[ 1 | 2 | 3 ]

To an ever-increasing extent, applied photography is making use of urban space as a surface on which to project images. These are dedicated to the advertising of products of one kind or another, but while image files individually will contain logos embodying objects or signs, collectively they have the effect of transforming numerous locations into aesthetically configured surfaces.

In the project SIGHT.SEEING however the methods of art photography will be used in an intensive exploration, on many levels, of the urban environment, which will figure as something more than a carrier of images. This exploration is to result in the production of enlarged "picture postcards" depicting the body of a city, into which they will be integrated by the manner in which they are displayed. Within these general aims the Triennial will concentrate on two particularly significant and topical approaches. The first of these, which observes the city as a complex organism whose elements ( architectural, socio-(multi)-cultural, social and aesthetic) are linked by more or less functioning articulations, proposes that while the study of urban space, like sightseeing, is an externally introduced

 

activity, its portrayal should take place first and foremost within its own physical and societal setting, and at the same time in the print media and in virtual space.
This leads directly to the second, and equally relevant, approach, which is concerned with the photographic image as an artistic form of "pictographic writing in space". Ever since the invention of photography, the basic constant at the centre of various medium-related theories of what is required to make a photograph, as distinct from, say, a painting, has been the fact that there is a camera lens pointing at something and that this Something is the subject of the photograph. Today there is an ongoing, strongly committed discussion centring on this specific "indexical presupposition" - that there is a connection to a referent, in other words that the photograph has a subject - and on the other specific characteristics which photography as a medium of creative art shares with photography as a medium of everyday depiction. In art today - and this applies to still photography as well as to video - there is an increased concern with the complex character, and the economic and social determinants,
>> more