Tag Archives: Benjamin

Part 4 – Another Threshold

By Sophie Berrebi | Published: 28. March 2013

Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola, from 1868, currently on view at the Royal Academy in London in the Manet: Portraying Life exhibition is usually interpreted as a testimony of the friendship between the artist and a writer who was one of his strongest supporters in those years. The painting shows Zola seated sideways at [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged allegory, Berrebi, digital vs analogue, documentation, Edouard Manet, history, imaginary, John Elderfield, Juliet Wilson-Bareau, lithography, medium, painting, photo history, portrait, reproducibility | 1 Response

5. A Subject for, a History about, Photography

By Geoffrey Batchen | Published: 17. October 2012

My previous posts have explored the various ramifications of photography’s reproducibility, pursuing the way this attribute disseminates the photograph, securing, dispersing and dissipating its identity in about equal measure. I have suggested that this pursuit considerably complicates the traditional representation of photography’s history, undermining any narrative based on single artists or single prints or indeed [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged Batchen, capitalism, cluster, death, digitalization, disclocation, dissemination, form, history, history of photography, medium, multiplicity, portrait, practice, reference, representative, reproducibility, reproduction, substance | 6 Responses

3. Still Searching: “the dark, repressed side”

By Geoffrey Batchen | Published: 1. October 2012

My previous post briefly mentioned the negative as one crucial component of the identity of many photographs. It is, nevertheless, an aspect of that identity often ignored by histories of photography, where negatives are rarely reproduced or discussed at any length. Negatives, it seems, are truly the repressed, dark side of photography’s history. True, there [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged authorship, Avedon, Batchen, Bayard, Capa, enlarger, history of photography, Max Dupain, negative, ownership, practice, printing, reproducibility, Stieglitz, Sudr, Szarkowski, Talbot, Winogrand | 22 Responses

2. “Form is henceforth divorced from matter.”

By Geoffrey Batchen | Published: 23. September 2012

My first post considered photography in the context of its dissemination within consumer capitalism, a context that, I suggested, secured the medium’s presence within modern culture even while dissipating its identity, thereby making possible the very thing it also makes impossible. This contradictory character, in Benjamin’s view a key aspect of the political economy of [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged Batchen, Camera Lucida, capitalism, daguerreotype, digitalization, dissemination, form, history of photography, market, matter, medium, negative, Niépce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roland Barthes, stereography | 9 Responses

1. Dissemination

By Geoffrey Batchen | Published: 15. September 2012

The theme of my contribution to Still Searching is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935-36). Or, rather, it is inspired by the striking absence of discussions of reproduction and its effects in the literature about photography since this essay first appeared. So I [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged aura, authorship, Batchen, capitalism, copy, daguerreotype, Derrida, dissemination, distribution, haunting, Henry Talbot, identity, multiplicity, negative, original, photogram, portrait, practice, punctum, representation, reproducibility, reproduction | 11 Responses

Part 2 – An Anti-Archival Impulse

By Hilde Van Gelder | Published: 11. June 2012

In this post, I want to continue the reflection on how photography can today serve as a contributing motor for social change by turning our attention to the photographic archive. I would like to focus on a concrete example, the long-term project Theory of Justice initiated by the artist Peter Friedl in 1992. This work [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged Allan Sekula, appropriation, archive, change, history of photography, How the Other Half Lives, institution, Jacob Riis, memory, painting, Peter Friedl, power, resistance, Sally Stein, social, Theory of Justice, unconscious, Van Gelder, Walker Evans | 4 Responses

Part 1 – What Has Photography Done?

By Hilde Van Gelder | Published: 31. May 2012

In order to grasp what photography can do as an art today, I want to start with looking back, asking ourselves the question: what has photography done so far? What relevant lessons can we learn from photography’s past? Before which carts has photography been put – so to say – ever since it was invented? [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged 7th Berlin Biennale, Allan Sekula, Andrea Fraser, Antoine Wiertz, Artur Źmijewski, aura, canon, documentary, Gerhard Richter, globalization, history of photography, Jean-Francois Chevrier, Jeff Wall, Julian Stallabrass, market, Martha Rosler, Michael Fried, museum, narrative, painting, reality, Thomas Struth, Van Gelder | 17 Responses

2. Notes on Photography and Loss

By Walead Beshty | Published: 23. April 2012

On the long flight from Los Angeles to London I undertook last week (which at the time of this posting going live, I will be completing in the reverse) I reread “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object” by Vilém Flusser. In it Flusser asserts that “We are witnessing a cultural revolution”, a revolution consummated by digital [...]

Posted in Blogger Post | Also tagged "Is Photography Over?", aesthetics, apocalypse, Atget, Beshty, Camera Lucida, concreteness, convention, death, digitalization, hermeneutics, lifelike, medium, methodology, Oliver Wendell Holmes, polysemy, representation, Roland Barthes, Saussure, Siegfried Kracauer, structuralism, Vilém Flusser | 3 Responses

Current Blogger
April 15 till May 31, 2013
David Campany writes, curates and makes art. His books include Walker Evans: the Magazine Work (2013), Gasoline (2012), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2009), Photography and Cinema (2008) and Art and Photography (2003). He co-founded PA magazine. In 2013 he curates shows of the work of Mark Neville and Victor Burgin. He teaches at the University of Westminster.
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Megan Driscoll, Joanna Fiduccia and Christine Robinson are art historians and Ph.D. students from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Christy Lange is a writer based in Berlin. She is Associate Editor of frieze and Contributing Editor of frieze d/e.
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Tag Archives: Benjamin

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