A black and white photo recently bothered me; I was at the University of Texas reading about the oil industry when I came across a striking image that at first glance might seem rather boring: a muddy boardwalk, three people, three horses, two wagons loaded with barrels and jerry cans Oil. The footnote says it was taken in 1915 during an “oil shipment” in a town called Normangee.
Although there was nothing particularly beautiful or striking, famous or disturbing about the photo, I stared at it in fascination for a long time. Because? To explain, I turned to Camera Lucida. Note on Photography (1980), the last book published by Roland Barthes, in which he proposes two very fruitful concepts for analyzing the photographic experience: the Studium and the Punctum.
Barthes defines study as the “educated” interest in an image, a “trivial taste” motivated by the cultural content encoded in an image. The punctum, on the other hand, is a burst of taste unexpectedly caused by a “sensitive point” that “emerges from the photo like an arrow and pricks me.” The punctum hurts us and challenges us in intimate and random ways.
This photo particularly interested me because it captures a far-reaching historical transition: in it, horses, the main means of transportation for Eurasian civilizations for millennia, meet with oil, the fuel for vehicles that were used to make draft horses, which later became obsolete. These oil delivery vans are a hinge between two eras.
The Ford Model T, the first fuel-efficient automobile, went on sale in 1908, seven years before the scene was photographed. The engine of this car had twenty horsepower, while the oil delivery trucks had only three horsepower, one white and two brown (I don’t know if they were mares or men), scrawny whiners like Don Quixote’s. These lanky animals were part of a large population of horse workers: in 1915, there were more than 20 million horses in the United States alone, and 25% of the country’s total agricultural land was used to produce their feed. From then on, the number of horses worldwide would decline sharply. After being crucial factors in the expansion of Eurasian empires, the feudal organization of Europe, and the conquest of the Americas, horses eventually became recreational animals at racetracks, riding clubs, tourist carriages, and beach riding.
I doubt that the guy in the beret, sitting very comfortably on one of the oil barrels, imagines that in the future all the world’s financial newspapers will publish the price of a barrel every day, since it has become one of the most important measures of contemporary wealth. International oil production and reserves are precisely measured in barrels, the price dynamics of which determine crises and inflation, international credit, geopolitical alliances, coups, wars and assassinations.
Here ends my photo study: a taste motivated by historical curiosity. From here on out, the punctum moves me. The image catches my eye because of one feature that seems random: the white horse appears to be looking at the camera. In the shadow of its blinders, the animal defies its mechanical condition and becomes one of the motifs depicted. The intuition of his gaze becomes an animated mirror that confronts me with my fears for the future. I fear that I will quickly become redundant, just like the horses that transported oil in the early 20th century.
Plagued by insecurity, I take refuge in my studies again. Artificial intelligence and robotics threaten the value of our work. The streets around the university library where I am are already being used by autonomous vehicles. The first time I saw an empty car approaching, moving silently without a driver or passengers, a ghostly chill came over me. Before I cross the street, I always check the eyes of drivers to make sure they have seen me and aren’t running me over, but there is no way to look the autonomous machines in the eyes (I refuse to intelligently watch them to name). ) that increasingly manage more aspects of our daily lives.
Not long ago, a taxi driver from Chilango gave me one of the most effective psychotherapies of my life as we drove along the viaduct. Will we talk about politics, sports and wickedness on shows like ChatGPT when we look at the taxis of the future? Maybe there will be apps to connect with passengers of other taxis who want to chat with a stranger for a while. Or maybe we put on hallucinatory helmets to pretend we’re riding a horse down a forest path while stuck in traffic outside. In this scenario, everyone would have their virtual horse, Babieca, Rocinante or Palomo.
But the photographic presence of this anonymous horse doesn’t make me so tech-optimistic. The price we are already paying for automation is deeper and deeper loneliness and increasingly limited career prospects. Pets mitigate the affective crisis of digital city life, but cats and dogs cannot save us from becoming powerless in the face of companies and governments operating on minimal workforces. If we docilely ride in the autonomous taxis of tomorrow, we risk losing the direction of our existence entirely. Given this scenario, every time I interact with the screen, I feel like a horse carrying the computing fuel of the machines that will replace it. A sleepless horse with no health insurance, a left-handed horse that can only read and write, a horse that is sometimes distracted at work and stunned by the photos.
Jorge Commensal He is the author of The Mutations, Junkies of Letters and This Boiling Void. Works with Transformación de Conflictos Socioenvironmentales, AC and the Condor Reintroduction Project in Baja California, Mexico.