Multi Multi, Photoworks’ 31st Annual (a new publication) is a deep dive into image replication.

William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered photomechanical reproduction in the 1840s, and Walter Benjamin published his iconic essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in 1935. But since then, the implications of photography’s reproducibility have been largely ignored - and even deliberately suppressed in limited edition fine art prints. That is, until now. The invention of digital imaging, the internet, and social media have brought the ability to reproduce and circulate images to the fore, and with them new questions around what it all means. Michelle Henning’s Photography: The Unfettered Image and Andrew Dewdney’s Forget Photography propose images as part of a flow, while developments in AI suggest attempts to create order from chaos.

Multi Multi (Photoworks Annual # 31) gathers contemporary artists working with replication, in 23 projects by image-makers from around the world. Mixing projects made with cutting-edge technology with works created with the oldest analogue processes, it suggests that image replication is nothing new. In doing so, Multi Multi suggests image replication is intrinsically linked to the culture in which it was born, at the start of industrial capitalism. Multi Multi continues the project begun with Photoworks Annual 30, The Thing, which considers how images extract and commodify; it just asks what happens when they’re mass produced.

Designed by Shaz Madani, Multi Multi is a printed publication, featuring 23 projects by artists from around the world. It also includes essays by Andrew Dewdney and Michelle Henning, and an experimental text created with AI by Alex Puliatti, who recently graduated from King’s College London, plus an introduction by Photoworks Editor Diane Smyth.