14 May 2012

Walead Beshty blogs for Fotomuseum Winterthur

Our new blog Still Searching – An Online Discourse on Photography goes into the next round with Walead Beshty (*1976). The internationally known photographer, professor and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles, will be blogging for us until the end of May 2012. Beshty's concern is the exceptional position of photography within the (art) world today. Why is it 'that a medium that was born less than two hundred years ago, in the midst of the industrial revolution, would be the primary contemporary vehicle of the western pictorial tradition?', is just one of the questions he asks in his first post.

In his second blog post, Beshty zooms in on various thinkers from Vilém Flusser to Roland Barthes who practice what he calls an 'apocalypse of the image': 'The photograph becomes exclusively the testament to a loss or lack, a marker of absence, a presence defined in negative rather than positive terms, and this dead end is always the foregone conclusion of attempts to find solidity in signification.' His third post tries to find answers to the fundamental question „How can we keep discussing photography at all?'

Read Walead Beshty's whole posts and share your own thoughts on www.blog.fotomuseum.ch

Still Searching—An Online Discourse on Photography aims to be a continually growing and developing Internet discourse on the medium of photography that features a multitude of participants; it is conceived as an online debate on forms of photographic production, techniques, applications, distribution strate¬gies, contexts, theoretical foundations, ontology and perspectives on the medium. It explores photo¬graphy's role as a seminal visual medium of our time—as art, as a communication and information tool in the context of social media or photojournalism, and as a form of scientific or legal evidence. This discourse will be conducted by theorists, critics, educators, enthusiasts, users and also photo¬graph¬ers. Still Searching is organized and moderated by the Fotomuseum Winterthur and located on its website. It is supported by numerous institutional partners from all over the world.

The German photo historian and theorist Bernd Stiegler kicked off the blog (January 15 to February
29), the Indian writer Aveek Sen, (March 1 to April 14), US artist Walead Beshty (April 15 to May 31), and Belgian photo theorist Hilde Van Gelder (June 1 to July 14) follow(ed) until the summer break.
Geoffrey Batchen, the photo historian and theorist currently working in New Zealand, will initiate the autumn season (September 15 to October 31).