PhotoLit - Theorie und Kritik

Text engl. - Nebeneintrag. - Nur Kurztitelaufnahme 01.2015.

Text engl. - „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.“ (Press release). - „The instruments constructed by Deüelle Lüski are, in the true sense of the word, iconoclastic. They shatter belief in the photographic image as the sacred product of the act of photographing. Deüelle Lüski’s instruments wage a guerrilla campaign against the single-focus gaze that looks from above, dominating, observing, watching, standing guard, the gaze that seeks to normalize and police the disrupted flow of life and to disguise the traces of the civil contract left in the photograph.” (Ariella Azoulay in The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, 2008).

Text engl. - Haupteintrag/ Main entry. - „The notion of the minor, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature (1975), is introduced and connected 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 affects 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.“ (Press release). The book consist of thre chapters of essays. The chapter are titled: 1. Towards a Theory of the Minor, 2. Major Artists - Minor Practice? 3. Surrealism in Variation.

Text engl. - Nebeneintrag.