NADJA ROTTNER

Miles Coolidge's Localized Rhetoric of Place

An ongoing reconciliation with traditional modes of veracious representation – the genre scenes of the interior and the street (the domain of the document since its historical debut in the 1920s) – has prompted a conceptual restructuring of a primarily topographically oriented generation of contemporary photographers. Canadian born, California resident Miles Coolidge belongs to a generation of photo-artists of the mid-1990s that expands upon the semantic possibilities of deadpan photography in a self-reflexive and critical analytical exploration of the medium; reinventing photography’s capacity as a mode of human communication and as a discourse anchored in concrete social relations. Coolidge’s practice tunes into a postmodern photography of difference that does not openly seek the political, but rather situates itself in the decline of a liberal capitalist worldview in an attempt to deconstruct scenarios of a petty-bourgeois dream world still acted out in the service of a contemporary global society of control. Played out is the self as commodity, the knowledge of fragmentation, the boredom and the routinization of labor in favor of a break with the entire development of a history of modern sovereignty.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 76/2001, pp. 3–15.

REINHARD BRAUN

Media, Images, Modes of Disciplining. Associative Interventions in Werner Kaligofsky's works

Thus, it seems that Werner Kaligofsky re-presents, translated into the medium of photography, various media discourses of a technical-visual “mapping” of realities as a simultaneous mapping of perception, consciousness and thus society as a whole. If we could still think in terms of the Enlightenment today, this undertaking could be described as a visualisation of certain specific media dispositifs, above all because the translation of film/television into photography entails a massive intervention into the respective base media, an intervention that always reaches beyond and intervenes via the temporal level of images. “The boundness of film time is cancelled in favour of the duration of a fragment. The suture of the image sequence is undone so as to direct attention to the individual picture and its elements, to ‘dull meaning’ (Roland Barthes).” (Werner Kaligofsky) “Dull meaning”, however, is what is not encountered in language, nor in symbols, nor in speech. “Dull meaning” is the signifier without the signified – like the figurative absence of the film-producers in Orson Welles.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 76/2001, pp. 16–26.

MARINA GRŽINIĆ

Perspectives of the body in (digital) photography: GORAN BERTOK, RAJKO BIZJAK, LUKA DEKLEVA, ECLIPSE, ZVONKA SIMČIČ, JANE ŠTRAVS

Considering the discourse of the body in photography, as it is represented in the work by these six authors from Slovenia, it is excellent to step in media(s) res and write about pain and sexuality, fluids and games, gentle gestures and obsessive fingerprints, radiography and the medium of photography. The six authors mentioned here represent the powerful new Slovenian generation – although, I do not care for generations and neither for national contextualisation. Instead, two questions are crucial here: What is the significance of their work for the medium of photography? And how did or how does their photography effect the body?

Why the obsession with the body anyway? The post-socialist photographer is not the pure artist but the quotidian butcher who took apart almost every-body. No part of the body resists the camera lens, no skin is safe, no vagina, no excrement, no pain or pleasure of the body, in the body, with the body. The post-socialist photographer does the post mortem / detail / of the body in parts: pain, seduction, hysteria, psychotic needs, turbulent sex, brutal love.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 76/2001, pp. 27–38.

FRANZ SCHUH

The world as a whole is out of focus: On Karø Goldt's Photography

THE WORLD AS A WHOLE IS OUT OF FOCUS
When I asked Karø Goldt the almost naively simple question as to why she practised photography, her reply was both astonishing and complicated. Photography, she said, served her as a means of making reality “more real”. My impression was that she perceived this maxim in even more radical terms for herself. It seemed to me as if her pictures were proof that reality actually exists, that – as venerable philosophy has it – something is and not nothing. The prevailing perception here suggests that we can “objectively” get on the track of the existence of reality by using a machine, a recording apparatus between oneself and reality: the machine does not aim to prove anything to itself, which is why – unlike us – it has probative force. The machine as a prosthesis of our self-assurance! Karø Goldt’s former painting could not achieve this; the subjective aspect interferes in painting too much. To me, there is a peculiar ambivalence to Goldt’s motive: on the one hand it has a legal aspect –the aim is to furnish proof. On the other hand, the aim is to make reality – that is on trial –”more real”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 76/2001, pp. 39–45.

LAURI FIRSTENBERG

The work of Touhami Ennadre

HUMAN FACE
Touhami Ennadre is invested in discovering how to work without conventions or prejudices in approaching a subject, without fabricating a false scenario, which is contrary to the operations of the photographic â€“ to fix, frame, construct, and categorize. At his mother’s funeral in 1975 at the onset of his career, Ennadre initiated his negotiation of the camera’s capacity to document the body in problematic ways. A photograph of his sister resting her head and arm on their mother’s grave remains one of the only conventional portraits in Ennadre’s Oeuvre.1 Negating the tendency of the camera to sensationalize, Ennadre did not represent subjects in mourning, but pictured them in tension and transformation. He avoided the face and the body as totalities and was able to communicate emotion in the image of a hand. Ennadre confesses “I must find the body in a state of paroxysm.” His mode of portraiture, or anti-portraiture serves to replace the recording of the human face. This tendency is most apparent in his notable series of meditations of nude backs, feet, and hands â€“ sculptural studies in skin and texture from India and Indonesia 1978. Remarkably spontaneous and unstaged, what appears to be highly rehearsed and constructed is actually the result of impromptu shooting with a hand-held camera, positioned in close proximity to his subjects. Ennadre reveals of his process, “…this allows me to capture the image directly, unmediated…”. The gaze of the photographer is not primary at the moment of apprehending the subject photographically, and the resulting image is subject to chance operations.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 76/2001, pp. 46–51.

ROLF SACHSSE

Netz - Haut - Bild

Text feature in Camera Austria International 76/2001, p. 68.