by James Francis Hurley on October 29, 1917. It shows “members of a field artillery brigade, passing along a duckboard track over mud and water among gaunt bare tree trunks in the devastated Chateau Wood, a portion of one of the battlegrounds in the Ypres salient” (_IMG01, last page). Our copy is number 78 of 97.
_IMG02 is based on a photograph by Hartmut Reiche taken in Berlin on January 5, 1990. It shows a segment of the Berlin Wall broken through, with soldiers on the one side and smiling people looking through on the other. Our copy is number 12 of 25.
