Lieven Gevaert Series – serie

Reduced Price!Now only € 10,00 instead of € 25,00In this photo book, Els Vanden Meersch investigates the latent presence of violence and dominance in the everyday reality of the urban fabric. Subtle images contain combinations of banal details, through which emerges a restrained tension that points at the paranoid as it is felt in architecture. Control mechanisms such as surveillance camera's, spy holes and rear-view mirrors are set against one another. They gradually raise the stakes towards displaying an impenetrable control system that is built on the principles of military architecture, sophisticated technology and compelling viewing apparatuses. In this machine of anxiety, both the operator of the system and its target remain invisible. An aimless matrix of meaning appears, in which a mirror reveals as much as a dead-end corridor. Inan astutely accurate way, Paranoid obstructions offers a representation of what cannot be outspoken nor imagined but which inevitably has happened. Paranoid obstructions contains an essay by Hilde Van Gelder and a poem by Alice Evermore.

Reduced Price! Now only € 10,00 instead of € 21,00This book is the outcome of a collaborative research project between LGC, the Leuven Museumsite and STUK Arts Centre. On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Constantin Meunier's death, the contributions by Sura Levine and Marjan Sterckx examine the importance of Meunier for Leuven, where he taught at the Arts Academy from 1887 until 1897 and lived from 1887 until 1894. As a complement, four authors from various disciplinary backgrounds address the actuality of Meunier's social realist thought today. Virginie Devillez investigates the possibilities of a social realist art after the debacle of socialist realism, focussing on the Belgian 20th century artistic context and the work of contemporary Belgian artists and filmmakers such as the frères Dardenne. Hilde Van Gelder specifically zooms in on the possibilities of making a social or critical realist art, comparing closely the work of Meunier and Sekula. Human rights specialist Eva Brems discusses the impact of contemporary globalisation on the current viability of social rights. Labour law expert Marc De Vos screens the jurisdictional actuality of social realist thought today, especially in respect to issues such as pensions and the greying of society.

What is the place of Critical Realism today, given the fact that both realism and commitment in art have become highly problematic notions since at least several decades? Realism in the first place appears to be relegated to the museum of pre-modern styles and devices, safely locked-up in the toolbox of 19th-Century art history. Secondly, in our cool, postmodern times, the place for commitment has become highly confuse. The naïve confusion between Critical Realism and notions like Social(ist) Realism or Political Correctness has complexified that situation. The ambition of this volume is to position Critical Realism as clearly as possible in the current art scene. This book makes a strong plea for a critically engaged art, as it can be encountered in a most exemplary way in the work of Allan Sekula. Sekula’s oeuvre features a number of characteristics whose combination makes it unique: his iconography rediscovers and reinvents the theme of labor and his photos, on the verge between art and documentary – thus creating a kind of proto-documentary, reflect on the possibilities for the visual arts today to deliver an ‘act of criticism’. Internationally known as one of the most prominent artists engaged in this debate, Sekula’s research methods allow us to discuss the ways art can be critical about contemporary social questions without succumbing into a plain or overtly partial political statement.

Reduced Price! Now only € 10,00 instead of € 15,50This book is the result of a collaborative project, commissioned to the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography and Visual Studies at the KULeuven by the Concertgebouw Bruges. Complying to its mission as a laboratory for creation, the Concertgebouw seeks farreaching synergies between different artistic media. Photography and music thus found one another in a creative encounter that lasted six months, during MOZART06, the Concertgebouw's festival in the Spring of 2006. In the Name of Mozart, a double series of photographic portraits realised by Belgian photographer Malou Swinnen, is the outcome of this research. Malou Swinnen has portrayed seventeen Mozart performers, right before entering the stage, in two different states. The images are all included in this book and are accompanied by statements from the portrayed musicians themselves. The fascinating relationship between photography and music is addressed in an essay written by Katelijne Schiltz and Hilde Van Gelder. Liesbeth Decan has interviewed Malou Swinnen in depth. This results in an interview-essay that offers challenging historical insights into the artist's work.

Reduced Price! Now only € 10,00 instead of € 27,50 Henri Van Lier’s contribution to the field of photography is comparable, in its scope as well as in its achievements, to the work of all those we now consider being the great modern classics: Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, André Malraux, John Berger, Susan Sontag, or Roland Barthes. Less well known, probably for having worked and published in Belgium, Henri Van Lier had written with Philosophy of Photography a profoundly original and innovative reflection on the medium, both on its formal peculiarities and on its social, cultural, and anthropological functions. Much more than other theoreticians, Van Lier succeeds in combining an astute sense of the detail with an extremely broad interest in the meaning of the medium for mankind (for Van Lier, photography is always analyzed in the light of a new discipline he coined as ‘anthropogeny’ and which studies the gradual emergence of what makes us human through the history of the species). Moreover, having no particular institutional agenda to defend, Henri Van Lier is able to gather a wide range of disciplinary insights and questions –semiotics, history, aesthetics, and, why not, also philosophy. The present translation is the very first to appear in English, yet it is also much more. The book has received a completely new set of illustrations, meant to be more than merely ‘illustrative’. Made by sixteen young photographers all trained by the Belgian photographer Geert Goiris, who devoted an open master class to Henri Van Lier’s work, all these images represent both an homage to the author of Philosophy of Photography and a timely exemplification of the use-value of the ideas defended in the book. Each of the photographers has indeed attempted to suggest in his or her own image(s) the echoes which specific points of Van Lier’s work are able to create in the mind, the eyes, but also the hands of contemporary readers and viewers. In this sense, this book is not just a scholarly work; it has become a work of art.

Reduced Price!Now only € 10,00 instead of € 29,50Highly influential both as an artist and as a theoretician Victor Burgin figures amongst the most insightful thinkers on visual culture in recent times. His writings focus on the production of meanings and affects through images – at the intersections of subjective desire and sociopolitical organization – and cross a diversity of representational practices (photography, film, painting, advertising, television, the internet) and theoretical fields (semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies). The essays in this volume provide a succinct overview of Burgin’s rich and multifaceted work during the last forty years – from its origins in debates within the Conceptual Art movement to its present concern with everyday perception in the environment of global media. The selection includes such classic essays as ‘Situational Aesthetics’ and ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, together with less widely-known articles such as ‘Work and Commentary’ and the previously unpublished essays ‘Shadows, Time and Family Pictures’ and ‘Monument and Melancholia’. The essays are arranged chronologically in sections to represent four salient phases of Burgin’s preoccupations: Conceptual art and photography; A psychical realism; The city and global media; Infinite film. Each section is preceded by an exchange between Victor Burgin and the book’s editor, Alexander Streitberger, to introduce the main lines of thought. Examples from Burgin’s visual works, selected by the editor in consultation with the artist, accompany each section.

Photographic images can, apart from their capacity to show, convey an experience, a quality that has seldom been recognized. In this book the artist and photographer Maarten Vanvolsem explains how the strip technique can tell a different story of time and space in photographic images, a story that leads to new expressions and experiences of time and movement. The strip technique itself seems to be neglected in the debate on time and photography, although it has a long history. Its use is widespread and, especially in recent years, more and more artists rediscover the technique. Based on an historical overview, a knowledge and understanding of the technique, and experiments with the building of cameras, this book will propose a new use of this forgotten art: a use in which the temporal terms ‘speed', ‘rhythm', and ‘pace' are of more value than terms so often associated with photography such as ‘freeze', ‘split second', or ‘capture'. Within the book one can find more than thirty artists using the strip technique for their artistic practice. A lot of the artwork produced goes beyond traditional photography and the standards set by the photo industry. The research also reveals the extent to which artists use the technique to rediscover the time-based possibilities of the photographic image. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Since the late 1960s Peter Downsbrough has been an important figure in contemporary art, associated with major international art movements as minimal art, conceptual art, and visual poetry. In his artistic work he explores various fields including sculpture, architecture, books, film, and photography. This book provides, for the first time, a profound insight into Downsbrough's diverse and complex use of photography within his artistic work over the last 40 years. A substantial essay by Alexander Streitberger discusses the artist's photographic work - which includes single prints, series, postcards, collages, and books - within its aesthetic and historical context. Streitberger relates Downsbrough's work to fundamental issues of photographic practice and discourse such as the photograph as document, the representation of urban space, space-time relations, collage as an aesthetic and political means of expression, the relationship between still and moving image, and the context of presentation. The rich image material - some of which has never been published before - is arranged by the artist himself in order to create a fertile exchange between the topics of the text and his own intervention. Concluding with an exclusive interview with the artist, the book offers a real dialogue between artistic practice and theoretical reflexion. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

The first book to apply the concept of the ‘minor' to the theory of photography. The notion of the minor, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka, Towards a minor literature (1975), is introduced and connected applied here for the very first time to the field of photography theory. Deleuze and Guattari defined minor literature in terms of deterritorialization, politicization and collectivization. By transferring ‘the minor' to the medium of photography, this book enlarges the idea of ‘the minor' and opens it up to all kinds of mutations in the process. The essays gathered in this book discuss the ways in which photography can make the dominant codes of representation stammer and how it can produce new effects and address people yet to come. The authors consider ‘the minor' as a valuable tool to help photography research move beyond, or in between, binary and hierarchized ways of thinking (of high and low art, for example, or centre and periphery). As such, it aims to contribute to a rethinking of photography as multiplicity and variation. Consequently, the term is connected with both marginal and canonical photographic practices, covering photographers as different as Miroslav Tichy, Paul McCarthy, Tacita Dean, Dan Graham, and Paul Nougé. After developing a theory of the minor, this book explores how the operations of the minor can be found in major art practices. It closes by tackling the question of photography as variation in case studies of belated forms of surrealist photography. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Outcome of the multifaceted project In and Out of Brussels - book & DVD.‘In and Out of Brussels’ examines four Brussels-based artistic projects that converge in critically investigating the figuration of Africa in the image economy of the West: Herman Asselberghs's Speech Act (2011), Sven Augustijnen's Spectres (2011), Renzo Martens's Episode III - Enjoy Poverty (2008) and Els Opsomer's Building Stories: That Distant Piece of Mine (2012). While each is a singular film, together they reveal Africa's postcolonial imaginary to be a zone of crisis, situated between humanitarian emergency, financial pillage, and the politics of memory on the one hand, and the fictional - but nonetheless consequential - construction of European identity on the other. Just as dominant neocolonial narratives (which all too often cover over movements for independence and social justice) are critically played out and contested in these works, so too are documentary conventions creatively reinvented by Asselberghs, Augustijnen, Martens, and Opsomer. The resulting moving images emerge as a complex site of postcolonial haunting, self-reflexive performativity, researched analysis, archival reordering, and post-documentary cinematic affect. This book represents the outcome of an interdisciplinary and international research project, that gathered theoreticians, art critics, curators, and artists over a two-year period (2010-2012). The conversations collected and reprinted here look closely at the four films and examine their political, aesthetic, and historical implications. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Exploring the influence of other media on contemporary photography. ‘Heterogeneous Objects’ provides various essays that explore the encounter of photography with other media since the 1960s. The essays offer new ways of thinking about photography beyond modernist notions of medium specificity and autonomy based upon the idea that a photograph does not rely on a coherent system of codes but is almost always encountered as a fragmented, partial object. Addressing recent debates in art history and photography theory, film studies, and media theory, the contributions cover a broad array of approaches, relating photography to issues of the panorama, surveillance, sculpture, transformation and processuality, and the development of new media categories. Rather than conceiving of photography as a medium, the aim is to reconsider the photograph as a historically, theoretically, and culturally embedded heterogeneous object that is always related to, in contact with, or shaped by other media. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content). Contributors: Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Steven Jacobs (University of Gent), Joanna Lowry (University of Brighton), Marcel Marburger (Universität der Künste, Berlin), Raphaël Pirenne (Université catholique de Louvain), Yvonne Spielmann (University of the West of Scotland), Alexander Streitberger (Université catholique de Louvain), Hilde Van Gelder (University of Leuven)

Exploring radically new possibilities for contemporary photography by an internationally leading theorist. This book is the product of a unique collaboration between Israeli artist and philosopher Aïm Deüelle Lüski and visual culture theorist Ariella Azoulay. In their longstanding working relationship, they research how to theorize the structure of the contemporary scopic regime and open a space for its civil transformation. On this occasion, Azoulay interprets a particular series of cameras built by Deüelle Lüski, along with photographs taken by these cameras. Unlike conventional cameras and their vertical photography, Deüelle Lüski's cameras seek to generate new sets of relations between the camera and the world. Azoulay's text unfolds four different ‘short histories' of problems in photography, each of which deconstructs what otherwise might appear as a coherent photographic regime, yet which is shown to be based solely on principles of sovereignty and possession. Through and with Deüelle Lüski's project Azoulay seeks to ‘potentialize' the history of photography, that is, to recover long forgotten, un-materialized possibilities. The book contains 100 images and a conversation between the author and the artist. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

New perspectives on Belgian Surrealism and the photographic practices of Marcel Mariën. Marcel Mariën (1920–1993) was a key figure of Belgian post-war Surrealism. He is widely acknowledged for his landmark work on Belgian Surrealism and his collaboration with future Situationists like Guy-Ernest Debord in his journal ‘Les Lèvres nues’. Nevertheless, Mariën’s texts, collages, photographs, film, and (art?) objects have to date remained understudied. This is the first volume devoted to Mariën's photographic work. Through a series of close readings, Mieke Bleyen connects the collage and photographic practices of Mariën with his wider oeuvre, particularly with his archival and editorial activities. By applying Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the ‘minor’, this book proposes an alternative reading of Mariën’s anti-aesthetics and focuses on the affective range of his work. The figure of Mariën also serves as a case study that offers new perspectives on Belgian Surrealism's relation to mainstream Surrealism and the role of photography within Surrealism. This volume, moreover, raises a critique on ‘major’ art history's conception of time as linear progression and argues instead for twisted and extended temporalities in the case of Marcel Mariën. With previously unpublished images from Mariën's private archive. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

The first monograph covering Dibbets's iconic photographic oeuvre. Dutchman Jan Dibbets (b. 1941) is one of the principal artists to have introduced photography into the plastic arts, and this as early as the 1960s. At a time when photography has massively invaded contemporary art institutions - not without generating confusion and excess - it is not easy to evaluate the full radicality of Dibbets's approach. This radicalism has nothing to do with modernist overkill. Dibbets did not merely go further than others; rather, he simply went 'elsewhere'. Beginning in 1967, he embarked on a long-range project which, as we advance into the 21st century, he seems not to have abandoned: the 'pictorializing' of photography. Jan Dibbets is one of the few artists of his generation and reputation not to have seen his oeuvre accorded full monographic coverage. This exhaustive study seeks to fill this gap by covering almost fifty years of his photographic oeuvre.This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Sekula’s final work dedicated to labor solidarity in and around the docks. Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum is the project on which the US artist and writer Allan Sekula worked during the last three years of his life (2010–2013). The work consists, first, of a corpus of thirty-three framed photographs and two slide projections of in total over one hundred images, all made by the artist (Ship of Fools); second, it contains a gigantic collection of various objects, graphic images, postcards, and prints which the artist purchased, mostly online (The Dockers’ Museum). Sekula dedicated this work to both historical and contemporary labor solidarity in and around the docks. At the time of his sad passing in the Summer of 2013, Allan Sekula was in the midst of collaborating on this publication with all four contributing authors: Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Alberto Toscano, and Hilde Van Gelder, each of whom he had asked to write essays. This volume, which includes a representative ensemble of images and objects that are part of Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum, follows as closely as possible the instructions given by the artist and is the first substantial scholarly analysis of this impressive project. The volume also includes draft text materials written by the artist himself, as well as selections from the multitude of unpublished interviews, public debates, and lectures that Allan Sekula delivered between 2010 and 2012. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).Contributors: Jürgen Bock (Maumaus), Gail Day (University of Leeds), Bart De Baere (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen),Steve Edwards (Open University), Allan Sekula† (California Institute of the Arts), Sally Stein (University of California, Irvine), Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths), Hilde Van Gelder (KU Leuven)

The operative role of the photographic media in making and remaking history. History is increasingly made in images, not only because its records are largely photographic but also because our ideas about the past are formed in visual terms. This book offers a discussion of contemporary art practices which question the received notions of historical representations after the pivotal changes of 1989 in Europe. These art practices reveal, in different ways, the operative role of the photographic media in making and remaking history. Not limited to a particular artistic medium, they demonstrate how history is forged through enacting or re-enacting its past forms, while, on the other hand, they indicate how copying and quoting can contribute to creating a new, operative aesthetics. By foregrounding a performative character of images, art is shown to construct an alternative knowledge of the past. Among others the works of the following artists are discussed in this book: Zofia Kulik, Yael Bartana, Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujic, Luc Tuymans, Dierk Schmidt. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Mapping the possibilities of photofilmic images. This book explores the different ways in which art, cinema, and other forms of visual culture respond to a digitized and networked world. Traditional discourses on medium specificity, developed in distinct disciplines, often fail to provide an adequate description of the transformations that photography and film have undergone. The essays, written by internationally renowned scholars, encompass a broad range of different media such as video, documentary film, cinema, photography, and the Internet, as well as different disciplines such as art history, film studies, photography theory, visual culture studies, and media theory. In this way they deal with various practices or techniques ranging from panoramas, drone surveillance, tableau vivant, press coverage, computer-based editing, digitized financial markets, and various concepts such as temporality and contemporaneity, eco-aesthetics and forensic practice, countervisuality, human rights and political imagination, social transparency and control, thus mapping the possibilities of the continuous border-crossing movement between photographic and filmic images within contemporary art and visual culture. This volume also contains, as an artist’s contribution, a substantial and richly illustrated interview with Eric Baudelaire. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content). Contributors: Eric Baudelaire (Paris), Brianne Cohen (Amherst College), Stefanie Diekmann (University of Hildesheim), Evgenia Giannouri (Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle), Lilian Haberer (University of Cologne), Jana J. Haeckel (UCL), Ágnes Pethö (Sapientia University of Transylvania, Romania), Eivind Rossaak (National Library of Norway), Linda Schädler (ETH Zurich), Terry Smith (University of Pittsburgh), Alexander Streitberger (UCL), Hilde Van Gelder (KU Leuven).

The role of photography in Belgian visual art. ‘Conceptual, Surrealist, Pictorial’ is the first in-depth study of the use of photography by Belgian artists from the 1960s until the early 1990s. During these three decades, photography generally underwent a major evolution with regard to its status as a gallery-focused fine art practice. Liesbeth Decan explores ten representative case studies, which are contextualized within and compared with contemporary international artistic trends. Successively, she addresses the pioneering use of photography within Conceptual art (represented by Marcel Broodthaers, Jacques Charlier, and Jef Geys), the heyday of Photoconceptualism in Belgium (represented by Jacques Lennep, Jacques Lizène, Philippe Van Snick, and Danny Matthys), and the transition from a conceptual use of photography towards a more pictorial, tableau-like approach of the medium (represented by Jan Vercruysse, Ria Pacquée, and Dirk Braeckman). Ultimately, the selected case studies reveal that photo-based art in Belgium appears to be characterized by a unique uniting of elements particularly from Conceptual art, Surrealism, and the pictorial tradition. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

In-depth analysis of Victor Burgin’s video installation Parzival (2013). In commemoration of the destruction of the University Library of Leuven (Belgium) in August 1914, the projection work Parzival, created by Victor Burgin (°UK, 1941) in 2013, was installed within the rebuilt Library. The installation uniquely marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, which left its profound traces on both the consciousness and physiognomy of the city of Leuven. Parzival is a montage piece combining digital images of ruins and bombed out cities with audio-visual and literary material that references, amongst other works, Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal (premiere in 1882), Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and Milan Kundera’s novel Identity (1998). This publication provides an in-depth analysis of Parzival, a work that is inspired by the period of seven months that Wagner spent in Venice (1858-1859). Burgin’s Parzival raises questions about some of the most fundamental elements in Wagner’s operatic work: the longing for a savior, the complex connection between violence and catharsis, and the presentiment that destruction awaits humanity in the future (Götterdämmerung). In an associative manner, Parzival brings together various artistic and political features to confront the romantic ideal of the ruin with the horrors that might result from such a myth. In addition, this book contains a reprint of Michel Foucault’s essay “The Imagination of the Nineteenth Century” (1980). This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).Contributors: Geert Bouckaert (KU Leuven), Victor Burgin (University of California, University of London, University of Southampton), Alexander Streitberger (Université catholique de Louvain), Stéphane Symons (KU Leuven), Hilde Van Gelder (KU Leuven)

The 'Dusseldorf School' has become a household name in the art world for one of the most successful and influential strains of modern photography. Coined in the late 1980s, the name refers mainly to the pioneer group of students of the late Bernd Becher, who in 1976 became the first professor for creative photography at a German arts academy. His students included Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Axel Hutte, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, all of them today internationally acclaimed artists in their own right. Whereas 'Dusseldorf School' initially was used as a handy term for a group of artists with the same university's background, it quickly turned into a powerful brand name both in critical and commercial contexts. Despite its welcomed impact on the art scene, the members of the 'School' felt rather ambiguous about their perception as a group which turned them into stars but simultaneously risked levelling individual profiles and differences. What exactly connects and distinguishes them aesthetically is for the first time thoroughly explored in Maren Polte's pioneering study.

Despite our stereotypical ideas on photographic images as a snapshots (slices of time), photography is fundamentally a time-based medium. The relationships between photography and time are manifold: time can be directly represented within the image, it can be its theme and philosophical horizon, but it can also represent the global framework in which photographic practices develop and change through time. It is the ambition of this book to bring together the various aspect of time in photography as well as of photography in time, and to illustrate them in a series of case studies that focus on seminal authors (e.g. Fox Talbot, Victor Burgin, Robert Morris) and genres (e.g. spirit photography, montage photobooks and tableau photography), with examples ranging from the very first photographic pictures to the most recent cross-medial uses of photography in and outside art. Given the multifaceted dimensions of the notion of time, the book fosters an interdisciplinary approach, gathering essays by photohistorians as well as by authors with a critical or philosophical background. It foregrounds also reading methods of photography that are indebted to fields that have a great expertise in analyzing time such as narratology and literature. Written by international specialists for a non-specialist audience and displaying extraordinary breadth and erudition, this book reshapes our vision of photography in order to include many crucial yet overlooked aspects of time, culture and art.This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content)

The Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region, bordering on Belgium, is part of northern Europe's historical centre of heavy industry, which extends as far as the Ruhr area in Germany. With the end of coal mining in the 1980s, the Lille region transitioned to new economic activities, particularly within the cultural and creative industries, taking advantage of its strategic location midway between Paris, London and Brussels. After de-industrialisation and the 1984 opening of the Lewarde Mining Museum--the first institution of its kind in France--the region took part in industrial heritage campaigns modelled on the Ruhr industrial region. Various historical sites in coal-mining areas in this region and in Belgium were classified as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in 2012. Renaissance (2014) presents a photographic analysis of the epochal transition from industry to culture and leisure economies and is organised around eight groups of a varying numbers of photographs. It sheds a light on the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region's place in the European historyof the capitalist nation-state.The artist Jorge Ribalta offers a contribution to the critique on the myths and utopian promises of cultural economies. His photographic work interrogates the correspondence between the decline of industrial economies in Europe and the crisis of the middle class.

New perspectives on humor within photographyDespite the ubiquitous presence of photographic humor in art and popular media, the phenomenon has as yet received very little scholarly attention. Focusing on staged humor rather than on comic effects of snapshot photography, this volume brings together leading scholars in the field addressing humor performed in front of the camera, often specifically created for the camera, and the performative joke-work done by the medium itself. A first section explores how photography, due to its “shattering” qualities, turns into a privileged medium for eliciting humorous effects and how humor can be discerned within the photographic event. A second section discusses the toolbox of photographic trickery (photomontage, double exposure and cinematic movement) that allows photography to mock itself. The book closes with a section on photographic wit in conceptual art, both in canonized and more locally distinct practices.With artists’ pages from Paulien Oltheten, Lieven Segers and David HelbichThis publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).Contributors: Kevin Atherton (National College of Art and Design, Dublin), Anna Corrigan and Susana S. Martins (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), Hilde D’haeyere (KASK School of Arts of University College Ghent), Heather Diack (University of Miami), Louis Kaplan (University of Toronto), Ann Kristin Krahn (Braunschweig University of the Arts), Sandra Križić Roban (Institute of Art History, Zagreb), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck University of London), Johan Pas (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp), Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

"Disassembled" Images takes as a point of departure Allan Sekula's productive approach of disassembling elements in order to reassemble them in alternative constellations. Some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as human labor in a globalized economy or the claim for radical democracy, are recurrent themes in Sekula's oeuvre and are investigated by a wide range of experts in this book. Addressing a variety of artworks, both by Sekula and other artists, the collected essays focus on three crucial aspects within recent politically engaged art: collecting as a tool for representing folly and madness, the confrontation of the maritime space of ecological disasters and geopolitical processes with alternative models of solidarity, and what Sekula named "critical realism" as a reflective method in search of new social agencies and creative freedom. A text-image portfolio by Marco Poloni completes this profound reflection on Sekula's influential legacy within contemporary visual art.This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer Review Content).Contributors: Anthony Abiragi (University of Colorado), Barbara Baert (KU Leuven), Edwin Carels (School of Arts KASK/HoGent/M HKA), Ronnie Close (American University in Cairo), Bart De Baere (M HKA), Stefanie Diekmann (Hildesheim University), Carles Guerra (Fundacio Antoni Tapies), Clara Masnatta (ICI Berlin), W. J. T. Mitchell (University of Chicago), Marco Poloni (Berlin), Anja Isabel Schneider (KU Leuven/ M HKA), Stephanie Schwartz (University College London), Jonathan Stafford (Nottingham Trent University), Alexander Streitberger (UC Louvain), Hilde Van Gelder (KU Leuven), Benjamin Young (Parsons School of Design)

The first transnational history of photography’s accommodation in the art museumPhotography was long regarded as a “middle-brow” art by the art institution. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, it became the hot, global art of our time. In this book—part institutional history, part account of shifting photographic theories and practices—Alexandra Moschovi tells the story of photography’s accommodation in and as contemporary art in the art museum. Archival research of key exhibitions and the contrasting collecting policies of MoMA, Tate, the Guggenheim, the V&A, and the Centre Pompidou offer new insights into how art as photography and photography as art have been collected and exhibited since the 1930s. Moschovi argues that this accommodation not only changed photography’s status in art, culture, and society, but also played a significant role in the rebranding of the art museum as a cultural and social site. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Comprehensive overview of a highly influential contemporary artist’s workVictor Burgin counts among the most versatile figures within art and visual culture since the late 1960s. His artwork both connects with and reacts to minimalism, conceptual art, staged photography, appropriation art, video art and, more recently, computer-based imaging. As a scholar his thinking is informed by phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis.This monograph provides a comprehensive and unique overview of Victor Burgin’s body of work over the past five decades. Identifying the concept of ‘psychical realism’ as an overarching umbrella term, Alexander Streitberger traces back the artist’s parallel unfolding of practice and theory, while situating this process within various historical contexts and critical debates. Five chapters link insightful case studies to key issues such as conceptual art and situational aesthetics, the relationship between representation and politics, postmodernist concepts of space, and the digital environment of media images. The book is richly illustrated and includes a sequence from the major work Dear Urania (2016) especially designed by the artist for this book.This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Imagine a world in which each individual has a fundamental right to be reborn. This idle dream haunts Hilde Van Gelder's associative travelogue that takes Allan Sekula's sequence Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996/1998) as a touchstone for a dialogue with more recent artworks zooming in on the borderscape near the Channel Tunnel, such as those by Sylvain George and Bruno Serralongue.Combining ethnography, visual materials, political philosophy, cultural geography, and critical analysis, Ground Sea proceeds through an innovative methodological approach. Inspired by the meandering writings of W.G. Sebald, Javier Marias, and Roland Barthes, Van Gelder develops a style both interdisciplinary and personal.Resolutely opting for an aquatic perspective, Ground Sea offers a powerful meditation on the indifference of an increasingly divided European Union with regard to considerable numbers of persons on the move, who find themselves stranded close to Calais. The contested Strait of Dover becomes a microcosm where our present global challenges of migration, climate change, human rights, and neoliberal surveillance technology converge.

From its invention to the internet age, photography has been considered universal, pervasive, and omnipresent. This anthology of essays posits how the question of when photography came to be everywhere shapes our understanding of all manner of photographic media. Whether looking at a portrait image on the polished silver surface of the daguerreotype, or a viral image on the reflective glass of the smartphone, the experience of looking at photographs and thinking with photography is inseparable from the idea of ubiquity--that is, the apparent ability to be everywhere at once. While photography's distribution across cultures today is undeniable, the insidious logics and pervasive myths that have governed its spread demand our critical attention, now more than ever.Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project MuseContributors: Kate Palmer Albers (Whittier College), Ariella Aisha Azoulay (Brown University), Maura Coughlin (Bryant University), Niharika Dinkar (Boise State University), Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool), Jacob W. Lewis (University of Rochester), Mohammadreza Mirzaei (University of California, Santa Barbara), Joseph Moore (independent artist), Derek Conrad Murray (University of California, Santa Cruz), Kyle Parry (University of California, Santa Cruz), Annie Rudd (University of Calgary), Mette Sandbye (University of Copenhagen), Catherine Zuromskis (Rochester Institute of Technology)

This compelling publication traces the broad arc of photography's development in France from the 1970s to the present day. A decade-by-decade account reveals unexpected points of convergence between practices that are not usually considered in a comparative perspective. These include photographic practices in contemporary art, documentary, photojournalism, and fashion. Author Olga Smith sets these practices in dialogue with French philosophy - the writings of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Ranciere - to produce an innovative study of the intersections between the photographic image, text, practice, and theory. This analysis is guided by an understanding of photography as deeply engaged with historical, cultural, and intellectual events that defined French national experience in the contemporary period. Landscape provides a particular focus to study issues of key significance, including national identification, colonial past, legacies of modernization and environmental breakdown.