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.
Safiya Umoja Noble | 06.12.2017 – 31.01.2018
Digital Infrastructures of Race and Gender
Till the end of January, Safiya U. Noble explores the intersectional ways race and gender are embedded in digital infrastructures. Noble suggests that logics and structures of race are a matter of network and platform design, which encode values that cannot be divorced from the digital. To open, she investigates the erosion of humanities and social science courses from the education of engineers, and suggests that the erasure of sociality impacts conceptions of technology’s promise. Later in the series, she explores other dimensions of the social stack and how race and gender are embedded in contemporary conceptions of the digital.
The Problems of Profiting from Internet Pollution
Steve Edwards | 07.09. – 05.11.2017
The Fire Last Time: Documentary and Politics in 1970s Britain
In a time of crisis and increasing anti-capitalism, Steve Edwards considers the meeting of the political Left with photography in Britain in the 1970s. Edwards insists the fortunes of documentary and the visibility of social class are entwined. Beginning from a discussion of the critical fortunes of documentary over the last 30 years, he looks at the interest in Brecht and the fall out from the so called neo-Brechtian moment. In the process, he re-evaluates theories and practices of documentary, engaging with a range of documentary work; conceptions of skill and collective production and women and labour.
Undocumented: ‘Intensification, Contraction and Localization’
Fahim Amir | 16.06. – 31.07.2015
From Cows in French Banlieues to Pigeons in Popular Culture
From June 16 until the end of July, Fahim Amir will write about the photographic depiction of unruly animals in the context of urban panic. He will engage with an exploration of animal spirits in the films La Haine and Ghost Dog: from cows in French banlieues to pigeons in popular culture.
Dreams and Deserters of Aroofa, Tar Beach
Jorge Ribalta | 01.06. – 15.07.2014
Centrist Liberalism Triumphant: Postwar Humanist Reframing of Documentary
Jorge Ribalta’s blog series draws inspiration from the title of the fourth volume of Immanuel Wallerstein’s landmark series on the modern world-system. Rather than a theoretical or philosophical discussion on the nature of documentary photography, the blog series proposes a historical understanding of documentary practices in photography, and specifically during the Cold War. Ribalta’s point is that the rise of documentary rhetoric and discourses in the prewar era reflected the need to provide a visual tool for the representation of the working class and its new agency in mass democracy. But histories of photographic modernism, mostly a postwar construction largely determined by Newhall’s contribution, offered specific “liberal” versions of the emergence of the documentary discourse that had long-lasting effects. For example, the hegemony of the FSA documentary overshadowed the rest of the 1930s documentary experiences, particularly that of the Worker Photography Movement. In the 1950s, the large shadow of the monumental The Family of Man invisibilized or re-signified other documentary experiments, like Italian Neorealism or Paul Strand’s photo book projects, just to mention two examples. In both cases, prewar and postwar, centrist liberalism is triumphant. In other words, liberal humanism seemed to be an unsurpassable discursive and ideological horizon in postwar photographic avant-gardes and its historical narratives. The blog series brings to discussion some ideas and intuitions dealing with the humanist condition of postwar documentary photography and its problems.