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: Politics and Artistic Expression: Paul Strand

Anne McCauley | 01.02. – 15.03.2015
Politics and Artistic Expression: Paul Strand

Until March 15, Professor Anne McCauley will discuss the difficulty of reconciling politics and artistic expression, with a particular emphasis on the career of Paul Strand.

The Problematic Politics of Paul Strand

Sonntag, 01.02.2015
<div>The recent retrospective exhibition of Paul Strand’s photographs, organized by the <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/805.html">Philadelphia Museum of Art</a> to celebrate its purchase of more than 3000 prints and lantern slides from the Paul Strand Archive at the Aperture Foundation and coming to the <a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/exhibitions/21652_paul_strand_photography_and_film_for_the_20th_century">Fotomuseum Winterthur</a> in March, provides an ideal moment to think about Strand’s contribution and how he has been fashioned as a master of “modernist” photography (if not the slippery status of not-for-profit institutions that sell donated works to raise funds, perhaps the subject of another blog).<br><br></div>

Reading Strand’s New York Photographs: City Hall Park

Sonntag, 08.02.2015
<p>In my last post, I suggested that we should rethink how we might read “politics” into the works of Paul Strand.  I put “politics” advisedly into quotes, because few photographs can translate specific political tenets or party lines into form. Apart from a unique photograph called <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/310991.html?mulR=21244|1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Skeleton and Swastika, Connecticut”</a> contrived in 1938-39, Strand was no John Heartfield and never directly attacked scowling financiers or aggrandized noble workers in the fields in his still photographs. He remained above all an artist with a distinct social point of view, who recognized that the power to shift the public’s attention by forcing it to visually engage with the overlooked was his greatest gift.</p>

The Politics of Urban Planning: Strand at Midtown

Mittwoch, 18.02.2015
<p>The same year that Strand shot <a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/27002_reading_strands_new_york_photographs_city_hall_park" target="_blank" rel="noopener">City Hall Park </a>he took another, somewhat similar picture in a second prominent location, <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/74108.html?mulR=1483769599|11" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York</a>. Still perched above his subject but physically closer than he was in the courthouse north of City Hall Park, Strand was shooting from the second-floor window of Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery at 500 Fifth Avenue. The building is now gone, but from photographs it seems that he had to be behind a window (was it opened?) using a lens that radically compressed the width of Fifth Avenue and brought him nearer street traffic while catching a bit of a unfocused cornice in the lower left.</p>

Rear Windows: Strand’s Backyards

Donnerstag, 26.02.2015
<p>In 1916, the same year that Paul Strand made his remarkable studies of lower-class types caught unawares by a disguised camera lens, he moved away from New York’s crowded streets to capture backyards visible from a bird’s-eye perspective.</p> <p></p> <p></p>
Blog series: Past, Present and Future of the Photo Book

Markus Hartmann | 15.09. – 31.10.2014
Past, Present and Future of the Photo Book

Until October 31 Markus Hartmann, the former publishing director of Hatje Cantz will be thinking about the past, present and future of the photo book:

„Making and selling books was (and still is) a commercial venture, similar to the gallery business. I mention this because a lot of people from the inner circles of the art world do not have the same understanding and see their work or other works and exhibitions from a more idealistic point of view. I was accustomed to thinking about money and budgets when publishing books, and seldom had the opportunity to make books without such constraints. This is one reason why my contributions to this blog will focus more on the business side of making photo books than contributions from historians, researchers, curators, etc.“

Honoring Two Great Photo Book Publishers: Gigi Giannuzzi and Walter Keller

Dienstag, 30.09.2014
<div>Welcome back – now from Jaca, Spain!</div><div><br></div><div>Those who follow this blog may be aware that I am on a road trip through France, Spain, and Portugal. The trip started in Stuttgart and the last location I wrote about was Arles. More about the trip at the end of this entry. And again, to those who follow this blog: Feel free to contact me – I am always happy about advice on where to go, what to see, and who to meet!<br><br></div>
Blog series: Modernist Revisitations

Claire Bishop | 15.09. – 31.10.2013
Modernist Revisitations

Claire Bishop is blogging about ‚modernist revisitations‘ – or, in her own words: „Sometimes it feels as if every art magazine I open, and every exhibition I visit, features at least one artist whose work earnestly addresses ‘failed utopias’, who is fascinated by ‘Modernist movements and collectives’, who is committed to ‘the re-enactment of historic high Modernist principles’, or who is drawn to ‘forgotten Modernist constructions that have crumbled over time’. Why this incessant retrospectivity? Are these revisitations in any way political, a response to the limitations of postmodern eclecticism? Or should they be viewed more critically, as an avoidance of contemporary politics by escaping into nostalgia celebration of the past? My blog hopes to raise some questions about the ubiquitous genre of modernist utopias in contemporary art.“

How Did We Get so Nostalgic for Modernism?

Samstag, 14.09.2013
<div>I’m going to use this blog as a way to test out some ideas relating to a series of essays I’m putting together on the retrospectivity of contemporary art. What do I mean by retrospectivity? The tendency, found almost globally, for art to quote and repurpose pre-existing cultural artefacts. Pre-eminent among this tendency is the trend for repurposing Modernist art, architecture and design. </div>
Blog series: What We Talk about When We Talk about Photography

Aveek Sen | 01.03. – 14.04.2012
What We Talk about When We Talk about Photography

Until mid-April, the current blogger Aveek Sen will „open up the discussion on photography towards a realm of the promiscuous – a word I steal from the lexicon of sexuality to use in relation to the creative process. By the ‘creative process’, I do not mean simply the making and showing of photographs, but the entire web of relationships that connects looking, thinking, reading, listening, remembering and everyday life. I believe that photography is most richly nourished by its promiscuous liaisons with the other arts and with certain kinds of art/music-haunted experience. I will focus particularly on literature (especially fiction and poetry) and cinema, using specific works to build up a way of thinking about photography. Moving the discussion beyond the Barthes/Benjamin/Sontag trinity that dominates writing on photography, I want to use other works of art as starting points for reflection and debate, blurring the conventional distinction between theory and practice.“

The Grid and More

Samstag, 07.04.2012
<p>In 1985, the American photographer, William Gedney, copied out a passage in his notebook from the English writer on landscape, Nan Fairbrother: “The shapes we make for ourselves are geometrical, and the background of civilised life is more or less rectangular. Our rooms and houses are arrangements of cubes, our doors and windows, furniture and rugs, books and boxes – all their angles are right angles and all their sides are straight.”</p>