Featuring: Dina Al-Kassim, Jens Asthoff, Taco Hidde Bakker, Lara Baladi, Véronique Besnard, Michèle Cohen Hadria, Timothy Druckrey, Luigi Fassi, Karine Fauchard, Anne Faucheret, Duncan Forbes, François-Xavier Gbré, Marina Gržinić, Sebastian Hau, Christian Höller, Susanne Holschbach, Omar Kholeif, Maya Krinsky, Sandra Križić Roban, Pierre Leguillon, Nicolas Linnert, Bart Lunenburg, Yuki Onodera, Johan Österholm, Max Pinckers, Matthew Rana, Moritz Scheper, Julia Scher, Simon & Simone, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Marko Tadić, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Fatoş Üstek, Mercedes Vicente, Franz Wanner, Joanna Warsza, Carmen Winant
Ever since the first Symposion on Photography in 1979, the publication of which served as a departure point for the magazine Camera Austria International, Camera Austria’s work has been characterized by an intensive investigation into the relationship between text and image, theory and visual practice. Diverging or opposing positions were placed in relation to one another to widen the purview of the debate over photography on an ongoing basis—in the cultural sciences, visual studies, urbanism research, architecture, literature and film studies, philosophy, media theory, semiotics, the politics of representation, political activism, feminist theory, postcolonial studies, etc. First and foremost, however, the symposia were also a locus of exchange between theory and artistic practice. From a contemporary point of view, it appears that during the symposia on photography it wasn’t so much existing agreements that came to expression, but a polyphony of disagreement, discrepancy, and dissent corresponding to the simultaneous, albeit opposing perspectives on the photographic image.
On October 5 and 6, 2018, a Symposion on Photography will once again take place, dedicated to the theme of the “Violence of Images” and following in this tradition of the polyphony and expansion of discourses. This symposion again brings together artists and experts from various disciplines: Christine Frisinghelli, Marina Gržinić, Ana Hoffner, Tom Holert, Jakub Majmurek, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Ines Schaber, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Ala Younis. We have decided to publish this issue of Camera Austria International, which is deliberately conceived as a text and theory issue, concurrently with the symposion as a kind of ground-preparing reader. The question we posed to the invited authors was simple: what themes and reflections on photographic subjects—whether they be artistic or related to everyday culture—are currently at the top of their agenda?
We’re fascinated by the result, a panorama of observations on and insight into visual cultures: art photography in the age of catastrophe; questions of censorship and of the visual representation of revolution; the question as to what, if anything, can be gained from racialized images; the way in which right-wing authoritarian politics are expressed in conventional imagery; the forensics and representability of the sonic; the phenomenon of demobilization through images, and the resulting visual “instant archive.”
Accompanying the texts in this issue is an expanded image section that we’ve developed in close cooperation with the authors who have long accompanied and left their mark on Camera Austria, and who were invited to propose artists whose work they’d like to share with the readers of Camera Austria International. We’re pleased that the contributions presented here offer a multi-faceted insight into current positions in art photography, one that’s proven unexpected, even to us.
Camera Austria International
published quarterly, 92 pages, German / English