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.

Index

Blog series: Photography and the Language of Things

David Cunningham | 15.05. – 14.09.2016
Photography and the Language of Things

Until the end of June, David Cunningham will reflect on some current debates around photography and what Hito Steyerl terms “the language of things in the realm of the documentary form”. The blog will examine what seems in such debates a widespread desire to withdraw from representation altogether, whereby the image becomes (to borrow Steyerl’s own citation of Benjamin) “without expression”, not a representation of reality but “a fragment of the real world”, a “thing just like any other”. Engaging with the history of a certain avant-garde that lies behind this, the blog will then pose some questions concerning the political as well as ‘aesthetic’ implications of such a thought of the photographic image.

If Commodities Could Speak

Saturday, 09.07.2016
<p>“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood”, writes Marx, famously, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4">in the first chapter of <em>Capital</em></a>. “Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. For while, as an ‘ordinary’ object, “the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood”, “so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.</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.

Image and Programme

Friday, 04.03.2016
<p>As an attentive reader has pointed out to us, the word ‛programme’ appears in our book <a href="http://www.academia.edu/13578665/SOFTIMAGE_Towards_a_New_Theory_of_the_Digital_Image">Softimage</a> within a family of terms: algorithm, software, computation, processing, programming. If these terms, all gravitating around digitalization, seem almost interchangeable, we are in fact using the term ‛programme’ in a larger yet very specific sense, that of the programme of the image, or the image as a programme, which is not a condition that emerged with digitalization, but one that dates back to the Renaissance. Our first blog will explore the way the programme of the image develops in the 15th century in an intricate relation with the political programme of the time and the birth of the humanist episteme.</p>