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: Marvin Heiferman

Marvin Heiferman | 01.11. – 15.12.2013
Marvin Heiferman

In his blog series, Marvin Heiferman will take a broad look at the medium as it is changing and being redefined, and consider the issues in and around the medium that are provocative. Rather than understanding photography as a medium in crisis, as some people seem so eager to suggest, Heiferman sees photography in the midst of being re-imagined – this is will be his starting point to look at and talk about over the course of his blogging period. He will use news reports and stories about topical images, events, and issues in visual culture as the basis for taking a weekly look at how photography and our relationship to it are changing. He will link to stories, write about the issues that they raise, and invite readers to take an active role in the discussion. 

A Moving Target

Friday, 01.11.2013
<p>Using <em>Still Searching</em> as a shared space, what I hope to do over the next six weeks is both to stimulate a dialog and extend a project I’ve been working on lately, which involves taking a broad look at photography as the medium itself is in the midst of transformation. To that end, watch for links I’ll post periodically to online news reports and timely stories about provocative images, events, and issues in visual culture.</p>

The River

Tuesday, 05.11.2013
<div>The statistics are staggering, almost incomprehensible. It is estimated that every day, 1.3 billion photographs are made. Of those, 350 million are uploaded to Facebook. Google+ users, who are currently being offered some of the most advanced and easy to use photo-editing tools to lure them away from Facebook, are posting another 214 million a day. 150 million photos are shared through Snapchat, 55 million via Instagram, and another 1.4 million are added to Flickr.<br><br></div>

Posing as What?

Saturday, 09.11.2013
<div>Montage of Students Posing Awkwardly for What Turns Out to be a Video Camera:</div>

Here's Looking at Me

Wednesday, 13.11.2013
<div>In a defining moment of Nan Goldin’s 1980s slideshow, <em>The Ballad of Sexual Dependency</em>, the lyrics to the Velvet Underground’s classic 1967 song—<em>I’ll be your mirror/Reflect what you are, in case you don't know…'Cause I see you</em>—are heard as slides of women looking at their reflections in mirrors are projected, one after another, every four seconds. Mirrors, a much-used device in Goldin’s <em>magnum opus</em>, serve as constant reminders of our attempts to see ourselves clearly in reflective surfaces, through the eyes of others and, of course, through photography.<br><br></div>

How, Where, and When Will We Really Talk About Photography?

Friday, 22.11.2013
<div><a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26966_the_river">In an earlier post</a> where I marveled over the almost unimaginable number of photographic images made daily, some commenters here and on Twitter (where I’m happy to see these posts bouncing around, too) remarked that it was time to get over being amazed, alarmed, or fetishizing what is, in fact, an undeniable pile up of pictures. The gist of some of those responses was that the bulk of those images are made privately, don’t circulate widely, and aren’t particularly good or meaningful in the first place.<br><br></div>

Photography, She Said, Makes Me Nervous

Tuesday, 03.12.2013
<div>Decades ago, when I wanted to be a painter and also needed a job, I thought it might be good to get some hands-on art world experience. I went to a number of galleries to inquire if there might be any positions and—in the era before MFA, museum studies, and arts administration programs made that crazily competitive—was hired by Harold Jones, the founding director of LIGHT Gallery, which had recently opened on Madison Avenue. Harold, who had spotted me looking at shows there previously, took a chance, hired me, and in ways I still marvel at, changed the course of my life.<br><br></div>

I, It, We, and They See You

Friday, 13.12.2013
<div>In <em>Blue Nights</em>, a 2011 book in which Joan Didion struggles to come to terms with her daughter’s death, she relates how, when she was briefly hospitalized herself, doctors urged her to undergo a medical procedure:<br><br></div><div><em>I recall resisting: since I had never in my life been able to swallow an aspirin it seemed unlikely that I could swallow a camera.</em><br><br></div><div><em>“Of course you can, it’s only a little camera.”</em><br><br></div><div><br></div>