Still Searching…

From 2012 to 2023, the discursive blog format of Fotomuseum Winterthur subjected all aspects of photography and its role in visual culture to interdisciplinary scrutiny. The approximately 50 bloggers that contributed to Still Searching… discussed photographic media and forms within their complex technological, capitalist and ideological networks and negotiated some of the most pressing and relevant questions surrounding photography.

Blog series: Photography Must Be Curated!

Katrina Sluis | 15.09. – 20.12.2019
Photography Must Be Curated!

Katrina Sluis’ blog series “Photography Must Be Curated!” explores the diffusion and intensification of curation in an era of photographic post-scarcity. As curating becomes a practice and process made operational in network culture, and a problem to be solved by the computer sciences, what does this mean for those traditionally charged with the exhibition, collection and interpretation of photography? By focusing on the practices of technologists, digital marketers and platform users, the series aims to create new vectors between the previously separated fields of institutional curating, social media curating and computational curating. In doing so, the series ultimately seeks to explore what a practice of post-photographic curating might look like.

Know Your Bounce Rate

Monday, 16.09.2019

<p>In February 2011, Google released “Panda”, the first of several updates to its PageRank algorithm. The release aimed to discipline rogue webmasters, and prevent sites with poor quality content from polluting Google’s top search results. With it came the imposition of a new metric of value: <em>freshness</em>. Those seeking credibility within Google’s scopic regime were advised by specialists to generate new and dynamic content that’s ‘engaging, entertaining, enlightening and/or inspiring’ across all available media channels.</p>

Post-Photography Should Not Be Curated?

Tuesday, 29.10.2019

<p>For my second post, I’d like to dwell a little longer on the question of how contemporary photographic practices and technologies are curated institutionally. The issue facing photography curators today is that ‘the digital’ – as it is typically invoked – is not simply a new photographic medium but a hybrid and converged set of socio-technical practices generating alternative image economies, sites of expertise and cultural value.</p>

Curate or Be Curated: A Visual Interlude

Wednesday, 11.12.2019

<p>In this post, I wanted to curate a visual essay out of my screenshot collection. A recent infographic claimed that articles that contain images receive 94 percent more views than those without. Visuals are processed 600,000 times faster than text. Audiences can recall 65% of the visual content that they see almost three days later, in comparison to about 10% of written content. Adding an image at the beginning of every article reduces bounce rate; and with more engagement you can generate higher revenue and cultural authority.</p>

Survival of the Fittest Image

Thursday, 23.01.2020

<p>If the contemporary task of the photography curator has been to rescue the photographic image from photographic reproduction, then the task of the computer scientist has been to rescue the photograph from semantic oblivion. Or, as the scholar David Weinberger observes: “When you have ten, twenty, or thirty thousand photos on your computer, storing a photo of Aunt Sally labelled ‘DSC00165.jpg’ is functionally the same as throwing it out, because you’ll never find it again.”</p>