[TOC] photographies vol. 3, issue 1, march 2010 - Yable of Contents

CONTENTS
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The Uncanny Return: Documenting Place in Post-war German Photography by Donna MF Brett
Editorial abstract: "Focusing on post-war Germany, Donna Brett suggests that the destruction resulting from Allied bombing along with the later rewriting of histories of space post-1989 contribute to particular ways of seeing and conceptualizing "place" in post-war Germany. Our last issue included an article by Sarah James, who suggested that a particular photographic paradigm, marked by an absence of postmodern and poststructuralist debates, characterizes German understandings of photography and that this has reinvested modernist values with dialectical and political possibilities (see volume 2.2: 255—70). In a similar vein, Brett argues that a particular way of seeing is revealed through photographs of the changing topography. As she notes, some photographers have documented both monumental and everyday changes to landscapes within which previously familiar landmarks seem uncannily absent; others (including Bernd and Hilla Becher) have systematically investigated abandoned spaces and disappearing icons of industry. It is suggested that the imaging and re-imaging of sites provides a means for people to re-locate themselves, given specific histories of physical and visual displacement."
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Between Sequence and Seriality: Landscape Photography and its Historiography in Anonyme Skulpturen by Chris Balaschak
Editorial abstract: "Considering photographs as documents, Chris Balaschak takes the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher in order to analyse the effects of different modes and contexts of presentations — in exhibition or in book form. Taking the 1970 publication of Anonyme Skulpturen, he considers their typologies not only in terms of picture modes but also as
testifying to a post-war shift away from heavy industry, a "de-industrialization" as a result of which the work of the Bechers has come to testify to something that once was."
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The Drive to Archive: Conceptual Documentary Photobook Design by Melissa Miles
Editorial abstract "Melissa Miles likewise considers documentary modes, here centring on current trends towards conceptual documentary whereby photographers seek out signifiers of contemporary culture offering what often seems a humorous "take" on everyday circumstances. There is a cool detachment (reminiscent, perhaps, of the Bechers) but the exploration is not founded in the typological (although some photographers repeatedly explore a single phenomenon); rather, there is a sense of ironic detachment. In common with Balaschak, Miles' interest is not only in imagery and aesthetics but also in modes of publication, most particularly, the characteristics that have become criteria
for the valuation of photobooks which often stress design form over and above content and, indeed, the trajectory "travelled" by the book from publication to statues as collectible art objects. As she remarks, the rising status of photobooks as collectible items in itself begs critical investigation as does that which is masked through emphasis on art
marketability as opposed to the ideological implications of both the content and the status attributed to particular works."
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Biz [Us]: Looking Productively to the Representation of the "Self" in Photographic Portraiture by Fulya Ertem
Editorial abstract: "Fulya Ertem offers an account of a student project in 1998 whereby people on the streets of Istanbul were invited to pose for portraits in front of a screen (rather in the manner of nineteenth-century anthropologists investigating ethnic types). Her interest is in the "pose" and the uneasiness of the relationship between photographer
and the "other" at the instant of picturing which she suggests is an uncanny moment, one that we can detect through scrutiny of the resulting images. "
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The Legibility of Vernacular Aesthetics by Nicos Philippou
Editorial abstract: "Nicos Philippou's series of photographs and contextualizing essay question stereotypes of Cyprus,
through a focus on the coffee-house in Cypriot culture and suggests complex histories and tensions generally obscured within the imagery of tourism and marketing."
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Moving Stills: Images That are no Longer Immobile by Ingrid Hölzl
Editorial abstract: "Ingrid Hölzl proposes a critical rereading of Benjamin's writings on photography and film, focusing on his implicit theory of media hybridity which helps to circumvent notions of medium specificity in what has been called the expanded field of photography. Her contribution moves beyond binary opposition of photograph versus moving image to consider ways in which any still/moving divide is challenged through the refilming of photographs with a moving camera, and subsequent use in digital consumer software such as Apple iPhoto."
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Flavia's Tour Favela by Paul Antick
Editorial abstract: "Essay on marginalized areas within cities. He allies "fieldnotes" from trips to various favelas (literally, shrublands) in Rio de Janeiro with photographic notes on Whitechapel in the East End of London, now colonized
by artists and writers, but formerly territory into which, likewise, no middle-class traveller would venture without a guide.
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For facsimile view of the Table of Contents and Editorial please click URL
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