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.
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.
The River
Photography, She Said, Makes Me Nervous
Hilde Van Gelder | 01.06. – 14.07.2012
What Can Photography Do?
In her blog series What Can Photography Do, the current blogger Hilde van Gelder will examine art photography’s mobilizing potential in contemporary reality. She will investigate why artists use photographs in order to engage in critical debates about urgent political, economic and ecological issues for today’s society. On a more proactive level, the blog series wants to contribute to understanding how photography as art ― including the moving image ― performs as a constructive actor to rethink and reinvent human solidarity. Several concrete examples of photographic art works are used in order to provide a theoretical framework. The various consequences that artistic choices entail for the world views encapsulated within the proposed images, are carefully scrutinized. The blog series thus aims to raise collective discussion about the profound insights that photographs offer for both visualizing and imagining a renewed understanding of the concept of humanity. As such, this blog series is actively committed to thinking the multiple humanities of the future.
Photography and Humanity
Bernd Stiegler | 15.01. – 29.02.2012
Photographic Realism, an Attempt
In his blog series Photographic Realism, an Attempt, Bernd Stiegler will introduce six different aspects of photographic realism over the course of his six-week blogging period. The intention is to explore options beyond familiar theoretical trajectories, such as the indexical nature of photography or photography as social documentary. At first glance, these will perhaps seem quite removed from the fundamental question of realism. Each concept is one perspective among many and is definitely intended as a more or less provocative thesis. At second glance, each has the potential — this is the central hypothesis — to open up a wide field of theoretical questions and related topics. Each is an invitation to discuss.