This workshop was held at the Heidelberg Centre of Transcultural Studies on November 3-5 2017 and organized by Dr. Cathrine Bublatzky.
The workshop explored the visual culture of photography as central medium of socio-political expression. With a focus on different genres of photography, this interdisciplinary workshop asked for studies that engage with photography as cultural knowledge production created by artists, journalists or private persons. Following the idea of a ‘photographic situation’ which strongly interlinks photographer, photographed and spectator, the workshop emphasised the multiplicity of (trans)cultural interaction that photography creates according to its production, circulation, and spectating.
Pursuing the belief that ‘global cultures of photography’ require a critical eye in order to examine their aesthetic and cultural roles beyond existing ‘colonial/post-colonial’ paradigms, the discussion initiated a critical exchange about the potential of analogue and digital photography in shaping and generating citizenship (Azoulay) as this is considered a main challenge in both – historical and contemporary – times. In this context, the workshop examined not only the production, usage and circulation of photography, but followed a particular interest in those moments when photography produces a “sensory realm of the social” (Edwards) in and beyond different cultural and regional contexts.
Gallery Description
The workshop took place at the same time as the international curated Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie. Farewell Photography (9.9-5.11.17) in the Rhein-Neckar Region which brought together striking artistic reactions to the ever-ongoing transformation that photography undergoes as a “medium of democratic articulation and participation, but also of propaganda and commercial appropriation” (website). Taking the Biennale and its themes/artistic positions as another reference point for our discussion, the workshop included visits to some of the exhibitions.
Please find the program here.
Participants of the workshop included Angelika Böck (Munich), Sarah Böllinger (Bayreuth), Ruthie Ginsburg (Tel Aviv), Tayebe Naderabadi (Heidelberg), Simone Pfeifer (Mainz), Shireen Walton (London) and Liane Wilhelmus (Heidelberg).
Cathrine Bublatzky 