Manual 4.26.
2024–ongoing
In-game photography, official video game manuals, digital negatives Sun-exposed contact printing
Sun-exposed silver gelatin contact print
26 images / variable dimensions
Manual 4.26. examines how photography is imagined, taught, scored and controlled inside video games. The selected games are chosen because photography performs a function within them: as a subject, tool, task, evidence, puzzle mechanism, scoring system or condition of progress — not merely as a photo mode for making attractive images.
Working from official manuals, trailers, official game websites and in-game photographic tasks, Zmeyev follows images and instructions already authored by game developers. He re-enacts them inside the games, translates the resulting images into digital negatives and exposes them by sunlight through contact printing. What appears as creative freedom becomes a prescribed operation: the game image becomes less an artwork to compose than a command to execute.
Manual 4.26. A manual is a command disguised as help. It does not simply explain an image; it tells a body what to do with it.
In Manual 4.26., Maxim Zmeyev treats the history of photography inside video games as a history of instructed vision. The project follows games where photography is not decoration, but a mechanic: a weapon, a means of collecting, scoring, investigating, proving, remembering or moving forward. The image is not only made. It is required.
The series begins with Safari (1979), an early video game built around photographic action. Aim through the lens. Frame an animal. Press at the right moment. Receive points. From this first operation, Manual 4.26. follows the development of in-game photography from target and viewfinder to task, evidence and proof.
In later games, the order becomes harder to see because it starts calling itself freedom. The player is invited to explore, admire, compose, share and perform a personal eye. But the image is already being prepared by game developers: staged light, weather, ruins, polished dirt, scenic viewpoints, photo filters, preset poses. The world offers itself as open, then quietly marks the correct view. What circulates as personal authorship also works for the game: the player’s eye becomes part of its promotional apparatus.
Zmeyev follows this order too exactly. He does not search for “his own” images inside these worlds. He re-enacts images already authored by developers: frames that show what should be photographed, how it should be framed and how the photographic mechanic should be used. Some works are one-to-one re-enactments of images published in printed manuals, digital guides, official websites or trailers. Others come from tasks where the game demands a specific photograph in order to continue, solve a puzzle, receive points, verify evidence or unlock access. The shutter is pressed; the image has already been assigned.
The manual is where the assignment becomes readable. Look here. Aim there. Wait. Capture. Compare. Confirm. Read. Continue. The image behaves like a script. Photography becomes less an act of expression than a test of obedience to a designed point of view. To understand the work is also to follow an instruction: first see the image, then see the order that produced it.
Because the project builds a history of photography inside video games, it also turns back to photographic history outside them. Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras enters the work not as a technique to imitate, but as a frame at photography’s origin: a camera held still, an opening toward light, a surface waiting long enough for an image to appear. The window was not a romantic subject; it was an apparatus — a controlled passage for light and a technical condition of visibility. In Manual 4.26., that condition returns through other windows: the television screen, the computer monitor, the handheld display, the interface frame, the printed guide. Each offers access; each sets a limit.
The project transfers these prescribed images into sun-exposed contact printing, a process being developed towards photopolymer plates. Instruction, exposure and surface become part of one operation: a command designed for the screen is slowed into photographic contact, and a digital image once used inside a game becomes a fragile physical object made by light, surface and time. This is not nostalgia, but counter-procedure: photographic materiality is returned to images born inside screens, engines and interfaces.
The title follows Zmeyev’s internal coding system. 4 marks the project’s place in his chronology, but also the four states through which the image passes: official instruction, in-game re-enactment, digital negative, sun-exposed print. 26 refers to the twenty-six images in the series and to the 1826–27 threshold of photographic history associated with Niépce’s first surviving camera-made photograph.
Manual 4.26. is a project about compulsory creativity. It asks what kind of authorship remains when the viewpoint, the subject, the reward, the gesture and the circulation of the image have already been designed. The manual stops being a supplement. It becomes a system that assigns vision before the image is made, then calls the result authorship.
