Hybrid Photography: Intermedial Practice in Science and Humanities

Description

With the advent of photography, images became the object of scholarly research in a new way. The collective singular term photography encapsulated a peculiar hybridity from the very beginning, deriving from a variety of manual and visual techniques that were transferred to the medium. Traditional forms of portrayal remained part of it, just as much as technical innovation that stoked expectations of hitherto unimagined images and insights. Hence, since its origins with N.Niepce, W.H.F Talbot and L.J.M Daguerre, photography has exploited other reproductive techniques or has been judged by their standards, for example through the use of typographic media, materials and processes or comparing the system of grey scale reproduction to that of graphic reproduction. Against this background, the supposedly easy-to-define, technological reproduction method that is photography turns out to be surprisingly heterogenous in the way it is concretely practised, both with regard to the production processes of the different techniques and the appearance of pictures generated in this fashion, and finally the circulation and use of these images as media of discovery and proof. This realisation demonstrates that in photography, the individual details of the technical process are just as important as the respective use of the pictures. The ability ascribed to photography to represent reality regardless of the inadequacies of the human hand turns out to be empirically dubious. For the establishment of an understanding of photography as a hybrid, in which the photographic is not an ontological core that was changed, contaminated or, in the worst case, falsified by non-photographic practices. That photography is a hybrid is, in fact, regarded as its necessary condition- at least in its scientific use in chains of representation or montage. Hence, the authors of the volume examine the thesis that significance constitutes itself from the scientific use of photography, when assigned to a certain context.

Sara Hillnhutter was appointed research and teaching assistant in Art History at the Humboldt University Berlin in 2012, and has been a member of the post-graduate colloquium The Photographic Dispositif at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2013. She is part of the DFG (German Research Society) network Naturalizing the Transcendental. Epistemic conditions and appearances of the so-called Modern Era in science, literature and art around 1900. She co-edited Glossary of Inflationary Terms (nGbK Berlin, 2013), a reflection on processes of dislimitation within art and work contexts. After studying in Berlin, New York City, and Madrid she worked in 2008 as project coordinator for fine arts at the Goethe Institute Mexico City. Stefanie Klamm is academic collaborator at the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Her research centers on the history of archaeological practice, museums, and heritage studies as well as on visualization practices in the sciences and humanities; she is particularly interested in photography's relation to other media, photographic materiality, and photo archives. Her most recent book focused on the role of the visual in archaeology: Bilder des Vergangenen. Visualisierung in der Archaologie im 19. Jahrhundert: Fotografie - Zeichnung - Abguss (Gebr. Mann, 2017). Friedrich Tietjen has taught History and Theory of Photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, History of Contemporary and Modern Art at the University of Vienna and at numerous other universities and academies. He has curated numerous exhibitions on topics such as Private Photography in Austria 1930-1950 (Vienna), Photography and Death (Berlin), and Art Editions (Graz). Together with Maria Gourieva he is the founder and co-organizer of After Post-Photography, an annual conference at the European University in St Petersburg/Russia. His numerous publications address mainly topics from the field of photography along with essays on fashion, design and film, many of which can be found at https://univie.academia.edu/FriedrichTietjen