Journal

In the beginning was the negative. In making this assertion, which was still taken for granted by photographers thirty years ago, it is striking that it is now perhaps regarded as no more than a reference to the foundations of photography...

The image of flight is mostly one of refugees. The visual representation of cross-border movement, of waiting in reception centres, or of the (successful and failing) integration into societies with high immigration makes up the standard repertoire of humanitarian and journalistic photography.

The project of the Migrant Image Research Group started with the idea of challenging the already existing images of migrants in order to find other images and new ways of representing their stories.

A great deal has been written about the aura and the effects of this dialectic phenomenon, which is hard to conceive of and essentially a contradiction, a curiosity that Walter Benjamin discussed in his celebrated essay A Short History of Photography (1931).

In the works of the artists Pétrel I Roumagnac (duo), photography quite literally captures the space.

Memes, at the moment of my writing, are increasingly difficult to define. The line between what we call a meme and what is simply viral content wavers.

During the international election campaigns of the past few months supporters of opposing parties fought fierce image battles on social media.

Work, the act of laboring in exchange for some form of monetary gain, defines most adult lives across the world.

The exhibition Global Players at the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen is edicated to the connections between photography, economy and globality. This narrative begins locally, in Mannheim, Heidelberg and Ludwigshafen, during the economic revival of the 1950s, which was achieved in large part through the recruitment of foreign workers, as part of Germany’s recruitment agreements.

Photography had yet to be invented, but Denis Diderot already had its number. “That’s not me!” he wrote in 1773 upon seeing a portrait of himself.

Via a plurality of gestures, clothes and camera perspectives, Andrzej Steinbach presents the potential identities of two young women. The artist mostly refrains from an interpretation of the subjects while doing so.

The first time I walked onto the floor of the Republican National Convention in Madison Square Garden in New York City in August of 2004, I realized that I had walked inside a machine for making images. I was afraid that someone in authority would recognize me as a fraud—that I didn’t belong there, that I was not a photojournalist, that I was not any kind of journalist, and that I was, effectively, a spy.

Richard Frater’s artwork April, 2015 is composed in part of a stills camera and a calendar, both of which are pierced and linked by a steel tube, while near to them, positioned in a fragile equilibrium on top of several eggs, is the metal carrying case of a camera lens.

Art helps me reflect on images, while my background in video-activism and political engagement pushes me to define my practice and position myself.

Covered in a heavy layer of make-up, she shot her face on a DV tape. She wished to mask her flaws, to be perfect. But only a short time into the shoot, the illusion shattered and she found herself forced to visit the emergency room of the hospital.

Confronted with the emergence of digital photographic technologies and the overflow of images during the 1990s, we began to question the meaning of images and the motivations that lead to their production.

On May 31st, 2017, the sun having set on a day that ended with a series of heavy thunderstorms, I took a photograph with my smartphone out of the window of a diner. It was the kind of imagery impossible to resist: the golden glow of the fading day multiplied with ominous low-hanging clouds in the sky.