What Can Photography Do?
In her blog series What Can Photography Do, the current blogger Hilde van Gelder will examine art photography’s mobilizing potential in contemporary reality. She will investigate why artists use photographs in order to engage in critical debates about urgent political, economic and ecological issues for today’s society. On a more proactive level, the blog series wants to contribute to understanding how photography as art ― including the moving image ― performs as a constructive actor to rethink and reinvent human solidarity. Several concrete examples of photographic art works are used in order to provide a theoretical framework. The various consequences that artistic choices entail for the world views encapsulated within the proposed images, are carefully scrutinized. The blog series thus aims to raise collective discussion about the profound insights that photographs offer for both visualizing and imagining a renewed understanding of the concept of humanity. As such, this blog series is actively committed to thinking the multiple humanities of the future.
Hilde Van Gelder
Hilde Van Gelder (*1969) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Leuven. She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography (www.lievengevaertcentre.be), editor of the Lieven Gevaert Series, and editor of the e-journal Image [&] Narrative (www.imageandnarrative.be). With Helen Westgeest, she co-authored Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Her book, co-authored with T.J. Demos, In and Out of Brussels: Aesthetics / Histories / Politics Between Europe and Africa is forthcoming from Leuven University Press in 2012.