Lectures

The symposium accompanies the exhibition The Colonial Eye: Early Portrait Photography in India. It broadens the view of historical and contemporary portrait photography to include other regions of the world. Art historians, conservators, ethnologists, Africanists and artists report on their research and present their works.The symposium accompanies the exhibition The Colonial Eye: Early Portrait Photography in India. It broadens the view of historical and contemporary portrait photography to include other regions of the world. Art historians, conservators, ethnologists, Africanists and artists report on their research and present their works.

In his lecture, Olivier Lugon (University of Lausanne) examines the role of photography in exhibitions and uses examples to explain what aesthetic and societal orientations are implied in the act of showing photography in exhibitions.
Since the nineteenth century, photo exhibitions have often been criticised for showing too many images and for overwhelming viewers with a flood of unrelated subjects. In the early 1950s, however, a number of exhibitions were designed expressly to subject visitors to a vortex of images. Visitors were to learn to recombine and reinterpret all kinds of photos in ever new ways: the photo exhibition became a training ground for modern seeing, to give people orientation in a world that was thought to be increasingly complex and mobile.
Show photography! is a cooperative project with Kunstsaele Berlin and takes place in collaboration with Camera Austria International (Graz/Berlin). With the kind support of Allianz Kulturstiftung.

Christian Booss works in the research department of the Federal Commission for the Stasi Archives of the Former GDR.

The 4th conference of the working group on Art in the GDR will examine the extent to which photography was exploited by SED media policy as an ideological instrument of ‘class struggle’ and ‘socialist development’, and its formal aesthetics and content controlled by the Central Photography Commission to enforce realism.

The 4th conference of the working group on Art in the GDR will examine the extent to which photography was exploited by SED media policy as an ideological instrument of ‘class struggle’ and ‘socialist development’, and its formal aesthetics and content controlled by the Central Photography Commission to enforce realism.

The 4th conference of the working group on Art in the GDR will examine the extent to which photography was exploited by SED media policy as an ideological instrument of ‘class struggle’ and ‘socialist development’, and its formal aesthetics and content controlled by the Central Photography Commission to enforce realism.

The event focuses on the long-term preservation and conservation of the photographic legacy contained in museums, archives, libraries and private collections, and in private household collections of family photographs. Photography conservators and curators report on their work.

The conference analyses the importance of the visual sources preserved in archives, collections and libraries for scholars and researchers in all disciplines. Particular attention is given to selection and digitisation. Speakers include scholars from Austria, Britain, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

From the very beginning, media images played a quite defining role in the discussions about labour migration in the Federal Republic. Based on the example of the Italian labour migration to Wolfsburg in the 1960a and 1970s, the talk addresses the question of which image motifs photographers selected in approaching the subject of immigration. Can specific thematic areas be derived from these images? How do the images take up clichés and perpetuate them? Finally, the question that should also be addressed is whether there are historical referential images in the communal set of memories that are again and again found in the different media like icons.

German photographers initially maintained a much less deeply felt relationship to the forest, a cradle of national myths, than German painters and poets. The photographers of “Neuen Sehen/Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Vision/New Objectivity) excluded nature and thus also the forest from their images to the greatest extent possible. It was first under the oppressive horizons of the National Socialist regime that advanced photographers turned their gaze to the landscape. With the altered awareness of the environment in the last thirty years, the forest has received increased attention in photography. The lecture follows this development along with photographic examples.