Suchergebnisse

Reclaim (Intervening against published Press Photos)As part of their participative community project "Hotel Gelem", artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud started a collaboration with Roma families in Berlin. The families were invited to design the edition for this FKW issue. "Reclaim" explores collective authorship as a means of protection against vulnerability and as a strategy to intervene into extrinsic images of self as they are determined by hegemonic representational politics and visual practices.

Visual Migrations – the Movement of Images between Times, Media and Cultures"Visual Migrations" focuses on the interface and interferences between discourses on migration and discourses on images. The issue, thus, links two current debates that so far have been discussed separately: the visual representation of migrants and migration as it has gained growing importance in the political and social sciences, on the one hand, and, on the other, the migration of images that constitutes a central topic in contemporary image sciences. In different ways, both discourses correspond to the political and economic changes since the early 1990s, to notions of globalization and to the enforcement of digital technologies, computer and Internet. They share metaphors of description like "flow" or "flood" – of data, of images, of people – indicating a powerful functioning of the system or its threat and endangerment. The particular contributions to the issue explore how images of migrants and/or migration and migrations of images converge and interact. By way of focusing on the politics of representation as a giving-to-be-seen and taking the uses of images and their effects as analytical approach, they explicitly or implicitly critique W.J.T. Mitchell's notion of a pictorial turn as much as his differentiation between image circulation and image migration. Taking into account the concept of a (trans-)cultural image repertoire and the effectiveness of the unconscious as having a crucial impact on the particular choices of images, e.g. in processes of stereotyping or the naturalization of meanings, they explore image circulations as movements that cannot be stripped off (their) historical, cultural and medial dimensions and conditions.

Als ein zentrales Medium der visuellen Repräsentation von »Identität« hat die Fotografie in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten einen zunehmend wichtigen Platz auch in künstlerischen Projekten erhalten. Kerstin Brandes fragt nach Möglichkeiten einer emanzipatorischen visuellen Politik und zeigt, wie die Verknüpfung postkolonialer und feministischer Theorien mit Theorien der Fotografie neue Blickweisen auf die Bilder eröffnet.Künstlerische Arbeiten von Barbara Kruger, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson u.a. werden dabei nicht als zu analysierende Objekte, sondern als Herausforderung für ebendiese Theorien diskutiert. Der Band bietet zudem eine kritische Revision des gegenwärtigen fotografischen Diskurses.

Kerstin Brandes"Exotic Savages". Borderline Figures as a Symptom of Neoliberal Image Politics?In May and June 2006, an advertisement, published by Germany's large TV magazine HÖRZU as part of its latest campaign, caused vehement and widespread protest. It represented a white man in a business suit and a scantily clad African woman with a lip plate, combined with the campaign slogan: "at some point, one doesn't accept just anything". Opposing the protest, the Deutscher Werberat, the self-regulatory body of the German advertising industry, insisted that the poster represented an emancipated relationship between two consenting adults. This article discusses the controversial opinions regarding the sexist and racist nature of the advertisement. It argues that the black woman portrayed functions as a borderline figure, challenging the precarious crossroads of neoliberal claims of visual normalization and the conditions of anti-sexist/anti-racist critique in the field of vision. Exploring the various images of black femininity and representational types that the image evokes – from the female (black) beauty to the African tribal woman to the monstrous female – the article provides an analysis of the interaction between a Western/European/White collective visual memory and the history of the mutual production of beauty norms and racisms.

KERSTIN BRANDES / SIGRID ADORF: "By refusing to crystallise in any specific form"—Art, Visibility, Queer Theory: An IntroductionThis issue, entitled "By refusing to crystallise in any specific form"—Art, Visibility, Queer Theory, gathers contributions devoted to the question what queer theory on the one hand and (feminist) art history, visual culture, and media studies on the other have to offer one another. Although the question of visibility is central to both the politics of representation and the discourse of queer theory, which opposes normative definitions of the body and subjectivity, it is seldom tangibly related to the visual field. We hypothesise in this issue that the tools established by critical art history for analysing images within (their) specific contextualisations and areas of tension, such as the manifold interactions between historical images, viewers, and institutional frameworks, can crucially help extend queer theory's productive engagement with visual culture. Thus, at stake is not only a critical discourse on images, but also the political scope of action that images can provide themselves with, that is, whether and how images can be regarded as agents in the sense of agency and how they might become (artistically) usable.