SYMPOSION ÜBER FOTOGRAFIE XV

With the Symposium on Photography, a forum of discussion that has taken place annually since 1979 as part of the styrian autumn festival and the results of which have been published in CAMERA AUSTRIA, our preoccupation with the cultural, artistic and social effects of the medium of photograhy has been placed in the context of contemporary theoretical debate. This has been an important consideration in choosing the symposium themes: In looking at artistic and theoretical issues and their general social relevance, we express our regard for a specifically photographic knowledge while constantly redefining the horizon of a debate on “art photography”.
In our culture, the Archive – this was the theme of the 15th Symposium on Photography – has been a concept of central importance. As Foucault has pointed out, it is the institutions that accumulate and administrate information and knowledge who also define the structures of power. The normative systems of order created in such institutions (in museums and libraries) shape our relation to the world. The medium of photography inscribes itself into the archive by virtue of its property of quasi doubling and replacing reality, as Herta Wolf demonstrates in her contribution. Photography has always been both means and object of catalogueing and controlling as well as an instrument of measuring and administrating the body. Roberta McGrath describes the parallels between views of the (female) body in medicine and in 19th century curiosity cabinets. In an attempt to confront the repressed social and political history of photography via the predominant history of photography as art, she refers us back to a time when “photography’s claim to both scientific truth and artistic metaphor ( … ) inhabited the same universe”.
If activities associated with the archive – recording, collecting, storing, organising, comparing and administrating information are included in a context of artistic practice, we see a variety of artistic methods some of which have been documented in the contributions to this issue.
Peter Roehr’s method is characterised by the repetition and seriality of Minimal Art and its reference to aesthetic standards of Pop Art. Hans–Peter Feldmann’s use of the archive offers at least two alternatives: The utilization of an unlimited stock of photographic images forming a universe of available visual Ready–mades and the photographic fixation of objects, as in “All of a Woman’s Clothes”, whose meaning reveals itself only to the collector. The methods of David Goldblatt and Jindrich Streit, to name only two examples, are documentary and correspond to the theme of their interest: To photographically record, over years, their own environment, making visible social change.
We thank the management of styrian autumn for financing the Symposium on Photography 1994. Unfortunately it was decided not to continue the series of Symposia this year so that our numerous “regulars” will have to be content to wait until the year to come. We thank all the authors for their collaboration in this double issue of CAMERA AUSTRIA and particularly the participants in the Symposium on Photography for editing their papers in time for publication.

Christine Frisinghelli, July 1995