The photographic image has always historizised; an artifact of the past, photographic moment. But just as it is conditioned by the temporal and material context of its making, its essence – if there is one – is conditioned by how we encounter the image. This encounter involves both the situation in which the image is seen and our individual selves in relation to it – our histories, beliefs, and expectations. To further reflect on this unstable, temporal quality of the photograph, we explore the meaning of looking at the future by looking at photographs. Artistically and philosophically a contradiction in terms, it is still a practice we experience: How to look ahead with something temporally bound to the past. To do this, we reflect on ‘Regarding the Pain of the Future’ by the first author and develop and discuss an artistic practice emphasising a second, photographic moment.
What do we tell our children about the future? Can we, given the fundamental threats of our time, teach them to love truth, without robbing them of the buoyancy and playful hopes that are part of a meaningful childhood? We all know it: things are not looking good. What’s more, not only do the dangers and opportunities of the future exist; they are complex, contradictory and fundamentally intangible. What does it mean? How do we know what to do to do things right? What do we do when doing things right seems an impossible task?
‘Regarding the Pain of the Future’ is an artistic project by first author Hilde (see notes on project funding) on being with a threatening future and on the temporal capacity of the photograph. But at its core is also the experience of being part of a family, living with children, in our time: The experience of a world full of conundrums and threats, the attempt to see the world for what it is, and of dealing with this with children; worrying about their future, thinking about how to think about the future together with them. Children presumably always want to know if the future will be ok – and what do we do when it really is not?
Working together, but also individually and artistically, is familiar to us, but it makes pinning down the role and function of a first-person narrator rather difficult. It is a collaboration: we develop ideas, think, travel and write together. At the same time, the images are made by Hilde, technically of course, and more importantly, there is the artistic process, which we experience as a process where the subject is at the core. Concealing Hilde as artist-subject in a narrative 'we' would be misleading, both in terms of actual process and in how to think about process. ‘I’ would also be misleading, however. While this tension is by no means extraordinary to us – it is our process – when telling and sharing, we have experienced that it is a constant difficulty. We have tried a number of different strategies (see also notes section on collaborative form). We will also address the I/we-topic again after image 11, as we switch the narrator voice from 'we' to 'I'.
So far, working on this project has taken us to a broad range of locations and topics, like rescue agencies, farmers cultivating wildflowers, geothermal energy, drying water reservoirs, glacier covers, forest fire aftermath, anxiety and withdrawal, EKGs, precision fermentation of ‘artificial’ food, organic farming, and more. We have sought out places that can say something about complexity and unrest in our time, but that also work with images of the close and familiar. There was a hope of encompassing and creating a sort of vibrant experience, partly unsettling, partly agency, partly distress, partly a feeling of work to be done that might, as a whole, convey something about us and the times in which we live.
What does it actually mean to look toward the future? And what does that mean when one is talking about photography? In "Regarding the Pain of the Future," this is partly a question of the idea of the future and the capacities of our gaze, which we discuss in Part 1, Engulfing the Idea of the Future. There is also the question of the temporality of photographs, where we discuss how the use of conspicuous manipulations may enact a form of temporality in the images (see Part 2, The Temporality of Photography and its Enactment). If we are to create something that can be experienced as brieftopia, as this special issue of VIS calls for – a glimpse into a possible future – we have to address both the idea of the future and the temporality of future and photographs.
(3) PLIVO (Active Violent Incident) exercise, Buskerud, Norway. Regarding the Pain of the Future #3 © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(4) Shoulder joint model. Regarding the Pain of the Future #4 © Hilde Honerud, 2024
(5) Bust with EKG-sensors, Melbourne, Australia. Regarding the Pain of the Future #5 © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
Engulfing the Idea of the Future
What is our idea of the ‘The Future’? Growing up in Scandinavia in the 1990s, ‘future’ was about opportunities – achieving our goals and dreams, a hopeful promise. Nowadays, many experience the future as quite the opposite, an unknown threat, a destiny. Futuristic TV-series are by and large dystopian – probably because it is easier to imagine everything falling apart than envisioning how to keep it together. Nonetheless, these are the predominant ideas we live with now: The future as tragedy, like in the old Greek tales where everyone knew that the hero was heading towards misfortune, where something dark is coming and everyone can see it and no one can change it.
And it is real. We experience the tragic through the great human suffering here and now, we see it all too clearly in the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan. We see unimaginable suffering in real time; we know it could have been avoided, but the fact that we all see it makes no difference. We know the forests are on fire, that droughts are forcing people to move, glaciers are melting away. We all see it, and we can't seem to find a way to make it stop. That this does not affect our brief glimpses into the future is out of the question.
The future has always been fickle. Our parents feared nuclear war, Jon feared for the ozone layer, and before our times one feared disease, wars, and poverty that could wipe out everything you knew. Seen from a contemporary northern European perspective, the world was objectively much more dangerous ‘way back when’. In recent decades, some countries have experienced a period in which bad things could not, should not happen, and any external obstacle to realizing one's potential was an anomaly, a grievance. This is in every way a historical exception that has hardly existed before, and certainly not for entire societies. In a way, one could say that the fear and the hopelessness that we know many people, especially young people, feel about this, is not about losing the future – because the future will come. It is about losing an idea of the future that was never real.
But there is something else, too. The complexity of what creates and constitutes fears of the future makes it difficult to hold onto, and rationalization and simplification become easy solutions. The clearest illustration of that is perhaps the political division seen in so many places, perhaps most poignantly in the USA, where, to put it bluntly, there is a left that fears the destruction of the climate, and an extreme right that seems to fear the combination of falling birth rates and immigration. These are two diametrically opposite ways of fearing for existence, yet with clear commonalities. It is existential fear, based on organizing and simplifying schematics of what constitutes true and false, pure and impure.
(8) Bioreactor for researching new antibiotics from fungi, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Germany. Regarding the Pain of the Future #15 © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(9) «Black summer» wildfire aftermath, Mallacoota, Australia. Regarding the Pain of the Future #16 © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(10) Covers to protect parts of Rhône glacier from melting. Switzerland. Regarding the Pain of the Future #17 © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
The complexity may lead us to fear of doing something wrong, or everything. Even the smallest things, like, can I eat that avocado, chicken, or drink bottled water, or will the act make me a bad person? The rationales of fear are certainly manyfold. Still, it is not difficult to understand the appeal of seeking refuge in simpler causal and moral structures. It is easy to point to right-wing populism, but this can apply to all forms of simplifying opinion systems. Perhaps this is the reason why we see people moving directly from the far left to the far right. The simplistic approach, where right and wrong are obvious, is a danger in any case.
Sometimes the present-day reality is so difficult to grasp that it helps to use the words we use when talking with our kids. The world doesn't end, no matter what, but the downfall of every human being is the downfall of one world. The threat is neither more nor less existential than this. That leads us to the question: When we fear something, what is it that we fear? What is it that we see?
We wanted a whole that can withstand imperfect solutions; ways of dealing with the future that are neither clear-cut nor certain. Instead, it is about creating a massive experience of complexity, uncertainty, the undefined in what the future and the unrest and the possibilities are made up of. Together we searched for situations, phenomena that could say something about the complex problems – and solutions – that make up our future.
As mentioned in the introduction, a major communicative challenge in our collaboration is the question of how we use the first person as a narrative perspective and character in our texts. What do we mean when we say ‘I’, and what is our idea when we use ‘we’ instead? The artistic is processual and thereby inseparable from the self that creates it. But the sociological deliberation relating to the work also shapes the gaze of the self. Accordingly, there is an ‘I’ that is definitely I (Hilde, and her artistic process and practices). But there is also a specific kind of ‘we’ that shapes the voice and storytelling.
In this project, we find that using only one of the two forms is unrealistic for us, as our collaboration entails a merging beyond this clear separation. It is no longer always possible to say what is artistic and sociological; they slip into and overlap with each other. The artistic expression is Hilde's. In this work however, it is clear that both Hilde’s artistic and Jon’s sociological approach play major roles, equally driving forward the content of our work.
In this text, we have started out with ‘we’. As the next sections of the exposition narrow in on the artistic process, we shift to the notion ‘I’, meaning that we will focus on Hilde and the artistic process. The process is still nonetheless communal, a creative partnership that drives our work, but leaning into processes that are inherently visual and inseparable from the artistic self. With that said, it is inevitable that we intersperse our mutual thinking and writing on our project topic with an occasional use of the notion ‘we’.
While artistic and reflective processes can take place simultaneously, the two are nevertheless separate. For me (Hilde), this distinction is absolutely crucial. If not, the picture quickly loses its ‘feeling’ or mood, what is just there without us being able to say what it is, in a picture. But the work towards what it can become, and not least the discussion about what the result is and can be, we develop together (c.f. notes section on collaborative form).
(12) Copenhagen Botanical Garden, Denmark. Regarding the Pain of the Future # 20, © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(13) Vic-Sau water reservoir. The village of Santa Romà was submerged when the dam was built in 1962, but the church reemerged with the drought in 2023, as seen in the centre of the image. Catalunya, Spain. Regarding the Pain of the Future # 21, © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(14) International fire drill, Kongsberg, Norway. Regarding the Pain of the Future # 22, © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(15) Thermal energy plant. A carbon-neutral geothermal energy plant, operated by Enel Green Power and Thermal Generation. It is the first European geothermal energy plant and the second largest in the world. Larderello, Italy. Regarding the Pain of the Future # 19, © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
I started by taking part in various preparedness exercises. I was intrigued by how the exercise looked so real in the picture but was still a controlled event. Eventually we sought a more complex picture, moved on to farming, technological innovations and energy production, I wanted to embrace the complexity, so we could both talk about the unease about the future and how complicated it is to do everything right all the time.
In the exhibition space (see image 23), I sought this complexity through an installation aiming to change the experience of separate images as the viewer moved in the room. In the selection and adaptation of works, I was also looking for images that could work together and display a similar atmosphere or mood so that they would still be connected, even if they were shot far apart from each other and at different times.
(16) Eye Candy. Venice, Italy. Regarding the Pain of the Future # 7, © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(17) Cheese made by precision fermenting, a technique where specific proteins are produced in bioreactors to emulate milk products without milk. The method could, in theory, feed the world from an area the size of London. FORMO, Berlin. Regarding the Pain of the Future # 8, © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
(18) Fire drill, Flesberg, Buskerud, Norway. Regarding the Pain of the Future # 9, © Hilde Honerud, 2024.
The Temporality of Photography and its Enactment
An important part of the efforts leading up to the final body of work takes place in the studio. It's always like that, but in many of the works shown here I've gone further, adding layers and looking for new compositions that can arise from the pictures. My experience of this method has been that it requires a state of empathy and systematicity similar to that when I am taking photographs. The quality of the raw material, the photographs, must be good, and in the studio, a lot of trial and error and experimentation are necessary to find out which sets or combinations of photographs can work as a new, reconstructed whole. This breaking up of the images becomes ‘a second, photographic moment’, as it is not merely a technical process, but entails a similar vein of presence and adherence to the visual qualities, and of the experience as felt in the original shoot.
What does the reconstruction and deliberate manipulation of a photograph actually mean from an artistic perspective? In one sense, it is clearly a destruction or deconstruction of images. At the same time, one can question whether a photograph has really been destroyed or diminished if one still considers the result of this work to be visually successful. We have tried in so many ways to disseminate or illuminate the artistic strategy of destroying photographed images. The technique is in itself is nothing new; one might look at the montage techniques of the Dadaists and later artists, for example. One can look at the use of double exposures, or Karen Barad's ‘agential cut’ (Barad, 2007), which Kerstin Hamilton (2022) has written about in her review of documentary approaches in photography.
I partly thought of this as a way to distance myself from the idea of objectivity in documentary photography, or more precisely, to create images that forced attention to the fact that they were constructed; these weren’t merely photographs, they were acts of photography - photographies. Hence, as photographer, I take on a responsibility by showing the images, and perhaps also the viewer has a choice, and a responsibility, in how they read the images. The role of this responsibility became quite tangible in a work on refugees doing sports I did recently in Moria on Lesbos in Greece (Honerud & Honerud, 2023). For me, the photographs of strong refugees doing sports were only possible in a media context where everyone saw news images of the tragedies, overfilled boats and people crying. The images of strong, healthy refugees making sound choices was meant to show who they wanted to be: individuals, not victims. But there was also the risk of it being misread, lulling the careless viewer into thinking ‘they seem ok’. The manipulations I did in the studio, in combination with titles such as ‘The contrast between the photographed moment and all others’, was partly a response to this risk.
What eventually became clearer to me, however, was that the reason why this felt the right thing to do in the face of real and serious situations was more than a practical, narrative move. We began to discuss the destructive action against the image, questioning for example whether or not it was a form of violence (Honerud & Honerud, 2023b). There is something violent about destroying a photo of something real. But is there any part of that act that in itself is more violent than taking a picture and showing it in the first place? Not in itself. Jean Luc Nancy (2007) discusses the image as an idea of something that derives its meaning from both being real, and recreating its reality through the viewer, and therefore always being a form of violence towards the viewer. Both artistically and philosophically however, that felt like a dead end for us.
When you think about it, breaking apart an image in itself, and destroying an image of someone are different things. Accordingly, the more relevant, and pressing issues were the post-colonial considerations. Arïella Azoulay (e.g. 2008) for example has formulated this poignantly and influentially, on what it means to take pictures of the other, and to define the other. The destruction is less important than the process of taking the picture – the fundamental respect for the photographer’s civic duty to those who appear in photographs, the interaction, the critical awareness of one's own role, and the understanding that the photograph can never be seen without a context – a temporal and material belonging.
This purposeful breaking apart of photographs is what I call ‘the second photographic moment’ (Honerud 2025). This moment is, of course, not detached from the experience I had meeting the situation and people I photographed earlier. Regarding the photos I took of refugees (Honerud & Honerud 2023), I clearly could not have manipulated images in this way until I had a sufficiently close relationship of trust with the organization and the people in it.
This is the approach that I brought with me into this project: a second photographic moment, not brought to the fore by the precariousness of people I met, but by the precariousness of the current state of the world. And I bring not only the tangible experiences and what I know into this moment, but my visual aspirations. I look to Lucas Blalock and Minh Ngoc Nguyen and how they work with objects, an objectifying, photographic gaze. I try to let the eye wander freely into forms, like Viviane Sassen or Nico Krijno. No matter how much we philosophize the outcome, it is a visual process.
By destroying my photographs and exhibiting clearly manipulated images together with other images that are not, I try to talk about the relationship of trust with the photographer, with me. We may choose whether to trust a journalist, an author or writer. But at least until the present overflow of AI imagery, I think many people do not make such a choice with a photographer. Most people are now starting to question the truthfulness of an image, but not the photographer. With the clearly manipulated images, I want to shake viewers and demand that they must relate to the image, but also to me and that the narrative I provide. They must choose whether to trust it or not.
There are no individuals in any of the photographs that I share in this exhibition, only hands or traces of people. But the meaning of the image broken apart still holds a similar meaning for me: it is a way of distinguishing the second photographic moment and of showcasing the importance of trust in a narrator. Nothing is unconditionally true, but that does not mean that everything is equally true, and that is the challenge I face when I try to create images that thematize an acute and essential reality, and how it relates to our ways of glimpsing possible futures.
What is a Brieftopia incurred by photography?
To catch a glimpse of future – a brieftopia – spurred specifically by photography challenges our experience of what a photograph is, of its material and temporal status.
Partly, we believe changes in the cultural meaning of ‘future’ are part of any photographic brieftopia. The danger in the apparent complexities of the threat and possibility of tomorrow makes it more important than ever to accept ambiguity based on face-value observation of the current.
But it is also about the photographs themselves. By enacting a second, photographic moment, the temporal nature of photographs becomes more visible and tangible; not only an intellectual observation, but inherent to the image. We cannot say if it makes us more hopeful, trusting, or capable, but it is how we can relate photographs to an idea of the future.
A question still lingers: Is making the unstable conditions of photographic storytelling an act of realism, an act of emancipation from illusion? Or is it adding on to and legitimizing post-factual, post-policy misconceptions? Perhaps. But perhaps it is also just an approach to the real, the reasonable, and the believed that makes sense to us.
Notes and References
On collaborative form
We, Hilde and Jon, are married, and we work together. We are both associate professors, Hilde in photography, and Jon holds a PhD in sociology. In our articles building on Hilde’s exhibited work, we usually use the first-person ‘I’, as the switching between ‘I’ as an artist and ‘we’ as authors is not easy to read. In this text, we have chosen to shift from we-dominant to I-dominant after image 11. The topic of I/we is also discussed in the introduction, after image 2. The text, its arguments and composition, and the relation to the images is co-written throughout. The images and the artistic process themselves are exclusively Hilde's work.
We have collaborated for 12 years now, and we have experienced how the I/we-knot is deeply embedded in the relationship between the actual process of collaboration and the narrative possibilities. Deep collaboration between art and the social sciences challenges not only epistemologies (i.e. what is the adequate construction of a statement that claims to be real?), but also ontological challenges. What exists in a way that warrants a narrative about it?
We have not really solved this conundrum, and perhaps we never will, but we have approached it in many ways. We have worked parallel in some projects, with two parallel narratives as a narrative structure, either separated as different forms of text (Honerud & Honerud 2023d), or as an interplay between text and image (e.g. Honerud & Hovland 2016). In some works, we have leaned towards an artistic process supported by academic discourse and narrated as ‘I’ (Honerud & Honerud 2025). In yet others, we have aimed for academic discourse with a less processual and more observational and analytic gaze, as ‘we’ (Honerud & Honerud 2023c).
References
Azoulay, Arïella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.
Hamilton, K. (2022). The Objectivity Laboratory: Propositions on Documentary Photography. University of Gothenburg. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/70822
Honerud, H, and Hovland, J (2016). Øvelser i Norsk. Kongsberg: Fragment forlag
Honerud, H., & Honerud, J. (2023). Photography as violence: On experience and manipulation. Philosophy of Photography, 14(1), 85-94. https://doi.org/10.1386/pop_00072_7
Honerud, H., & Honerud, J. (2023b). Fractured Photography. Journal of Artistic Research Vol. 29: https://jar-online.net/en/exposition/abstract/fractured-photography
Honerud, H, & Honerud, J. (2023c). Å forme et kreativt blikk. FormAkademisk, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.7577/formakademisk.4807
Honerud, H. & Honerud. J. (2023d).How public imagery matters for art and crisis. Routledge Open Research 2023, 2:12
Honerud, H., & Honerud, J. (2025). On Trust and the Broken Image. Photographies, 18(1), 115–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2024.2441169
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2005). The Ground of the Image. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.