Joint spectatorship: collective experiments with photography

Abstract

By experimenting with a practice called Joint Spectatorship several questions from the heart of the philosophy of photography are brought to consideration: the relation between the medium of photography and the idea of looking; the difference between seeing art and making sense of the art seen; the political aspects of collective spectatorship in public spaces; and the consequences that alternative pedagogies have on the divide between the university and the museum as the loci of art history. Joint Spectatorship is thus investigated through various conceptualizations of looking at photographs, from Henry William Fox Talbot’s and Walter Benjamin’s to later literary theory of “close reading” and the critique of institutions of knowledge.