Estelle Blaschke | 17.02. – 22.06.2021
Image Capital
In her blog series Image Capital, Estelle Blaschke seeks to sketch out the idea of photography as capital, ranging from metaphors of photography as currency and the broad spectrum of logistics and infrastructure to the attribution of social, epistemic or monetary value to photographs. What happens if we begin to shift the perspective towards the “economy” of photography, an aspect regarded all too often as a side effect? How productive is it to link the impulse of making photos to terms and concepts like “value”, “capital” or “currency”? How does it help us to understand today’s practices? And how might it help us to rethink past developments? The aim of this series of posts is to look at contemporary practices through the lens of these concepts, as complex and vague as they are, and to relate them to historical instances and existing writings in the field of photography studies and beyond.
Estelle Blaschke
Estelle Blaschke is a photography historian. She holds an interim professorship in media studies at the University of Basel and teaches photography history and theory at ECAL. Her research focuses on the theory of photographic archives, the circulation of images, image infrastructures and the history of digital photography. She is the author of the book Banking on Images: The Bettmann Archive and Corbis (Spector Books, 2016) and a member of the editorial board of the scientific journal Transbordeur. Photographie, Histoire, Société. In 2019, she edited the Photographie et technologies de l’information (Transbordeur no.3), together with Davide Nerini. With Armin Linke, she directs the research and exhibition project Image Capital, which will be on show at Folkwang Museum Essen and MAST Bologna in 2022.