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: Institutions and the Production of ‘Photographs’

Elizabeth Edwards | 15.09. – 31.10.2016
Institutions and the Production of ‘Photographs’

In her blog series, visual and historical anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards will scrutinize the processes and mechanisms of institutional collecting. Why and how are photographs acquired by institutions and what are the implications for the photographs that get curated? And what happens when non-collections are brought into the remit of ‘history of photography’? Edwards will discuss assumptions, categories of description and hierarchies of values that shape the management of collections and look at how the new historiography of photography is being articulated in museums and galleries. Finally, she will consider the impact of digital technologies on the way in which photographs are constituted as both historical objects and ‘collections’. What are the effects on institutional assumptions and practices, and what does this do to a history of photography and its articulation in public space? 

Patterns of Collecting, Institutional Mind-Sets and the Problem of Hierarchies

Thursday, 15.09.2016
<p>A few years ago I was talking to a curator of social history in a major British public museum service which I knew held substantial collections of photographs of the local region going back to the 1850s. I asked him how he thought about these photographs in his care, and how they related to the museum’s ethos and activities. To this he responded “well I don’t really – they are just there”. I have been thinking about the ‘just there’ quality of photographic collections ever since. How is it that a body of material, maybe 35,000 glass plates, of substantial importance in regional history can be ‘just there’? How are the tensions of specialness and ubiquity negotiated through institutional practices?</p>

The Presence of Non-Collections and the Challenge of Photographic Ecosystems

Friday, 23.09.2016
<p>I recently attended a leaving party for a museum photographer of some 30 years service. The usual orations were accompanied by a digital slide show of his work over those last 30 years during which he had excelled in a range of museum demands. He made bundles of sticks look exciting and provided photographs of masks, chests or totem of such technical precision and virtuosic lighting that First Nations carvers in Canada could reconstitute the haptics of their traditional carving practices – retracing chisel marks. It was also a slide show of how a museum sees itself and how it performs its objects. Yet these photographs were, until that moment, invisible as a photographic practice, and above all, they are not understood as part of the photograph collection at that institution. They are non-collections, ‘just there’, everywhere and nowhere.</p>
Blog series: What Remains of the Photographic beyond Photography

Sophie Berrebi | 01.03. – 14.04.2013
What Remains of the Photographic beyond Photography

Sophie Berrebi will be looking for what remains of the photographic beyond photography. Or in her own words: “This is what I would like to explore in the next few weeks: What remains when photography transforms itself? How does technological modification trigger ontological change – if at all – and how does this translate into the way we apprehend pictures as producers, sitters, and viewers? In short, what interests me is how photography has taught us to look and what remains of the photographic beyond photography.”

Another Threshold

Thursday, 28.03.2013
<div>Edouard Manet’s <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manet,_Edouard_-_Portrait_of_Emile_Zola.jpg"><em>Portrait of Emile Zola</em></a>, from 1868, currently on view at the Royal Academy in London in the <a href="http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/manet/"><em>Manet: Portraying Life</em></a> exhibition is usually interpreted as a testimony of the friendship between the artist and a writer who was one of his strongest supporters in those years. <br><br></div>

The Production of Documents

Monday, 08.04.2013
<div>“In history everything begins with the gesture of <em>setting aside</em>, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into ‘documents.’ This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists in <em>producing</em> such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects, simultaneously changing their locus and their status.” <br><br></div>