Book Launch
Moderated by Steffen Siegel, with: Martha Rosler and
The desire to renew and repoliticise documentary practices was a central motivation behind the publication image/con/text: Documentary Practices between Journalism, Art and Activism. How can – or should – the effect of images be enhanced? What possibilities currently exist to subvert the stereotyping and traditional viewing habits of classical documentary photography and its narrative forms? Prof. Steffen Siegel, the artist Martha Rosler, the photographer Edmund Clark and the art historian Prof. Susanne von Falkenhausen will explore these and other questions.
The discussion will focus especially on instances where journalism, art and activism overlap, spanning an arc from Martha Rosler’s pioneering work in the 1970s to current projects examined in the publication. The latter build on complementarity of sources and diversity of perspectives. How do they generate legibility? Does the deliberate generation of context succeed in negating the idea of a perfect correspondence between the object itself and the represented excerpt of reality? And can it properly account for the complexity of the real world?
