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: Processing

Sean Cubitt | 05.03.2017 – 17.06.2025
Processing

The photographic image introduced a radical new proposition about representation. Drawing, painting and printmaking required prolonged contemplation of subjects. The long exposures of early photography seemed to parallel that durational encounter. But the appearance of the snapshot changed that. The photogram was an isolated moment singled out that provided a new aesthetic and a new ethical quandary about the instant seized abruptly from the flow of time. The moving image may be seen as an attempt to heal this trauma in the flux of time, but one that created new modes of temporal alienation. Digital imaging, still and moving, alters the conditions of the photogram, bringing it closer to the processing of scientific instruments. In his blog series, thinking ahead of a proposed new avenue of research into the aesthetic politics of truth, Sean Cubitt draws on thinkers from Flusser to Badiou to consider the changing nature and function of time from the decisive moment to data visualisation.

Problems of Happy Images

Montag, 30.01.2017
<p>I ended my <a href="https://www.fotomuseum.ch/de/explore/still-searching/articles/29961_image_after_2_from_truth_to_ethics" target="_blank" rel="noopener">last post</a> with the ethical and political demand for happiness for all. Yes, it is a radical demand. Our world is not a very happy place; and each of us has been schooled, by religion, politics, and what we like to call reality, that we have to put up with pain in the hope of something better coming along when we get to heaven or pay off our debts. Both prospects, in reality, are equally distant. Which means that we have schooled ourselves to accept unhappiness as the nature of life. Casting that off is a huge psychological task, let alone the immense political revolution that would have to happen to realise happiness for everyone.</p>
Blog series: Photography and the Language of Things

David Cunningham | 15.05. – 14.09.2016
Photography and the Language of Things

Until the end of June, David Cunningham will reflect on some current debates around photography and what Hito Steyerl terms “the language of things in the realm of the documentary form”. The blog will examine what seems in such debates a widespread desire to withdraw from representation altogether, whereby the image becomes (to borrow Steyerl’s own citation of Benjamin) “without expression”, not a representation of reality but “a fragment of the real world”, a “thing just like any other”. Engaging with the history of a certain avant-garde that lies behind this, the blog will then pose some questions concerning the political as well as ‘aesthetic’ implications of such a thought of the photographic image.

The Return of the Real (Again)

Freitag, 27.05.2016
<p>In my previous post I tried to sketch out some of those questions provoked by a contemporary desire, <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-thing-like-you-and-me/">in the words of Hito Steyerl</a>, to side with and affirm the object. While this affirmation has coincided with a more general turn towards the object or thing in recent theoretical writing – and, consequently, away (or so it is said) from earlier concerns with language, text, discourse and sign – it has also been attached, in Steyerl and others, to a more specific call to rethink the character of 'the image', and of 'our' relationship to it, as one framed not by an “identification” with the image “as <em>representation</em>”, but precisely “with the image as <em>thing</em>”.</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>