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# Six Memos for the Future of Photography
- URL: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/six-memos-consistency/
- Published: 2026-08-28T07:10:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T07:12:07.000Z
- Description: #6: Consistency
- Author: Jon Nicholls
- Tags: Memos

This is the final post in a short series responding to Italo Calvino’s [*Six Memos for the Next Millennium*](https://designopendata.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/sixmemosforthenextmillennium%5Fitalocalvino.pdf?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io). 

---

In recent weeks I’ve found myself doing one of two things. Either spending a whole day carrying a camera and not making any pictures or deciding not to take a camera and spending the whole day looking for photographs I can’t make. When I have a camera I look hard, frame a few things, focus carefully, go as far as half-pressing the shutter release once or twice. A day of nearly photographs. When I don’t take a camera it’s mostly because I’m with my family. I like to pretend that I’m more available, more present for them and maybe I am a little. But I’m still framing shots just without the ability to make pictures. Either way, there are no images to show for the effort.

Calvino completed five memos. Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. He died before the sixth was written. Esther Calvino’s note says it was to be called *Consistenza* and that it was to be about Melville’s [*Bartleby*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,%5Fthe%5FScrivener?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io). That’s all the evidence we have and everyone who writes about it, including me, is filling a gap.

I’m not sure about the word consistency. In English it suggests reliability or doing the same thing each time and I began by preferring ‘substance’, because *consistenza* also carries suggestions of density and heft. But I changed my mind. *Consistenza* is what a sauce has, or clay, the property of holding together, whether a thing keeps its shape when it’s no longer supported. Bartleby has no substance at all. He lives on ginger nuts and occupies a corner. What he has is that he will not change his shape. He will not conform or deform.

#### **The lawyer**

In Melville’s story a Wall Street lawyer hires a scrivener, someone who copies documents. Initially, he works productively and silently at a desk by a window facing a wall three feet away. When asked to help proofread, he says he would prefer not to. He goes on saying the exact same phrase each time he is asked to do something. He stops copying, stays in the office, is found to be living there and won’t leave when dismissed. Rather than remove him by force, the lawyer moves his practice to another building. The new tenants have him arrested. He eventually dies in the prison yard, refusing food, lying on his side by the wall with his knees drawn up.

I thought this could be an allegory of photography and I spent a while trying to force it into shape. Bartleby is the photograph, mute, with plenty of surface detail, but refusing to say what it all means. It sounds plausible until you realise that the photograph doesn’t refuse anything. It complies instantly with whatever is asked of it, including the uses that harm people, which is why it can be so easily conscripted. Bartleby would prefer not to. The photograph doesn’t have preferences.

Then I considered Bartleby as the photographer who declines the frame, who [chooses not to make the photograph](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/from-the-photopedagogy-bookshelf-982) for whatever reason. That doesn’t work either because Bartleby’s refusal is absolute and he dies refusing. Any essay that ends by admiring him has recommended starving in a prison yard.

Then Bartleby as the archive, the thing that will not be got rid of and can’t be made to explain itself. Or the file that can’t be opened because the technology has moved on and can’t remember what to do with a .jpeg. Each of these works for a while and then doesn’t and after a few hours of this back-and-forth I realised I was doing the same thing as the lawyer in Melville’s story. He’s the narrator. He likes explanations for his employee’s odd behaviour. Bartleby’s eyes have failed at the dim window. His constitution is disordered. He once worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, sorting undeliverable mail for burning. But these are the lawyer’s consolations. We’re never given access to Bartleby’s thoughts. We know all about the lawyer’s exasperation and charity but Bartleby is just a surface.

The story is a trap for anyone looking for a motive. [Deleuze](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mXVlWzUM3U&t=38s&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) finds a formula that hollows out language. [Agamben](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10978-009-9059-9?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) finds potentiality withheld. Political readers find the refusal of labour. I tried to make it about photography. We don’t know what Calvino would have found. What the story exposes is the reader’s desire to project.

#### **Resistance**

Gert Biesta, my favourite philosopher of education, describes two ways an encounter with the world might go wrong. One is world-destruction, where you force the material until it gives you what you had in mind, overriding whatever it was. The other is self-destruction, where the resistance is unbearable and you withdraw from the encounter altogether. The interesting place is in the middle, which he calls dialogue and involves staying in relation to something that pushes back without either dominating it or fleeing from it.

Photography looks like a poor candidate for this. Clay fights back, the blank paper fights back, the exposure takes a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second and the apparatus does all the work. [Baudelaire](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/270956?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io)’s objection, roughly. But what if the resistance isn’t in the medium itself but is in the world, which won’t arrange itself for you, or hold still? That’s harder than clay, since you can’t work it. You can wait, or move. Or you can just accept the refusal. And it’s not a matter of how much world you go out to meet. You don’t need to be standing on a busy street to feel the world’s resistance. The classroom is the world. The pale light through the dusty window, the scratched desk, the badly arranged bookshelf or the friend who agreed to sit still but won’t stop giggling. And there’s the resistance you feel when the image comes back and it’s different to the thing you were excited to make. And the edit, where you struggle to organise images you made last week. Pictures that you wouldn’t make today. Biesta uses the slightly unwieldy term *subjectification* for the moments when a young person meets something that resists them and is free to decide how to respond to it. Free to decide includes, of course, the freedom to decline. A student who can only ever comply is being objectified. The refusal doesn't have to be dramatic or even articulate. What’s important is that the option is real, because if it isn't, whatever the student produces tells us about the teaching and not much about them.

#### **A procedure**

I couldn’t write this memo the way I wrote the other five. Like Calvino’s memos which refer to other texts, my memos refer to photographs, things you can put next to one another. And there is no Calvino either.

So I decided to try something else. I gave my five previous memos to [Guido](https://fotologic.substack.com/t/guido), my AI photography guide (familiar to regular readers of these posts) and, with one condition of my own, that no names of people survive, asked him to design a constraint, fixed before reading rather than after. A way of compressing or editing the texts by chance.

The procedure he devised involved considering the five posts as one continuous text, first to last, discarding every sentence containing a person’s name (as requested by me), then keeping only sentences containing a word of negation or absence, from a list settled in advance: no, not, n’t, nothing, nowhere, nobody, no one, none, never, without, gone, missing, remove, removed, removal, absence, refuse, refusal, left out, leaves out. A hundred and four sentences were left. From these he selected every sixth sentence, for the memo that’s missing. No editing afterwards was allowed, the order was preserved, nothing cut or added to smooth the joins.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!O1Cy!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff961223a-2886-40af-a7a0-28184a04440b_2000x2000.jpeg)

There are a couple of strange sentences. “A removal of distractions” and “Not precision as measurement” are fragments. I preferred not to remove them. My no-names rule left pronouns and demonstratives pointing at nothing. That refusal refers to no refusal. “The second” has no first. “The Internet is not his multiplicity” has a *his* with nobody behind it. The poem is a surface that gestures at an interior it will not disclose. I’ve deliberately set it as a paragraph rather than as lines. A prose poem of sorts. Run together it reads better and lies slightly about its origins, since a paragraph is the shape of continuous thought and lends unity to whatever it contains. A prose poem also has edges, like a photograph. Baudelaire, who wrote prose poems and despised photography for being a mechanical procedure, would say a poem made by counting to six proves his point.

I then remembered another sampling method, from Tom Phillips’ [*A Humument*](https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/works/humument/slideshow/1-50/9667-page-40?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io).

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WLZ-!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F07747de6-c728-42e3-ae36-6eaff2e31ac8_1550x667.jpeg)

Tom Phillips - Page 40 from **A Humument*, early and late versions, 1973-2022

I asked Guido to re-visit the text of the five posts and make a slightly more Phillips-esque selection, individual words and short phrases from separate lines, in order, 100 or less in total, top to bottom. Whole sections could be left untouched but the resulting ‘poem’ needed to make some kind of (abstract) sense. I was interested in the idea of a photograph, framing the visible, including but mostly excluding. I was interested in what judgements Guido would make. As always, the pre-thinking before the utterance was fascinating:

> *Let me work through the source material systematically, pulling key phrases from each section—starting with the opening about imitation and reality, moving through Calvino's observations about bodies and silver halide, then the latent image passages about absence and presence, the hidden mother's vanishing, and finally the Ishiuchi material about what remains when the mother is gone. Continuing through more observations about how images work—Talmor's invented landscapes that never existed, the FSA photographs edited with holes, camouflage nets designed to hide through fabric, letting materials reveal themselves over time. Halpern's precision capturing the exact moment something remains unfinished, visibility as mental projection and impossibility, light passing through slides rather than reflecting off them.*  
>  
> \[…\]  
>  
> *Now I’m reading through the lines for flow and sense — checking how the language sits, whether each image lands, whether the progression from “nothing on the film” through the silver and the shutter and what’s left behind feels coherent and weighted.* 
>  
> *I’m trying to reshape these fragments so they read more like a continuous run, the way words survive on a Humument page and still form something sentence-like, rather than just a scattered list.*

Here is the resulting poem. All the words are mine, framed by Guido, following an occlusion method inspired by Tom Phillips:

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3XvX!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92aa17d9-893f-44f2-8499-2244ada2afd5_1000x1334.jpeg)

#### Another look

The lawyer goes back, returning to Bartleby’s corner again and again. Each visit is a fresh attempt to solve the same problem. He questions him, offers him money and a room in his own home. He’s hoping that something under the surface will announce itself and account for the refusal. It never does. Eventually, the returning becomes unbearable and he moves his practice to another building and leaves the man in the empty rooms. Bartleby is arrested and the lawyer visits the prison to make sure he’s fed well. This is a real kindness following an abandonment. What he never does is look at Bartleby without wanting something from him.

There’s a lot of talk in photography education about attention. Be present. Look properly. Slow down. I’ve said and written similar things myself. It seems to me now that the difficulty isn’t that people fail to look but that looking is expected to pay. Each of the lawyer’s visits is the same visit. The surface he keeps looking past is all there was ever going to be. Not because there’s nothing behind it. If we think of Bartleby as a person, rather than just Melville’s literary device, the reasons for his refusal surely exist. They are simply not available, which is also the photograph’s condition. Everything in a picture was caused by something. The door is that colour because somebody painted it. The poster is pasted there because somebody had a job to do that morning. The woman is standing at that angle for her own reasons. None of these causes are recoverable from the picture. The surface covers a plenitude you can’t get at. Which is why the projecting is so hard to stop and why captions exist. The emptiness argument is the wrong one.

I often go back to photography exhibitions. Four times to one show last year, five to another, mostly because I like them and sometimes because it’s raining or I need the toilet. I’m wary of dressing this up. It’s a habit and returning can be nothing more than the pleasure of recognising my own taste, which is just a kind of connoisseurship. Usually, by the third or fourth visit I already know everything in the rooms. Whatever happens then doesn’t feel like acquisition. There are photographs I’ve been looking at for over thirty years and I could describe most of them from memory. They haven’t become clearer. The looking hasn’t accumulated into a definitive interpretation and I’ve stopped expecting it to.

So the quality, if it is one, is remaining in front of something that will not pay you for your time. Not patience, which implies a delivery date. Something more like a willingness to stay unreconciled, to keep a thing in view after it has stopped offering anything.

Consistency in this sense isn’t a property of the photograph. The photograph asks very little of us and will sit somewhere for decades, waiting. Whether anything holds together is a question about the other side of the encounter.

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