Photography Project Research Articles

Leopoldstadt

Leopoldstadt

More Lonely Ere: Idiorrhythmic communities and the nostalgic lens

This article discusses the photographic project, ‘More Lonely Ere’, made during the COVID-19 pandemic focusing on the community of Watford, Hertfordshire, where the author was based and unable to leave. Watford will be compared to Marion Shoard’s ‘edgelands’ and the concept of rurality will be used to situate Watford as a liminal space between city and countryside but also to demonstrate the limited locality and community during COVID-19. The article also considers Roland Barthes’ ‘Idiorrhythm’ describing how people share spaces but live according to individual daily rhythms. This connects ideas of community during a pandemic when people are expected to maintain separation from each other. The resulting photographs will be analysed in terms of a conscious ‘documentary aesthetic’ and photographic nostalgia, materiality and abstraction will be discussed. Comparisons are made to canonical works and also Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ poem to provide useful metaphor and a framework for photographic work.

The Lisa and John Slideshow (2017): A Play about Photography

The Lisa and John Slideshow is a theatrical response to my own earlier photographic project, Pictures from the Real World. Colour Photographs, 1987–88, interrogating recurring theoretical questions that challenge the discourse of social documentary photography through an expanded practice. As a significant piece of research, devised through participation with those depicted within the image, the forty-five-minute play questions representational methods through an alternate medium. The project evokes what else was knowable from the terrain of possibilities when the sovereign images of the former project were captured, as it reaches into photographs, opening contextual focus on the social, political and relational aspects of production. This paper is drawn from my Ph.D. thesis, What the Subject Does. Lisa and John and Pictures from the Real World submitted to the University of Sussex in December 2022. The question asked within this commentary is: How can unequal power relations within photographic representation of working-class communities be renegotiated through trans-media practice and the use of theatre?

‘I don’t fit that stereotype’: participant photography and the visual (re)positioning of Black men

This paper examines how Black men use a participant photography project as a tool for meaning making during the current political and social context of anti-Black racism, Black activism, and intersectional politics. Using a critical visual methodology in the analysis of the images, this paper will examine how Black men make meaning of current social issues through the types of images they produced, how they make meaning of the types of audiences they are speaking to through the project, and how these meanings are reflected through their repositioning practices in the visual project. Specific attention is paid to how they used the project to visually reposition themselves against raced-gendered hegemonic ontologies of Black masculinities by producing images and narratives that were intended to educate and disrupt dominant discourses on Black men. For this reason, I argue that the visual project is a type of repositioning event, which was a way for Black men to resist racial hegemony through the participant photography project.

Toward New Feminist Aesthetics

Toward New Feminist Aesthetics

Becoming-Amazon: Femininity, Embodiment, and Sexuality in a Photographic and Digital Breast Cancer Project.

In recent decades, digital and photographic life narratives by women living with breast cancer and mastectomy have gained public visibility. This article examines how a documentary and fashion photography project in contemporary Berlin rethinks normative concepts of femininity, embodiment, and sexuality through the performance of the breast cancer patient as Amazon warrior. Based on feminist theory, disability studies, media studies, and in particular Gilles Deleuze's concept of becoming, I coin the term "becoming-Amazon" for the process of relational subjectivity formation that the project opens up. Uta Melle's project shifts notions of post-mastectomy bodies as unfeminine, incomplete, or asexual and envisions and celebrates a multiplicity of relational femininities, embodiments, and erotic zones with difference. By combining digital cancer activism and an aesthetics and politics of visibility, difference, and intercorporeality, Melle's project intervenes in contemporary cancer discourse and unsettles what has been considered as redemptive cancer culture.

Possessing Nature. Mexican Pavilion at the 56. Venice Biennale

The piece Possessing Nature was presented by Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega at the 2015 Venice Biennale, its content and context were transcendental for the historical memory of the Mexican participation that restarted in 2007. The conceptual piece is a metal structure where water flows, and in its shape and angles recalls the topographical path the Mexican pavilion has had in various exhibition places in Venice. The water flows with the help of a hydraulic pump and the piece is complemented by the projection of photographs that refer to the water relationship between Mexico City and the city of Venice, both cities being built in lake environments. Thus, this article examines the fifth pavilion of Mexico at the Venice Biennale by addressing the historical context of the national pavilion in the 21st century and the symbolic content of the piece, since in its analysis the cultural policies that have led to the Mexican pavilion at each Biennale, together with the reflection and evidence that the artists made around water as an element dominated and even avoided by modernity, all related to the proposal of the artistic director of the 56th Venice Biennale, the Nigerian-American Okwui Enwezor and which he called All the World’s Future.

El sonido del silencio: fotografias de Doroteo Giannecchini y Vincenzo de Mascio en Turin

Historical, anthropological and aesthetic approaches permeate the numerous entries that analyze photographic projects of the 19th century. This article focuses on a small number of photographs, part of a project to disseminate the evangelizing labour of the Franciscan missions in the Bolivian Chaco, under the direction of Doroteo Giannecchini and the photographic work of Vincenzo de Mascio. It explores new meanings of the photographic image, from a hermeneutical approach underscoring the power of images; assuming their polysemic nature to broaden the understanding of the visual dimension of Giannecchini’s missionary project.

On the Trail of Some Human Heat. Thermal Imaging, Visual Culture and the Covid-19 Pandemic

The paper is divided into two main aims. In the first part, it wants to investigate the presence of thermal imaging in the context of contemporary visual culture, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when thermal imaging widely demonstrated how currently optics models of vision are increasingly accompanied by thermal models of visualisation. The result of the latter is thermography: at the same time, a process that transforms our epistemic relationship with reality, extending the possibilities of visualising information beyond the limits of the visible spectrum; and an image that maintains the indexical bound with its referent, but that is conceived as the outcome of an elaborated and displayed dataset. In the second part, the paper focuses on the artistic field in which thermal vision gained further relevance in the context of the pandemic. On the one hand, the artists have criticised and deconstructed it; on the other hand, they have relaunched its use in a biopolitical horizon, such as in the case of the photographic project Virus (2020), in which Antoine d’Agata roamed the deserted streets of Paris and visited some intensive care units with a thermal camera, during the first national lockdown in 2020.

Margins, flows and crossing points: France's liquid territory

In his accounts of Montmartre and Marseille, Nicholas Hewitt shows how places on margins and frontiers channel flows of different sorts running across city, nation and world. In doing so, they open up suggestive perspectives on the nature of French territory, how it is conceived, and how it can be imagined. In particular, they foreground the productive tension of the marginal place as edge and opening, and interrogate the bounded and regulated space implied by the geometrical trope of the French ‘hexagon’. What emerges instead is a curiously liquid sense of French space-in-time as shifting, shimmering and mercurial, caught up in and contributing to the ebb and flow of global circulation. This article explores how movement, flow and liquidity have featured in recent explorations of French territory and topography, drawing on work by Jean Rolin, Agnès Varda and the photography project France(s) territoire liquide, whose title spells out its assumption about the nature of contemporary French space. At the same time, the article situates those accounts in relation to conceptions of French territory which informed the work of post-war spatial planners, whose substantial material and infrastructural legacies reflected their own sense of territory as flux, flow and liquid force.

Contemporaneity and views from Expatria: past and current landscape practices

ABSTRACT Views from Expatria: Photographing Place and the Self in Transience echoes the contradictory contexts of accelerated global migration and the recent pandemic border closures and controls. These conditions contribute creative parallels and new relationships to an escalating interest in concepts of place, home, expatriation and transience in contemporary society. As a creative-based research initiative using landscape photography as both a tool and methodology, the project reflects aesthetic trends, legacies and current debates about landscape photography and its contemporaneity. The paper critiques the literature and community of practitioners around concepts of non-place, home, transience and expatriation, and concepts central to the featured artist’s photographic project Views from Expatria (2021). The paper also seeks to explore ways in which the practice is informed by contemporary photographic theories and practices.

James E. Talmage and the Selenite Crystals

James E. Talmage and the Selenite Crystals

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Photosartorial Elicitation and the Bukae of Korean Instagram

Korean Instagram is in the midst of a phenomenon involving the creation and self-marketing of alter ego identities — 'bu-kae'— that create a culture in which more specific, digital subcultures lead to the formation of real communities offline, which are a thriving part of youth culture today. The 'sub'(부) 'character'(캐) is nowadays a major mode of interacting online in South Korean social media and a clear result of digital media cultures that nowadays house different parts of identities for specific kinds of social uses through identity separation. This research uses 'photo-sartorial elicitation', a structured interaction and means of gathering social data by having a model and photographer interact around clothing in a way that reveals previously hidden or non-obvious social facts about that person or even a community. I am able to engender participation around a photographic project since photographs on Instagram are the prime social currency within digital subcultures on Instagram, with 'exchange rates'for participation in front of the camera far higher than even direct payments of fiscal currency might provide. In the end, it is only by being able to answer the questions, 'Why are you here?'and 'What do I get out of participation as a subject?'that one can gain the ability to reach into the depths of social phenomena that are otherwise largely impenetrable to the researcher’s gaze.

“Boring Photography”: American New Topographics, Socialist Boredom, and Post-Soviet Deadpan Photography

This article looks at the exhibition New Landscape (2018), which was the first full-scale attempt to reflect on the popularity of “deadpan” photography in Russia in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The show was partly modeled on the American exhibition New Topographics (1975). I look at the reasons why the American model was adopted and the earlier late Soviet and Russian photographic projects that dealt with boredom, including the most non-conformist ones, were avoided. I conclude that the reasons for this should be analyzed in the complex postcolonial context, which includes the acting out of collective trauma. In my analysis, I focus on the link between trauma and repressed aggression, violence, and resentment. I also show how Russian deadpan photography has opposed Putin’s regime and developed a pioneer methodology for reflecting on the post-Soviet condition. The American model was used to bring together a diversity of viewpoints, which reveals more complex and integrated ways of dealing with collective affect.

Spotting A Tree From A Pixel (With Remote Sensing Researchers)

This exposition contemplates the collaboration between me, a photographer, and remote sensing researchers from the Department of Geoinformatics at Aalto University, in an ongoing artistic research collaboration called Ground Truth. Ground Truth is a photography project about ‘seeing something when there’s nothing there’. Based in the research group’s initial intent to overcome the spatial resolution limits of satellite imagery, the project now investigates new imaging techniques such as computational photography and hyperspectral imaging of forests, while also referencing photography’s love affair with natural landscapes. Such a comparative approach to natural photography has allowed me to offer a vision that typically escapes human sight perception. I open this auto-theoretical text with a personal experience, namely being on a field trip with remote sensing scientist Daniel Schraik. I use this moment to, among other things, articulate my thoughts on the construction of the ‘real’ in different disciplines. I then contemplate the body of interviews and field trips that became a two-year-long interdisciplinary dialogue, and also brought together two distinct ways of looking at the forest: one symbolized by the camera, another by the terrestrial laser scanner. Inspired by remote sensing concepts such as ground truth and the inverse problem, I have come to examine photography through a new analytical framework. In everyday language, the term ‘ground truth’ refers, in part, to a first-hand experience. In our project, it makes sense, then, that Ground Truth connotes the documentary tradition and the act of witnessing. In the language of science, however, and specifically in remote sensing as a field, ground truth means something different. It refers to data collected on-site, which can then be used to calibrate, to build models, to predict, to interpret, and to decipher information from images; in this case, satellite images. Similarly, our interdisciplinary collaboration functions on another operational layer of photography beneath the immediately visible, one that illustrates an expanded notion of photography across contemporary discourse. Ground Truth interweaves archival imagery, documentary photography, experiment dataset, 3D digital art and conceptual photography. The constellation of employed elements contrasts the representational approaches of drawing and photography with the data-oriented and algorithmic approaches of computer-aided seeing. The two modes together allow for a parallel reading of the forest — one that contextualizes different epistemological regimes that allow for new configurations of the relationship between image and reality.

Photo Art Project Erotics in Photography: From Analogue to Digital. Part 2

The author’s idea. The idea of this photographic project was to create an erotic photographic work, namely such images that contain elements of fine art, which are closely intertwined with the myths and legends of ancient Greece. Throughout photographic history, both historical aspects and stylistic images of the visual art of each era are explored and intersected.
 The photographic project is based on the story of characters such as Eros, and the three graces – Innocence, Beauty, and Love. During the development of the storyline, the characters go through the ages, their aesthetics, and expressiveness. The passage of time and the development of society in terms of morality change the attitude toward the naked human body and its interpretation.
 The analysis of the beauty of the human body in various forms of sensuality is carried out. It is established that eroticism is the result of the process of ontogenetic, and cultural development and expresses the individual psychological and semantic components of the human body’s uniqueness. And photography, as the most common way of visual communication, has formed modern ideas about it.

Visual Spaces of Change: Self-reflection on Architecture and Urban Change Through Photography

This paper synthetizes theoretical aspects of photography related to architecture, city and territory, as well as the case studies coming from the research project Visual Spaces of Change, focusing on the use of photography to investigate the dynamics of architecture and urban change. The project proposed to engage researchers and artists from the fields of architecture, art and image in the creation of visual narratives that promote public debates and a new understanding on urban change. The methodological framework adopted an integrative approach regarding Architecture, City and Territory integrating a series of open talks, public presentations and exhibitions of contemporary photography projects related to the subjects of Architecture, City and Territory during the years of 2019 and 2020 on several public spaces of Oporto City. A pedagogical experiment was also taken that builds up on previous research and had as base the several impressions from the students collected through quantitative and qualitative survey. The potential of visual methods for communicating the identity and transformation of architectures and public spaces are made clear through the discussion of photography (including its uses, methods and approaches) as a valuable research tool and technique to disseminate architecture and public space problematics in contemporary cities. The paper presents the results of the qualitative survey made to the audience of four site-specific exhibitions comprehending visual narratives produced in the context of the research project, as well as the survey made to students of Architecture from third year (1ºcycle) in the Faculty of Architecture of University of Porto (FAUP).

The Spanish Lesbian Collective LSD: A Closer Look to Their Video-Essay Retroalimentación (1998)

In 1993, the group LSD (Lesbianas sin duda / Lesbians without a doubt) was created in Madrid. It was a collective of artivists including Itziar Okariz Virginia Villaplana, Fefa Vila, Azucena Vietes, Marisa Maza, and Liliana Couso, among others. They met in the downtown neighbourhood of Lavapiés to publish magazines and fanzines such as Bollozine or Non Grata, dedicated to film, music, photography, and the Spanish queer art scene overall. In addition, they carried out two photographic projects that are already part of the national lesbian imaginary: Es-Cultura lesbiana and Monstruosidades. This collective, which uses artistic channels for activism, takes a model of a community that is no longer a conqueror of rights (liberalism) but rather a destroyer of all aspects of a hierarchical society.
 Queer activism is located at the margins of representation, understood as “an abject margin full of monsters, in which race, class and sex are mixed, ready to come to light and destabilize the dominant discourses" (García, 2016, p. 162). Violence is no longer understood individually but within a social structure. Some of these artists later continued their careers with video actions and performances in public places, exposing their bodies and thus problematising their gender and sexual orientation, as several of them contributed to the visibility of lesbians in Spain at the turn of the century. 
 This article analyses the photographic and collage work of the Spanish lesbian collective LSD, taking as object of study the video essay Retroalimentación (1998), made by the LSD member Virginia Villaplana.

Roland Regner: Transformations

Roland Regner has embarked on a radical photographic project. He is transforming his entire archive of biographical photographs. The conversation presented here refers to several series in which he exposes biographical photos to a certain bacterium. This transforms them in such a way that, when viewed, they are no longer recognisable as biographical photos. For this project Roland has teamed up with the Microbiological Institute of the University of Zurich. This artistic endeavour is linked to the idea that photographs never portray reality objectively.