Research: Post-photography. Apparatus, Images, Practices in Art and Everyday Culture

This project contributes to research on photographic practices in the context of digitization, data flow, and networked images in everyday communication, the entertainment industry, and art.

Attempts at defining the essence of post-photography with reference to the end of photography, have added little to the understanding of the medium. It seems more rewarding to research the contexts and conditions under which meaning is produced after the end of traditional concepts of the apparatus, image, and image-making, and to rely on a wider notion of the seeing machine as opposed to the traditional camera apparatus.

The project members start from the assumption that post-photography can only be adequately described as a phenomenon created by a network of human and non-human actors, visual economies, and aesthetic paradigms. They focus on research on image practices which have rarely been made the object of scholarly attention. They aim at relating aspects of everyday practices, entertainment industry, and art hitherto normally considered individually.

Some of the key questions of the project are: Which are the photographic paradigms that feed the use of digital seeing machines in and beyond art; how is post-photography to be described so that this description adequately includes strategies and practices in and beyond art; how are relations between the image, the apparatus, and practices to be described? Our analysis includes mobile communication devices, video gaming, artistic appropriations of immersive media technologies and visual phenomena that are not photographs in a traditional sense.

The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF).
2018 – 2021