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: Future Histories

Steffen Siegel | 23.04. – 15.07.2020
Future Histories

In his blog series “Future Histories,” Steffen Siegel discusses various problems of older and more recent historiographies of photography – and how to go beyond them. Photographic image-production and the medium’s historiography share almost the same age. However, compared to photography’s innovative or even revolutionary visual strategies, the forms of writing about its history have remained surprisingly traditional. Photography Studies always have been a nomadic enterprise within an interdisciplinary environment. Nevertheless, there is a risk of taming these research activities by adopting models and genres from other academic disciplines. This blog series is an invitation to discuss the following questions: How can we arrive at new ways of reflecting on photo history? How can we create a bigger picture without just writing another compendious book? Thus, how can “Future Histories” lead to different ways of representing the medium’s history?

The Bigger Picture

Thursday, 23.04.2020
<p>Do you read histories of photography? I am not referring to casual reading – an article here, an essay there. Rather, I mean whole books or even tomes. Perhaps I should ask more precisely: Have you ever read a “History of Photography”? From cover to cover?</p>

Beyond Newhall?

Wednesday, 06.05.2020
<p>We don’t have to beat around the bush: the photo historian, curator, and university teacher Beaumont Newhall has not enjoyed an excellent reputation for quite a while now. 1982 seemed to mark a watershed for him.</p>

Lowering the Sights?

Thursday, 04.06.2020
<p>Right at the <a href="https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/157220_the_bigger_picture" target="_blank" rel="noopener">beginning of my blog series</a>, I asked: Do you read histories of photography? Having myself in mind, I suggested an answer: rather not, at least not from cover to cover. In <a href="https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/157223_beyond_newhall" target="_blank" rel="noopener">my second post</a>, I focused on a particular model of writing photo history that I attributed to Beaumont Newhall and his interest in an art historical point of view. Despite forty years of criticism directed at this model, it seems to be hard to conceive alternatives.</p>
Blog series: The Status of the Image in Digital Culture

Ingrid Hoelzl, Rémi Marie | 01.03. – 30.04.2016
The Status of the Image in Digital Culture

The current blog series are co-written by image theorists Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie. Until the end of April, they will reflect on the status of the image in digital culture. They will examine the shift from the humanist to the posthumanist programme of the image, in line with the shift from the geometric paradigm of the image (based on the linear perspective) to the algorithmic paradigm (introduced with digitalization). Hoelzl and Marie will discuss the central idea of their book Softimage (2015), the image as a software, and reflect on the status of the image in the age of autonomous machines – the postimage.

Softimage and Hardimage

Monday, 04.04.2016
<p>PS to our previous blog, <a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/27022_on_the_invisible_image_and_algorithm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“On the Invisible (Image and Algorithm)”</a>.  As a friend suggested, we should have imagined Paglen’s photo of a secret military base in the so-called top-secret lab run by Sergey Brin “in an undisclosed Bay Area location”: here is the place for thinking about secrecy. In fact, Google seems intentionally to be creating an atmosphere of mystery around “a pair of otherwise ordinary two-story red-brick buildings about a half-mile from Google’s main campus” <span class="frzfn fn"><span class="marker">1</span><span class="text">Brad Stone, “Inside Google’s Secret Lab, Google X’s Silicon Valley Nerd Heaven – America’s Last Great Corporate Research Lab”, <em>Bloomberg.com/news</em>, 29 May 2013, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-22/inside-googles-secret-lab">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-22/inside-googles-secret-lab</a></span></span>. It is impossible to find much information on Google (sic!) apart from two journal articles. In the one published in <em>The New York Times</em> in 2011 we can read: “It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.” <span class="frzfn"><span class="marker">2</span><span class="text">Claire Cain Miller and Nick Biltonnov, “Google’s Lab of Wildest Dreams”, <em>The New York Times</em>, 13 November 2011.</span></span></p>