Still Searching…

Von 2012 bis 2023 beschäftigte sich der Diskurs-Blog des Fotomuseum Winterthur interdisziplinär mit allen Aspekten der Fotografie und ihrer Rolle in der visuellen Kultur. Die insgesamt fast 50 eingeladenen Blogger_innen von Still Searching…  diskutierten fotografische Medien und Formen als Bestandteil komplexer technologischer, kapitalistischer und ideologischer Netzwerke und verhandelten aktuellste und relevante Fragestellungen rund um die Fotografie.

Index

Blog series: Future Histories

Steffen Siegel | 23.04. – 15.07.2020
Future Histories

In his blog series “Future Histories,” Steffen Siegel discusses various problems of older and more recent historiographies of photography – and how to go beyond them. Photographic image-production and the medium’s historiography share almost the same age. However, compared to photography’s innovative or even revolutionary visual strategies, the forms of writing about its history have remained surprisingly traditional. Photography Studies always have been a nomadic enterprise within an interdisciplinary environment. Nevertheless, there is a risk of taming these research activities by adopting models and genres from other academic disciplines. This blog series is an invitation to discuss the following questions: How can we arrive at new ways of reflecting on photo history? How can we create a bigger picture without just writing another compendious book? Thus, how can “Future Histories” lead to different ways of representing the medium’s history?

Beyond Newhall?

Mittwoch, 06.05.2020
<p>We don’t have to beat around the bush: the photo historian, curator, and university teacher Beaumont Newhall has not enjoyed an excellent reputation for quite a while now. 1982 seemed to mark a watershed for him.</p>
Blog series: Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Abigail Solomon-Godeau | 16.04. – 31.05.2014
Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Starting on April 15, 2014, the American art critic and professor emerita Abigail Solomon-Godeau, will reflect on a selection of the exhibitions (i.e., the particular) viewed in the past couple of weeks and try to distill, or extract, something that might count as some valid generalities about photographic practice and photographic discourse in their current manifestations.

Two Radically Disjunct Approaches

Dienstag, 15.04.2014
<div>This is the first of five blogs I will be writing for the Fotomuseum Winterthur and, as it happens, the first I have ever written. But because almost everything I write is done on commission, the daunting freedom provided by this kind of blog (“write anything on photography”) is more intimidating than exhilarating. Given such freewheeling editorial liberty, I had to decide whether to orient this first blog to the “general,” or to the “particular.” <br><br></div>

Boundary Problems: Addressing History in the Image

Dienstag, 22.04.2014
<div>In the powerful group exhibition entitled <a href="http://www.galerielelong.com/exhibition_pr/2252">Re-framing History at the Galerie Lelong in NYC,</a> only one of the 21 works on view falls under the rubric of “photography.” But even so, in addition to its seven photographs, fifteen 35mm slides, and a contact sheet, the work includes two videos, a set of 20 matchboxes, and four reproductions of printed matter. I refer here to Susan Meiselas’ mixed-media <em>The Life of an Image: Molotov Man.</em><br><br></div>

A Tale of Two Mapplethorpes

Mittwoch, 30.04.2014
<div>A large retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work has just opened at the Grand Palais in Paris. It is coupled with another Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Musée Rodin where Mapplethorpe’s photographs—I am not joking—are displayed with various sculptures by Rodin.<br><br></div>

Whitewash: Artist and Models

Montag, 12.05.2014
<div>"When one reads this passage [from Martinique by Michel Cournot] a dozen times and lets oneself go; that is, abandons oneself to the movement of its images—one is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis."<em> </em>(Frantz Fanon:<em> Black Skin, White Masks</em>)<br><br></div>