Ostensibly as documentarian as his work on The Family of Man, Image Storage Containers (2012) does something closely related in intention to the latter and yet very different. On one level, it can be described as condensing, as Marie Muracciole has noted, two moments in the myth of photography as a “universal language”: the first involving The Family of Man as imperial project; the second, photography’s sheer technicity as a mechanical means of reproduction,  with all its attendant connotations ofobjectivity and scientificity. Atop this interfolding of meanings one can discern two additional layers: the Image Storage Container as a kind of “thought experiment,” an auto-pedagogical exercise to schematize the human nervous system, and, a more polemical read, as a proposition about the present conditions for viewing photographs within today’s networked image regime—at a moment when computer technologies, themselves predicated upon neuroscience findings on human perception and cognition, have precipitated a mass transformation of psycho-social behavior. 

Michael Baers