Studio Manifesto

Against the Program

Studio GM Archive Studio Place Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia Year 2026

These are the positions GM Archive Studio works from. The title refers to the program built into every camera, the assumptions an apparatus makes about what is worth recording. Working against the program is not working against technology. It means using the tools without accepting their terms.

Propositions

01The photograph is not a neutral record. It is an argument about the world, shaped by the apparatus that produced it and the institutions that put it to use.
02The divide between nature and culture is a habit of perception. Photography has helped to reinforce it, and a habit can be unlearned.
03Computational processes continue photography. Each new technique opens the photograph further, and none of them is the last.
04Working with scientific processes without scientific intent moves them into the register of perception. The result attends to the conditions of knowing more than to claims of knowledge.
05Documentary images of the Anthropocene’s symptoms are not enough. The work has to take on the conditions themselves, the slowness of deep time and the scale of climate.
06An archive is an argument about what matters and what is allowed to remain. To build one is to make a claim about knowledge and memory.
07The image does not claim to be a window. It admits it is a wall, a surface carrying the conditions of its own making.
08The viewer is already inside the world the work proposes. The aim is an encounter that is hard to walk away from unchanged.

Gregor MacGregor
GM Archive Studio, Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia
2026