Symposion Übber Fotografie XVIII: Agents and Agencies

In this double issue we are presenting the contributions to last year’s SYMPOSIUM ON PHOTOGRAPHY that began by questioning the role of photographic image production in the construction of “Agents and Agencies”, a pair of concepts used to describe or designate (individual and collective) instances of social authorships that has assumed a key role in recent debates. In keeping with the underlying intention of the SYMPOSIUM ON PHOTOGRAPHY, the lectures and debates again attempt to lead us out of the tight field of reference of “artistic photography”, rather viewing it in the scope of a general discourse on culture and media, the public sphere, and the public representation of social interests.
The theoretical contributions – for example by GEOFFREY BATCHEN, TIMOTHY DRUCKREY and DOUGLAS FOGLE, CHRISTIAN HÖLLER and SUSANNE LUMMERDING – focus on clarifying fundamental shifts in the constitution of photography, as are both caused and indicated by developments in media technology. By comparing photogenics and digital photography, Geoffrey Batchen analyses the complicated “identity” of photography. Timothy Druckrey explores the problem of a “fetishist appetite for visibility” and unmasks representation as advertising in a case study. Douglas Fogle outlines a “genealogy” of conceptual photographic positions and presents the works of a number of artists. In his contribution, Christian Höller establishes the eminent “invocatory nature” of media images as an action-orienting and generating apparatus, and discusses W. J. T. Mitchell’s “Pictorial Turn”. Susanne Lummerding makes critical reference to notions of a “view regime” that would seem to lay down the possibilities of all visual representation. YVE LOMAX’s contribution, in the form of a philosophical dialogue with Gilles Deleuze and Spinoza, is centred on causality, manifolds, immanence and exmanence – i.e. on the fundamental constitution of Being and on how it can actually enable something like an “ability to act”.
The artistic contributions – by SAM SAMORE, BEAT STREULI, MITRA TABRIZIAN and RICARDO ZULUETA – we feel, present artistic strategies interlocked with the thematic framework of the “ability to act” when – as in Beat Streuli’s projects – the focus is on returning representations of individuals to the public sphere, or – as in Ricardo Zulueta’s work – on quasi-sociological experiments with participating actors illustrating the “overvaluation of signifiers”. In his “Scenarios” and “Allegories of Beauty (Incomplete)”, Sam Samore creates series of pictures into which “we project idiosyncratic stories from our own subjective fount of history”, while Mitra Tabrizian’s “Minimal Utopia” work refers directly to post-modern contexts of the individual, constructing a city that is populated both by individuals and replicators, and by merit of this very fact promotes the question as to the subject and its ability to act.
Finally, ROLF SACHSSE continues the series of “Marginalia on Federal German photography” in this issue, this time focusing on the linguistic or non-linguistic nature of photography.
We hope that this issue will again provide a wide range of interesting insights into contemporary photography. It is with special pleasure that we would like to congratulate Inge Morath, a long-standing friend and one of the few internationally renowned Austrian artists, on her 75th birthday.

Manfred Willmann
Reinhard Braun
July 1998