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Seminar

Photography is a product of the industrial era and is emblematic of modern visual culture. According to modernity, photography and vision are synonymous. Thanks to its explosion onto the printed page and its democratization, both of which were initiated at the turn of the 20th century, photography is the visual means of representing and communicating par excellence. Photography is also an historically ambiguous medium that exists between art and scientific instrumentality and, in that way, its role as historical documentation is one of the fundamental concepts within artistic and scientific culture, as well as that of public life in the 20th century. To Modern Art, photography is a means of describing things precisely as well as experimenting with the limits of visual perception. To the Social Sciences, photography is a testament and a document for research and discursive work. To mass media, photography allows it to provoke sensations which produce opinions and debate.

At this crossroads of Art, Social Sciences, Mass Media and Pop Culture, all of which are manifested in the printed page, photography plays an important role in the 20th century as the means of maximum penetration and permeability and, because of that, has had the greatest impact on perception and public opinion. In this way, we can say that it is through photography that reality is constructed, which makes it much more than a representation. The 20th century sees the world through photographs and thanks to them. Photography is not so much a register of what is, but a true mechanism for the construction of perceptive forms and a visual instrument. The city is the stage of modern vision, which is photographic.

This seminar is conceived as a space for reflection and debate on the photographic representation of historical processes of city transformation.

Blake Stimson, Ian Jeffrey, Frits Gierstberg, Maren Stange, and Jean Françoise Chevrier, among others, will participate.


Programme

This seminar is a part of the open PEI program

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2
The city produced by photography

6 pm
Photography of the Social Forms
Presented by Blake Stimson

8 pm
The City in Modern Photography

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3
Photographic Missions and Urban Processes

4 pm
Roy Stryker and the Farm Security Administration. Documental Photography and Social Engineering

6 pm
Mass Observation

8 pm
The DATAR effect. Photographic Missions in 80's and 90's Europe

Participants

Jean-François Chevrier is an Art Historian, Art Critic, Exhibition Curator and Professor of Contemporary Art History at the École Nationale Supérieure de Meaux-Arts in Paris.

Friets Gierstberg is the director of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rótterdam and the curator of Rotterdam 's Foto Bienale

Ian Jeffrey is an Art Historian and Photographer.

Maren Stange is a professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at New York's Cooper Union.

Blake Stimson is an Adjunct Professor of Art History at the University of California at Davis.

programespublics [at] macba [dot] cat

Related

Audios

The DATAR effect. Photographic Missions in 80's and 90's Europe
Roy Stryker and the Farm Security Administration. Documental Photography and Social Engineering
Mass Observation
Photography of the Social Forms
The DATAR effect. Photographic Missions in 80's and 90's Europe
Roy Stryker and the Farm Security Administration. Documental Photography and Social Engineering
Mass Observation
Photography of the Social Forms
Son[i]a #33. Jorge Ribalta
17.01.2007

Publications