Mishka Henner


Mishka Henner is a Belgian artist living and working in Manchester, England. His work has featured in several surveys of contemporary artists working with photography in the internet age. He has been described by some as a modern-day Duchamp for his appropriation of image-rich technologies including Google Earth, Google Street View, and YouTube, and for his adoption of print-on-demand as a means to bypass traditional publishing models.

Education and early career

Henner studied Sociology at Loughborough University and at Goldsmiths College. On leaving Goldsmiths, he remained in London for a number of years and in 2003 visited "Cruel and Tender" at Tate Modern, a survey of documentary photography, which he described as life-changing.
Between 2004 and 2010, he worked with long-time collaborator Liz Lock, a photographer from Toronto, Canada, on documentary projects in and around London and the North West of England and on portrait and feature commissions for a number of British broadsheets including The Independent and Financial Times. In 2008, Lock and Henner joined Panos Pictures becoming Profile photographers for the agency in 2010. They left the agency in the summer of 2012.

Key works

Between 2010 and 2015, Henner's work was characterized by an engagement with the nature of photography in the post-Internet age. Many of his works resulted in print-on-demand books, films and installations that featured in large-scale museum surveys in France, Canada, and the US. In the jury report of the Kleine Hans award of 2012, Hans Aarsman, Hans Eijkelboom, Hans van de Meer, Hans Wolf and Hans Samson described Henner's work in the following manner:
Writing in a New York Times feature on the artist in 2015, the author and critic Philip Gefter wrote, "He is one of a growing number of artists making savvy use of the surveillance capabilities of satellite imaging and Google Street View in work that reflects the way the Internet age has altered our visual experience." In the same article, the Museum of Modern Art's Chief Curator of Photography Quentin Bajac is quoted as saying, "His work is at the crossroads of many different genres or practices part of a strategy of neo-appropriation that you find in contemporary photography today with the Internet.”

''Photography Is''

In February 2010, Henner released Photography Is, presenting “more than 3,000 phrases that define one of the most democratic and ubiquitous of all art forms. Mirroring the ambiguous and untrustworthy nature of photographs themselves, each phrase in this book has been torn from the context in which it originally appeared. The result is contradictory and chaotic, frustrating and insightful. In short, it is photography, without photographs.”.
Reviewing the work in Fotokritik in March 2010, the German artist Joachim Schmid wrote, “The sheer volume and diversity of quotes are a great reflection of photography itself: sometimes intelligent, sometimes stupid, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, serious, funny, poetic, romantic – as diverse, different and contradictory as the people who utter them.".
In 2015, an installation of Photography Is featured in the Qu'est-ce que la photographie exhibition curated by Clement Chéroux and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In the accompanying catalogue published by the Centre Georges Pompidou and Éditions Xavier Barral, the curators wrote that Henner's work inspired the exhibition:
In February 2016, the International Center of Photography in New York announced a site-specific installation of Henner's Photography Is. Spanning nearly 70 feet, text from the book was placed across the construction shed during the building of the ICP's new museum space on the Bowery until its opening in June 2015. Passers-by were invited to participate in an interactive experience via a live Twitter feed, contributing their own definitions and opinions on what photography is. The museum described Photography Is as "a surprisingly poetic and thought-provoking meditation on how the subject is discussed throughout our culture."

''Fifty-One US Military Outposts''

In 2010, Henner published Fifty-One US Military Outposts and described it in the following manner: "Overt and covert military outposts used by the United States in fifty-one different countries across the world. Sites located and gathered from information available in the public domain, official US military and veterans' websites and forums, domestic and foreign news articles, and official and leaked government documents and reports." Writing in The Huffington Post in 2014, Peter Yeung wrote: "Henner takes these satellite images and then transforms them by altering and artistically-enhancing the colours, lending them an unexpected, lyrical beauty; without ever altering the specific physical details of images. He explains that projects such as these exploit 'loopholes in the vast archives of data, connecting the dots to reveal things that surround us but which we rarely see.' It is a role reversal, citizens rather than governments doing it, that exposes the ease with which any sort of information can be obtained."
A portfolio of the series was acquired by the New York Public Library in 2013 and was included in the Library's 2014 exhibition Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography.
Reflecting on the series in the British Journal of Photography, Paul Wombell wrote, "Mishka Henner has used freely available aerial imagery from satellite systems such as Google Earth for many of his projects. For 51 US Military Outposts, he used information available from official US military and veterans’ websites and forums, domestic and foreign news articles, and official and leaked government documents and reports to picture US military bases around the world. These bases are part of the semi-secret locations that mark the present power of the US military. Henner's intention was to depict this world from a military perspective, a world of pure strategy and logistics that controls space from above and below."
Reviewing an installation of Fifty-One US Military Outposts at the Carroll/Fletcher Gallery in London, George Vasey wrote, "We hover over the image, inverting the surveillance-like gaze – the watched become observers. The project shifts the public documentarism articulated by Frank and Lange towards the unseen spaces of private finance and security The ability to navigate and edit data provides new conditions of political accountability in an era of information as capital. Henner’s work recalls Eyal Weizman’s reading of the politics of verticality in relation to the Israel occupation of Palestine. For Weizman, power is structured around a vertical axis by asserting sovereignty over the land and surveillance. Henner’s images of military sites dramatise this verticality by inviting the spectator to look down at things shot from above."

''No Man's Land''

In 2011, Henner released No Man’s Land, a collection of photographs apparently showing sex workers around Spain and Italy, as captured by Google's Street View cameras and published as a print-on-demand book.
The work quickly gained notoriety online and featured on numerous blogs and news websites. American journalist and author Violet Blue described the work as haunting “snapshots of the unseen, and yes, the unheard” whilst Pulitzer Prize nominated photojournalist Alan Chin described Henner as “a conceptual photographer-artist masturbator.”
Writing in Prison Photography in August 2011, Pete Brook wrote, "for traditionalists, No Man’s Land is a long way from the spirit of documentary photography On Henner’s virtual tour, we cruise, at 50mph. We don’t stop, we don’t get out the car and we don’t get too close. We might as well be in another country … which of course we are Henner’s work allows us to keep a safe distance. He even saves us the trouble of finding these scenes on our own computer screens; we’re detached one step beyond. We are cheap consumers." In a separate post, Jörg Colberg added, “Henner essentially is producing visual statistics, with the women in question being reduced to ciphers, to small, often blurred, shapes that come with a label."
In April 2012, Pete Brook published email correspondence between himself and Henner, in which the artist mounted a defence of his work. “There’s a section of the photo community judging No Man’s Land according to a pretty narrow set of criteria,” wrote Henner. “So narrow they’re avoiding one of the elephants in the room, which is what role is left for the street photographer in the age of Google Street View?”
In 2012, Henner published a second print-on-demand volume of No Man’s Land and was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Writing about the shortlist for 1000 Words Photography Magazine, Brad Feuerhelm wrote, “No Man’s Land would be a convincingly clever interpretation of lucid geography, technocracy if I had not seen very similar modes of dissemination before. Not only is it derivative but the project completes a vicious circle of unpleasant attitudes of human currency and a new attempt to denigrate women to that of commerce even further.”
Despite these negative reviews, No Man's Land was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2013 and several writers offered more positive insights. Reviewing volume I of No Man’s Land for Source magazine, Daniel Jewsbury wrote:
In a lengthy article published in the online journal Circulation Exchange in 2015, Kate Albers reflected that the series “uniquely addresses the uncomfortable collision of public and private space and experience that now characterizes much of our collective lived experience, and wades, too, into the grim realities of the commerce and commodity of physical bodies in the 21st century.”

''Less Américains''

Henner created further controversy in early 2012 with the publication of Less Américains. In this self-published work, the artist erased much of the content of 83 photographs from Robert Frank's celebrated photobook, The Americans, leaving only occasional remnants of the historic images. In an interview with the New York Times, he describes the erasure of Frank's photobook as an homage to Robert Rauschenberg who similarly created controversy in 1953 with his work Erased de Kooning Drawing. Henner discusses the work in terms of blurring the boundaries of authorship and ownership:
The Americans is one of documentary photography's most revered works and Henner's book resulted in mixed reviews. The Guardian's Sean O'Hagan described it as "either inspired or provocative-to-the-point-of-insulting to the original" whilst Colin Pantall, writing in the British Journal of Photography, described it as "a Churchillian proclamation that far from being over, photography has barely begun." A review by Jeffrey Ladd in Time ended by evaluating the work in relation to Jack Kerouac's own words written in the 1958 introduction which accompanied the first US edition of Frank's book:

''Feedlots''

In 2012, Henner began researching oil fields and feedlots in the US, culminating in a cover-feature for the worldwide edition of Vice Magazine's Hopelessness issue in December 2012. In a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, Henner described how he began working on the series:
Investigative journalist Will Potter described the series as the inspiration behind a successful Kickstarter campaign to use drones to photograph US factory farms from the air, bypassing controversial ag-gag laws in place to prevent, amongst other things, the photographing of factory farms.
Discussing the series for Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley wrote:
In 2014 pictures from Henner's Feedlots and Oil Fields series were shortlisted for the 2014 Prix Pictet.

Publications

Solo exhibitions

2016
2015
2014
2013
2011
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
Henner's work is held in the following public collections: