Historians have now commonly acknowledged how the photographic atlas, in its many forms – perhaps the most celebrated being Aby Warbug’s Atlas Mnemosyne – had been employed in Germany during the ...years of the Weimar Republic as an extraordinary epistemological device to conduct historical, political, psychological and more broadly culturological investigations. And yet, some declinations of the device-atlas still remain singularly unstudied. This is the case with Das Frauengesicht der Gegenwart (The Face of the Women of the Present). The subject of the proposed contribution. Published in 1930 by the art historian Lothar Brieger, shortly before racial laws forced him to leave Germany, this photographic book (71 pages out of 135 are photographic plates) was realized with the aim of celebrating female self-affirmation against the conservative tendencies that were beginning to spread in the ascendant National Socialist society, constituting perhaps the most intense, and the last, representation of the Neue Frau in the German context. In the article, a dual perspective will be adopted. On the one hand, Brieger’s thought will be analyzed in dialogue with the main theories of photography of his time (above all, that of his friend Walter Benjamin, whose wife, Dora Kellner, is included in the portraits). On the other hand, the photographs in the book themselves will also be considered separately from their theoretical framework, investigating the view of the “modern woman” proposed by their material authors, the – long forgotten – female photographers Nini and Carry Hess.
Why is there a history of photography but no history of the photogram? The publication pursues this question by approaching the specific materiality, the scientific and artistic qualities of the ...photogram on the basis of a historiographic, semiotic and gender-theoretical analysis. Thereby a still outstanding media history of the photogram is realized and the historical relevance of this so far neglected medium is worked out.
Weshalb gibt es eine Geschichte der Fotografie, jedoch keine Geschichte des Fotogramms? Dieser Frage geht die Publikation nach, indem sie sich der spezifischen Materialität, den wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Qualitäten des Fotogramms anhand einer historiografischen, semiotischen als auch gendertheoretischen Analyse nähert. So wird eine bis dato noch ausstehende Medialitätsgeschichte des Fotogramms realisiert und die historische Relevanz des bisher vernachlässigten Mediums herausgearbeitet.
The article is an attempt at applying the concept of counterfactuality, typically employed with reference to narrative forms, to the analysis of visual culture, particularly to theatre photography. ...The material for case studies is provided by the works of Polish photographers who redefine the function of this form of photography. Typically, photography is seen by theatre historians as the prime form of theatre documentation, and therefore treated as subservient to the needs of theatre studies as an academic discipline. Contrary to that, the photographic projects analysed in the present paper (particularly those of Ryszard Kornecki and Magda Hueckel), although made in theatre during performances, have been produced and distributed as autonomous art forms which neither represent nor document theatre productions. In the analysis of these projects, I employ Margaret Olin’s concept of “performative index”, which describes the relationship between the image and the viewer as a dynamic creation of meaning. With reference to this theoretical framework, I argue that counterfactuality of theatre photography is a strategy of turning this medium into an autonomous form of art.
Why is there a history of photography but no history of the photogram? The publication pursues this question by approaching the specific materiality, the scientific and artistic qualities of the ...photogram on the basis of a historiographic, semiotic and gender-theoretical analysis. Thereby a still outstanding media history of the photogram is realized and the historical relevance of this so far neglected medium is worked out.
Diarmuid Costello ha defendido recientemente una versión fuerte de lo que él llama, siguiendo a Dominic Lopes, La nueva teoría de la fotografía y ha criticado una versión anterior de esta nueva ...teoría, que él considera más débil y restringida. Ambas posiciones —radical y restringida— se oponen a la visión tradicional en filosofía analítica de la fotografía. Sin embargo, Costello sostiene que la posición débil está aún demasiado cerca de esta tradición. Este artículo defiende la posición débil y argumenta que la supuesta versión fuerte es más prescriptiva, restrictiva e inadecuada.
Hans Belting sugere que as ‘imagens são os nômades dos meios’, porque montam e desmontam acampamento a cada surgimento de uma nova mídia. Sempre que a fotografia retrata outra imagem (pintura, tela ...de tevê) encena um capítulo dessa história. A fotografia foi guardiã dos paradoxos da distância e das tensões entre imagem e mundo na modernidade. Por isso ocupa hoje lugar crucial no debate acerca da visualidade contemporânea. Nosso destino e o das imagens estão de algum modo entrelaçados. A última geração de artistas visuais do século XX procurou expressar a dor da virtualização; a fotografia do século XXI redescobre a promessa de corpo latente em cada imagem.
Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and ...processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the "limits of representation." Nevertheless there are many photographs "showing" the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that bespeak the photographers' gaze and the circumstances of the photographs' production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as "evil." Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography (Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag, Barthes) to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may-despite their abstract meaning-be able to depict historical truth.
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