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: Photography and Dissemination

Geoffrey Batchen | 15.09. – 31.10.2012
Photography and Dissemination

Photo thinker Geoffrey Batchen will write about photography and dissemination:

„The theme of my contribution to Still Searching is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935-36). Or, rather, it is inspired by the striking absence of discussions of reproduction and its effects in the literature about photography since this essay first appeared. So I guess I am searching, in the first instance, for the reasons for this absence, given that Benjamin’s essay has been made compulsory reading for a generation of students and is one of the most cited in serious texts about the photographic experience. But I am also interested in beginning to explore the ramifications of photography’s relationship to reproducibility for our understanding of this medium’s history. How has reproducibility manifested itself in photographic practice and experience? What have been the effects of these manifestations? What kind of history would have to be written to encompass these questions? The invention of this history—of a mode of representation capable of doing justice to these questions–is ultimately what I am ‘still searching’ for.“

Still Searching: “the dark, repressed side”

Montag, 01.10.2012
<div>My previous post briefly mentioned the negative as one crucial component of the identity of many photographs. It is, nevertheless, an aspect of that identity often ignored by histories of photography, where negatives are rarely reproduced or discussed at any length. Negatives, it seems, are truly the repressed, dark side of photography’s history. <br><br></div>

Photography and Authorship

Sonntag, 07.10.2012
<div>My previous post touched on the complications that arise from photography’s dependence on a negative-positive system of reproduction, a system that divides the photograph from itself but also divides the act of photographing into a number of separate elements, each of them able to be undertaken by different workers. <br><br></div>