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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017
Scene - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017
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In pursuit of autonomy: Autonomia and the archive
By Scott CaruthAbstractThe Historical Archives of the Fondazione Fotografia contain over half a million photographic objects relating to the northern Italian town of Modena. Adopting all types of photographic processes and dealing with a broad range of subject matter, the collection details shifts and currents within both the photographic medium and the social and political landscape of the town itself. This article stems from the period in which I was artist in residence at the Fondazione Fotografia earlier this year. During this time, I attempted to trace the regions prominent yet ambiguous radical politics of the 1970s and the early 1980s, particularly the ‘Autonomia’ movement, through the context of the photographic archive. This research seeks to reflect on this process and undertake an exploration of the movement in relation to the archival enterprise, particularly the ways in which the wider concept of the archive as a framework presents issues that intersect with those dealt with by the movement itself. In doing so, I investigate the role played by the archive in the establishment of historical and political narratives and the ways in which it both constitutes and reinforces structures of power. The process of tracing Autonomia through such a framework confirms that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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How the personal remains political in photography today
More LessAbstractThere are a startling number of women artists making themselves the subject of their own work today. Many will make it a recurrent theme of their practice; others seem to go through a phase, either early or late on in their careers, where they feature themselves in their work. This might be an inevitable by-product of feminist studies, a subject covered in most art schools. Women artists grapple with theories about the engendered male gaze and attempt to position themselves within it. For young women artists it can almost be a rite of passage through which they must pass to find their own artistic voice. It could simply be due to the resurgence of interest in performance art in contemporary practice that leads so many female artists to use their own bodies as a tool for their work. This article sparked by the Evidence conference at FORMAT 2015 will consider the political implications of this use of the self. Four women artists using photography, all working in the United Kingdom, have been selected: Trish Morrissey, Sian Bonnell, E. J. Major and Melanie Manchot. Their work is taken as a starting point for some thinking around this subject. Each of the artists has been asked to respond to a series of questions and their comments punctuate this text; and I would like to thank them for contributing in this way.
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Evidence, memory and the malleable photograph
More LessAbstractThis article explores the capacity of the photograph to furnish evidence, which derives both from its indexicality and from the visual accuracy of the raw image. Photographs achieve the status of evidence not because the photograph itself has any implicit identity but rather because the State recognized that the photograph could provide proof of identification – mug shots – as early as 1850 when police departments hired photographers to take mug shots and crime scene photographs. Courts accepted the photograph as evidence as early as 1859 and continue today, even employing ‘Instagram’ officers whose job entails monitoring Instagram accounts of persons of interest. The article then explores why the photograph remains believable today to the public even with contemporary discourse about the malleability of the photograph.
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Objects: Methods of documenting social change
More LessAbstractThe aim of this article is to show how photography evidenced social changes in Polish history between 1959 and 2016. It focuses on the problem of documenting average items instead of photo reportage. It presents the pictures created in a variety of political realities: including the communist period in Poland and the years after 1989. By presenting projects of artists Władysław Hasior and Zbigniew Dłubak two different photographic practitioners work are shown. They both were able to see and document changes in the political reality of their time. After the fall of Communism the photographers draw attention to the documentation of ‘neutral’ objects once again. Polish New Documentarists continued earlier actions, but also created their work in the changed realities of the period. They practice what Edouard Pontremoli called ‘the aesthetic of dullness’(Pontremoli: 2006, 162). This article discusses how seemingly objective photographs become a part of the evidence of historical events.
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Eikonostasia
More LessAbstract‘Eikonostasia’ is the Greek word for roadside shrines indicating death in car accidents. In this article, the evidence of these shrines in modern material culture throughout Crete is being presented. Furthermore, the author/photographer explores these particular and unique structures as well as the preservation of memory through tangible evidence of an event which has occurred on a precise moment in time. How do the images of these particular structures carry through time the ‘Barthian’, ‘punctum’ and ‘studium’? To what point photography can actually record an evolution of a social habit/tradition/tendency throughout the advancement of our civilization and turn it into evidence of a highly evolving present? How does photography, as an art, revive the original character of these structures, which have gone from public to private in the spare of 50 years?
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A new vision and order of world
More LessAbstractIn a world of change photography is one of most interesting art mediums for analysis, contrast and social metamorphosis. In my research the political view discovered a new order in which was lost a certain idea of Italy, as well as lost innocence; in this article I dwell on the different series of two Italian photographers – Francesco Jodice and GianLuca Perrone – in which I focus on the macro areas of change, and the micro areas in which traditions and a precise idea of this country lost his face for an image of Paolo Sorrentino’s masterpiece La grande Bellezza. Before an analysis of the Italians photographic series of works, I explore the general topic of ‘evidence’ remembering Sascha Weidner; a romantically inclined traveller, restless, as though greeting the world for the first time with the strongest cry. Like an eccentric setting in Joe R. Lansdale’s novel, Drive-In, we are the co-stars in a convulsive world where trauma and decadence are not the exception in the collection, a recording or in a display of evidence.
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Reviews
More LessAbstractThe Nose, The Royal Opera House, London, November 2016
The Red Shoes, Matthew Bourne, Sadlers Wells Theatre, London, November/December 2016
Les Enfants Terribles, A Dance/Opera by Philip Glass, direction and choreography by Javier De Frutos, The Barbican, London, January 2017
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Critical costume
Authors: Rachel Hann and Sidsel Bech
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