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June 2012

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Jun 26 | By Joerg Colberg

Meditations on Photographs: Frederick Lennart Bentley by Martin Roemers

“The face,” Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is supposed to have said, “is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter” (“Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi”), and we know this as “the eyes are the window to the soul.” Scientists, oddly, seem to agree. And this is all fine, except that we have a problem here. What about the blind? Ordinarily, I don’t take those kinds of expressions for more than what they are. In particular, I try to avoid them in my writing, fighting my own hopeless war against cliché (in all likelihood a much paler version of the original one). But I saw this particular photography, a portrait of Frederick Lennart Bentley, taken by Martin Roemers and part of his The Eyes of War (which I reviewed here), and that’s the first thing that came to my mind (which, apparently and much to my consternation, is quite content with cliché). Click on the image on the side to see it fill your screen. (more)
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Jun 20 | By Joerg Colberg

The digital revolution has not happened (yet?)

The last thing anyone needs is rehashing the old debate about analog and digital in photography. I never found that discussion so interesting in the first place. I am perfectly comfortable with both analog and digital photography. Cameras are tools, and I’m personally not necessarily interested in talking about tools. That said, this might be too simplistic a description of my view. So let me try that again. (more)
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Jun 12 | By Joerg Colberg

Photography After Photography? (A Provocation)

Photography liberated painting from the existential burden to depict. With the advent of photography, painting was finally able to move sideways and forward, blossoming in all kinds of directions. Who - or what - is going to do that for photography? (more)
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Jun 6 | By Joerg Colberg

Photography and Memory (part 2)

OK. Photography is memory. Photography is a construct, just like our memory. Photography is a great tool to serve our purpose of constructing our memory. We’re our own propagandists who, just like all propagandists, know that what we’re saying is not necessarily true. But what matters is that we make ourselves believe it is true. Or rather we treat our memories just like we treat announcements in advertizing that always come with the asterisk and all the fine print. We know that “certain restrictions apply.” But photography allows us to try to make those restrictions go away, or at least to reduce the amount of exceptions. (more)
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