It is perhaps not too much of an overstatement to describe photography as a quintessential practice of life. Indeed, over the last few decades photography has become so ubiquitous that our very sense of existence is shaped by it.
While photography used to be something that others – professionals equipped with large machines that allowed them to capture a better image of the world out there, advertisers trying to sell us chunks of that world, photojournalists dispatched to the world’s remote corners that few of us could regularly access – did, some have suggested that, in the age of the camera phone and wireless communication, we are all photographers now. Yet we are all not just photographers today: we have also become distributors, archivists and curators of the ‘image’. As Victor Burgin aptly points out, ‘the most revolutionary event in the recent history of photography is not the arrival of digital cameras as such, but rather the broadband connection of these cameras to the Internet – in effect turning every photograph on the Web into a potential frame in a boundless film’.
The Photomediations: An Open Book project takes off from these recent developments around the technology of photography and around different ways of theorising photography as a diverse practice that not only changes ‘everything’ but that also undergoes constant change. Responding to the inadequacy of the rigid formulations and categories through which photography has been perceived and approached, it proposes instead that it may be time to transform radically, rather than just expand, the very notion of photography. The concept of photomediations is therefore offered as a richer and more potent conceptual alternative aiming to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today, as well as its kinship with other media – and also, with us as media.
The creative works we are looking to engage, connect and share here we hope will challenge the melancholy tone of photography past, as proposed by Roland Barthes in the now classic Camera Lucida. And better still, they should, in the words of Catalan photographer and writer Joan Fontcuberta, be ‘exclamations of vitality’.
Enjoy your creating!
You can read and learn more about the Photomediations: Open Book here, or explore aspects of Photomediations through articles, papers, case studies, and artist profiles via the generator below:
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