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Scholars and museums tend to avoid the evidence of photography’s reproducibility. It is an unwelcome reminder of commerce and labour, of promiscuity and dissemination, of transformation and transgression.
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Olena Chervonik talks with Geoffrey Batchen about his two most recent publications: Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination, that reached bookshelves in 2018, and Negative/Positive: A History of Photography, slated for release later in 2020. The conversation revolves around the photographic condition of reproducibility, repetition and difference, embedded in the medium from the time of its inception. While Apparitions explores photography’s relation to various newsprint outlets of the nineteenth century, Negative/Positive traces a comprehensive history of the medium’s propensity for multiplication, predicated on the dependence of photographs on the function of a negative, which, according to Batchen, seems to be a repressed Other in photographic history. A vehicle that enables reproducibility, a photographic negative is rarely discussed in critical literature and even more rarely reproduced or featured in the exhibition space. Batchen ponders this occlusion of a medium’s critical component, suggesting that a negative is linked to photography’s operation as capitalist mode of production. By omitting to profile a negative, we naturalize capitalism’s operational logic – a condition that clearly needs to be upset by directing a critical, revelatory, and thus politically engaged spotlight on photography’s predilection for image massification.
- Keywords: capitalism, commodification, massification, negative, photography, politics of resistance, reproducibility
Olena Chervonik (PhD fellow, the University of Oxford) is writing her dissertation on the history of photography and technologies of vision. Prior to embarking upon her dissertation, Chervonik held a number of curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Izolyatsia – Platform for Cultural Initiatives in Donetsk, Ukraine; and Videonale – Festival for Contemporary Video Art in Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany.
Geoffrey Batchen (BA, PhD Sydney) holds the Professorship of the History of Art in the Department of the History of Art and the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. Professor Batchen’s work as a teacher, writer and curator focuses on the history of photography. His publications include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (2008); What of Shoes: Van Gogh and Art History (2009); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010); Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016); and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018). He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012).
- Batchen, Geoffrey. 2019. Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination. Sydney: Power Publications.
- _________. 2020. Negative / Positive: A History of Photography. London: Routledge.
- Batchen, Geoffrey, and Joan Fontcuberta. 2016. “Well, What Is Photography?” Correspondence (October / December). Available online here.
- Shaviro, Steven. 2014. “Speculative Realism – a Primer.” Texte Zur Kunst 93, Spekulation/Speculation: 40–51.
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Modernity gets to be what it is because it has its others, and the same goes for art history. Enlightenment and the Enlightenment subject could only be formulated in comparison with the other: the colonized, the heathen, the unenlightened, the superstitious, the slave.
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I spoke with Kajri Jain over Zoom during the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Our conversation began with a discussion of her early fieldwork in the bazaars in India, probing into Jain’s own education and formative experiences. It then detoured into a critical unpacking of art history’s “sacred cows’, the need to fundamentally rethink the discipline’s deep intertwining with colonialism, and the many forms of baggage that non-Western art historians must carry on their shoulders. Jain’s suspicion of medium specific approaches led to a productive dialogue about anthropologist Michael Taussig’s work, theory fetishism, and several facets of contemporary photography in South Asia. We agreed about the need to continue to critique an elitist discourse that misunderstands the importance of religion, and the embedded nature of caste, in any reading of aesthetics and mass culture in the subcontinent. Ending with the question of how to decolonize, provincialize and globalize when engaged in pedagogy, Jain left us with much to contemplate.
- Keywords: art history and decolonialization, Indian aesthetics, secularism and religion, visual anthropology
Alisha Sett is a writer, curator, and educator. She is Course Director for Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory at Jnanapravaha Mumbai and is the initiator of Guncotton and Kashmir Photo Collective. Sett is on the editorial board of Membrana.
Kajri Jain is Professor of Indian Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on images at the interface between religion, politics, art, and vernacular business cultures in India; she also writes on contemporary art. Jain’s recent monograph, Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University Press, 2021), traces the emergence of monumental iconic sculptures in post-liberalization India; the earlier Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007) is about printed icons. Her writing has appeared in Art History, Third Text, Current Anthropology, The Immanent Frame, the Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, and New Cultural Histories of India.
- Jain, Kajri. 2021a. Gods in the Time of Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press.
- _________. 2021b. “Go Away Closer: Photography, Intermediality, Unevenness.” In Capitalism and the Camera, edited by Kevin Coleman and Daniel James. New York: Verso.
- _________. 2018. “In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History.” Paper presented at How Secular Is Art? On the Art of Art History in South Asia, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta Cogut Institute for the Humanities Brown University, October 27, 2018. Available online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le0IIlwldLE
- _________. 2013. “Pause.” In Here Art Grows on Trees: Simryn Gill, edited by Catherine de Zegher. Gent: Australia Council for the Arts/MER Paper Kunsthalle.
- _________. 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389736
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Hegel’s declaration of the end of art
does not claim that art is effectively over, rather that this is true of a certain kind of understanding art. This is a part of a given historical moment: Hegel said it exactly in the moment when art actually gained true autonomy for the first time.
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In the chapter “Self-consciousness”, found in his most important work The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel presents his famous thesis on the master-slave dialectic. The relationship between the two is reciprocal as one’s self-consciousness is acknowledged only through the other’s self-consciousness. In a combat relation, one of these self-consciousness’s gives way, while the other rises from the fight as a master. The idea of a master-slave dialectic was one of Hegel’s most influential ones; most notably, it inspired Marx in his formulation of the historical struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Much later, Kojève pointed out that Marx, in his formulation, omitted a key element found in Hegel’s equation: knowledge/truth is always on the side of the slave/proletariat. This gap that influenced the great French thinkers could not have come at a better time. Following the French Revolution, the structure of sovereignty changed radically, as the new social structures required a different kind of sovereignty. Up until the times of Freud, who witnessed the last “true” monarch, Franz Joseph, the remaining powerful father figures were slowly losing their power. The disappearance of traditional authorities provoked changes in the social structure. Society became mediatized hand in hand with political populism, however, this mediatization received its antipode in modern art.
- Keywords: dialectic, Hegel, mediatization, modernity
Luka Savić (b. 1990, Ljubljana) is an artist and philosopher. After graduating from the Academy of Visual Arts (AVA) in Ljubljana, he continued his studies at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He exhibits in Slovenia and around the world, his works were included at the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios residence in Spoleto and in 2020 he had a solo exhibition at the Škuc Gallery. He regularly lectures and writes articles on topics at the intersection of art and philosophy. He has recently published two articles in academic journals exploring pedagogical principles at the Bauhaus Art Academies and Black Mountain College.
Mladen Dolar (b. 1951, Ljubljana) is a professor and scientific advisor at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. The main areas of his research are German classical philosophy, psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy and art theory. Since 2013 he has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, and since 2015 a professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. In addition to lecturing at numerous universities in the United States and Europe, he is the author of more than 150 articles published in scientific journals and proceedings. He has published twelve books in Slovenian language, from Strukture fašističnega gospostva (The Structure of Fascist Dominion, 1982) to Bit in njen dvojnik (Being and Its Duplicate, 2017) and Uprizarjanje konceptov (Performing Concepts, 2019). Among his book publications abroad, special mention should be made of A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into nine languages) and Opera’s Second Death (together with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into several languages). He is a co-founder of what has become known around the world as the “Ljubljana Lacanian School”.
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We have to be careful not to project a nostalgic glow onto the past, as if magic can only be found there and not in our own moment.
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His long-standing interest in the history of early photography makes Geoffrey Batchen the appropriate speaker to discuss the question of photographic magic. Therefore, our conversation oscillates between magic and realism, but also other antonyms within the medium: negative and positive, analogue and digital. Taking in consideration all these oppositional notions, Batchen suggests that theoreticians “need to acknowledge and embrace photography’s abstractions and contradictions”. Different contradictions within photography’s theory and history became pivotal in our conversation. We also discussed the indexicality of digital images. According to Batchen, the negative/positive system of traditional photography can be compared with the binary code of digital images, which “is therefore based on the same oppositional logic, the same interplay of one and its other, that generated the analogue photograph.” Moreover, digitality does not eliminate the magic character of the contemporary photographs; in this context, Batchen mentions the capacity of instant transmission of snapshots from one place of Earth to another. In conclusion, Batchen reveals some details of his upcoming book Negative/Positive: A History of Photography.
- Keywords: Barthes, digital image, indexicality, magic of photography, negative
Witold Kanicki (1979) is an art historian, assistant professor in Department of Art Education and Curatorial Studies at the University of Arts in Poznan (Poland), and guest lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts (Switzerland). He works as an independent curator and critic. Author of more than 50 articles published in scientific journals as well as in catalogues of exhibitions and magazines on contemporary art and photography. His book on photographic negative and negativity was published in 2016 in Poland. He is interested in history and theory of photography, contemporary art, new museology, and curating. He currently works on the history of Polaroid in the Polish People’s Republic.
Geoffrey Batchen (BA, PhD Sydney) holds the Professorship of the History of Art in the Department of the History of Art and the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. Professor Batchen’s work as a teacher, writer and curator focuses on the history of photography. His publications include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (MIT Press, 2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (Phaidon, 2008); What of Shoes: Van Gogh and Art History (Seemann Henschel, 2009); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (Izu Photo Museum, 2010); Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (Prestel, 2016); and Obraz a diseminace: Za novou historii pro fotografii (NAMU, 2016). A new collection of his essays,更多的疯狂念头 [More Wild Ideas: History, Photography, Writing], appeared in Chinese in 2017. He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (MIT Press, 2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (Reaction, 2012). His latest publication is Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (Power Publications, 2018). Batchen has also curated numerous exhibitions, which have been shown in Brazil, Australia, USA, Netherlands, Iceland, UK, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand.
- Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
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I like the challenge of refining it down to something simple and beautiful. If it works, the layers of meaning go deeper and deeper, and you can appreciate it on any of those levels.
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Jason Fulford is a photographer who thinks and works like a poet: mixing thinking and feeling, things clear and vague, piling the contents only to eventually cut them to the most essential pieces, and expressing himself in an almost game form only to code the message to be appreciated on different levels. In his art, Fulford explores different ways to express the paradigms, paradoxes, unlikely proximities, and whatever he finds fascinating. When approached directly, he describes his work as “I take pictures of all sort of things and then re-contextualise them.” In a rather scholarly way, we would describe him as a refined formalist whose work is set to send a message. In his interview with Emina Djukić and Peter Rauch, Fulford delves into his bookmaking process, explaining the underlying method of his creative agenda, the process that starts the bookmaking process, the difference in relation between images and text in his books, the specifics of working with images and text simultaneously, the different roles of text and images, and the use of images to transcend into something meaningful.
- Keywords: aristic ambiguity, bookmaking, editing process, photobook, visual storytelling
Emina Djukić (1982) is a visual artist and pedagogue. She completed her master’s degree in photography at the VŠVU in Bratislava, and currently she is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, photography department. From 2005 to 2010 she collaborated with the Medvode Youth Cultural Center, where she was also a program director for some time. For several years as a mentor she participated in the Celje Fokus summer workshop and was her artistic director in 2013. Since 2015 she has been a member of the editorial board of Fotografija magazine. Currently she is mainly concerned with the narrative possibilities of photography and its relation to the past.
Peter Rauch (1979) is an architect, photographer and lecturer. In his creative practice he dissects matter of various buildings and insists on the opposition between a document and a construction of an artwork. In his theoretical practice he deals with the origin of thought, the role of negation in the constitution of an object, and the issue of rupture in the fields of art, science, and politics. He is an assistant professor at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design and at The Photography Department at The Higher School of Applied Sciences in Ljubljana.
Jason Fulford (1973) is an American photographer based in Brooklyn, New York City. His primary creative language is a photo book. In the process of editing, he transforms bits of everyday into words of photographic sentences. He constructs new realities out of “found” material. Some of his most famous photobooks include: Raising Frogs For $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013), Contains: 3 Books (2016), The Medium is a Mess (2018). He is also a co-founder of non-profit publisher J&L Books, where with Leanne Shapton, they publish photobooks of other photographers. Occasionally, as an educator, he holds workshops about editing and photobooks for photography students around the world.
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If artistic creation can be considered as an astral trip to the outer space, planning and architecture education taught me how to come back to the Earth.
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Public space directs how we live and act, how we socialize and even protest. If there is no community and solidarity there is no city, no civilization; there can only be a »city-state« as the modern version of an empire, says Murat Germen, photographer known for his critical view on the home-town of Istanbul. Muta-morphosis, probably one of his most famous series, uses digital manipulation to show a dark vision of future cities: buildings cramed together as in a strange and dangerous mutation process, almost melting as objects in Dali’s paintings. Through his artworks, text and lectures, Murat Germen criticizes excessive urbanization, motivated by capital and not by human needs. He also documented Gezi Park protests, in which the political aspect of managing the city became very apparent. His photos can be understood as a visual protest and Murat Germen thinks some of them may turn into visual evidence of the urban crime committed by the present Turkish government since 2002, when it came to power.
- Keywords: art, art and social power, gentrification, urbanism, visual protest
Iza Pevec (1987) finished the studies of art history and comparative literature. She has been writing about art and culture for some time, she was writing for Radio Student and since 2014 she is also working for Radio Slovenia – programe Ars. As a young curator she was part of the project Zagon of Gallery Škuc and in programme of the Centre and Gallery P74 Incubator for young curators. Since 2013 she is also writing for the Fotografija magazine.
Murat Germen is an artist, academic and archivist using photography as an expression and research tool. Born 1965, he currently lives and works in Istanbul and London. Has an MArch degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he went as a Fulbright scholar and received AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for academic excellence. Works as a professor of art, photography and new media at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Having many papers, photo series published on architecture, photography, art and new media in various publications; he has lectured at tens of conferences internationally. His oeuvre focuses on impacts of over-urbanization and gentrification, dis-possession, new forms, tools and methods of imperialism, civic rights, participatory citizenship, sustainability of local cultures, human devastation of nature, climate change, global warming, water rights.
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