Bildfähig!

Enough time has passed to reconsider some of the photographs that Barack Obama released shortly after his inauguration this January. Many pictures the White House has released since the beginning of the presidency make us believe that photographers were personally invited to testify what ‘really’ happens, when the president or his family is unobserved.
Pete Souza, who made one of [...]

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This advertisement for a mobile phone attracted my attention a few days ago. The phone is not so much designed as a technological product but rather as a result of artistry - i. e. made  with similar artistry as a handmade attire. In distinction from other cell phones this one suggests to possess „aura“: clearly, [...]

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Among the crucial challenge of any ambitious expert in contemporary visual culture are decisions of how he will allow his thought on pictures be affected by the challenges of digital image technology, if he uses it for research. Content based image retrieval systems (see here, here and here), which have improved strongly over the years, [...]

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In a 1964 newspaper article titled La cuisine du sens, Roland Barthes developed his arguments from the assumption that we continuoulsy read objects in our surroundings such as pictures, clothing, advertisements, a dinner host’s favorite wine if not a popstar’s hair-style and equally all „second messages“ hidden in these „first messages“. Any ‚professional’ readers’ (which [...]

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The flickr group Cars, cars, cars has the astounding number of 4.865 members with over 80.000 pictures posted. Another group responsive to anybody’s passionate interest in shoes (i love shoes) still has 1.211 members and 3.803 photographs. flickr groups of this kind collect pictures showing but one specific object which is in many cases a [...]

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Two recent blogposts deal with pictures on flickr showing the contents of bags. On Core 77 hipstomp writes that looking at these pictures on flickr is an efficient way for a designer to know more about the uses of laptop bags and “see what people carried in theirs” and concludes: “ID Ethnographers need look no [...]

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If we consider the digital picture frame above, what obviously strikes us is how directly it imitates the looks of traditional photo-frames. In a similar way, people have started using computer screens with regular frames to mount them on the walls of their apartment (here or here).
The phenomenon that younger technologies imitate older technologies is [...]

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This pair of photographs found on flickr (here and here) is pointing at the principal condition of photography that at any given moment at any given location multiple photographs are possible. They underscore that photography never tells us „what really happened“ and provide a convincing visual critique of any realist approach towards photography. Assertions that [...]

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