Still Searching…

Nicht nur die Fotografie, sondern auch ihre Theorie und Geschichtsschreibung erfahren unter digitalen Bedingungen eine radikale Erweiterung. Fotografische Medien und Formen sind in komplexe technologische, kapitalistische und ideologische Netzwerke eingebunden; Expert_innen, die die Rolle fotografischer Bilder wissenschaftlich untersuchen, kommen entsprechend aus ganz unterschiedlichen Disziplinen. Die Erweiterung des Diskurses um fotografische Bilder bildet sich auch auf dem Theorie-Blog Still Searching… des Fotomuseum Winterthur ab, der sich seit 2012 interdisziplinär mit allen Aspekten der Fotografie und ihrer Rolle in der visuellen Kultur beschäftigt. Eingeladene Blogger_innen des Online- Formats bewegen sich an vorderster Front der Forschung und schärfen unseren Blick für die aktuellen und relevanten Fragestellungen rund um die Fotografie.

Index

Blog series: Photographic Relationality

George Baker | 01.06. – 15.07.2013
Photographic Relationality

George Baker will write around the idea of thinking or theorizing “photographic relationality.” We think of photography, so often, in terms of what Rosalind Krauss called a “theory of gaps”: the photograph as an operation of visual isolation, framing, cropping, freezing an object as a motionless specimen. But the vaunted “doubling” in which photography has been involved is also the creation of a relationship; the photograph’s “indexical” tie to the world a bond or affective tie more than a simple technical effect, and one that still needs further thought and description. Touching upon specific photographs and photographers, pushing forward from the implications of select contemporary artistic practices engaged with photography, I want to think about the relational status and potential of photography over its longer history. I want to write a set of speculative entries on the photograph as an image-couple more than the photograph as image-double – theorizing photographic linkage over technological reproducibility as the central promise of photography today. A set of entries imagining an affective theory of photography, building upon thoughts on photography and love from Roland Barthes to Eduardo Cadava.

Image Couple

Dienstag, 16.07.2013
<p>Of all the arcana produced by our collective obsession with Roland Barthes’ theory of photography in the book <em>Camera Lucida</em>, by the endless exegesis and investigation this text on photography seems to inspire, I find the following the most impressive. Buried in a footnote two-thirds of the way to the end of Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca’s essay “Notes on Love and Photography,” a text first published in <em>October</em> magazine a few years ago, we read:</p>