Manual 4.26.
2024 – ongoing
Virtual Photography
Sun-exposed silver gelatin contact print
20 × 30.5 cm
Manual 4.26. reinterprets 26 images from video game manuals by transferring them onto silver gelatin photographic paper from digital negatives through sun-exposed contact printing. From early virtual photo safaris to photorealistic open worlds, the project traces how photography entered the history of video games and became a tool for interacting with digital environments. Game manuals appear here as vernacular databases of visual instructions, while the reference to Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras connects, not through process but through the logic of the window, the origins of photography to contemporary screens and interfaces.
Manual 4.26. is a series of 26 images drawn from video games, recreated by Maxim Zmeyev from screenshots and manual illustrations, then transferred onto photographic paper through a digital negative and sun-exposed contact printing. The project explores the relationship between virtual imagery and analogue photography through games released from 1979 to the present, selected for the role photography plays in gameplay, narrative progression, or puzzle solving.
By faithfully reproducing images from game manuals and strategy guides, Manual 4.26. questions authorship, originality, and execution. Following strict instructions, the artist deliberately limits his own room for invention and adopts a position closer to that of an operator. In this sense, the project belongs to the history of vernacular photography — utilitarian, instructional, and documentary images, whether technical manuals, ID photographs, or other pictures made to transmit information rather than assert aesthetic singularity. The screenshots found in video game guides belong to the same economy: they are made to demonstrate a command, a function, a procedure, an expected behavior. Their transfer into contact-printed photographic objects changes their status without erasing their original function. They remain instructional images, but become slowed down, materialized, and recontextualized.
From early titles such as Safari (1979), which stages a photo safari, to contemporary photorealistic games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), photography has steadily expanded the ways players interact with game worlds. Depending on the game, taking pictures can solve puzzles, move a story forward, document endangered species, collect evidence, imitate existing media practices such as paparazzi photography, explore a character’s psychological state, or simply teach the player how to look. In this context, the images reproduced in manuals are never neutral illustrations; they also show how a game wants to be seen, understood, and performed.
These images already exist within the window of the interface — screen, frame, control diagram, action zone — which directly recalls the long history of photography understood as a window. Niépce remains relevant here not as a technical model for the process used, but as an inaugural figure of an image fixed through an opening, in View from the Window at Le Gras. Between that founding window and the digital windows of screens, monitors, and portable devices, Manual 4.26. traces a continuity: images framed by a device and produced through a relation between vision, technique, and surface.
The concepts of Lev Manovich and Alexander Galloway inform this reflection. For Manovich, game manuals can be understood as databases of visual instructions that organize the possible use of images and actions. For Galloway, video games are structured by protocols, operations, and logics of execution; by mechanically following game instructions and reproducing their guide images, the artist extends that procedural logic while shifting it into a material medium.
The use of silver gelatin contact printing from a digital negative, exposed to sunlight, makes that shift explicit. Where the screenshot is instantaneous, backlit, and immaterial, the print requires a sensitive surface, exposure time, handling, chemical development, and the delayed emergence of the image. Here sunlight is not a romantic metaphor but a literal condition of inscription. The passage from file to transparency, and then from transparency to photosensitive paper, reintroduces a physical chain where the video game image seems to exist only as display and flow.
Mark B. N. Hansen’s reflections on the embodied dimension of media experience are also relevant here. By turning interface images into tangible photographic objects, Manual 4.26. slows their circulation and alters the way they are perceived. The project thus reconsiders the status of vernacular images from video games within contemporary visual culture and explores the contact zones between documentation, simulation, visual instruction, and photographic materiality.
