Photography

While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take photos in computer games, interpolate them in extended reality platforms, or synthesize them via artificial intelligence. To account for the most recent shifts in conceptualizations of photography, this book proposes the term virtual photography as a binding theoretical framework, defined as a photography that retains the efficiency and function of real photography (made with or without a camera) while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or noncustomary form.

Hysteria, a mysterious disease known since antiquity, is said to have ceased to exist. Challenging this commonly held view, this is the first cross-disciplinary study to examine the current functional neuroimaging research into hysteria and compare it to the nineteenth-century image-based research into the same disorder. Paula Muhr's central argument is that, both in the nineteenth-century and the current neurobiological research on hysteria, images have enabled researchers to generate new medical insights. Through detailed case studies, Muhr traces how different images, from photography to functional brain scans, have reshaped the historically situated medical understanding of this disorder that defies the mind-body dualism.

Northern landscapes are both real places and representations, imagined spaces – notions which are bound to collide in landscape photography. In this book, photographers, academics, curators, and archivists from Germany, Finland, Scandinavia, the US, and the UK address urgent questions about environmental degradation, globalization, consumerism, and the role of new technologies of representation in relation to landscape. Wide-ranging case studies examine the interpretation, experience, and appropriation of landscape in northern Europe, northern England, Scotland, and the Nordic countries. The book explores tensions in landscape photography between an emphasis on proximity and the embodied experience of place and space, and an advocacy of distance and critical engagement and a questioning of the primacy of direct experience.

How to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to deal with the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwärzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of view of media analysis as well as from sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The topics range from a new reading of Thomas Struth's street photographs to CERN photos with their charged rhetoric, from the assault of photographic close-ups to speculations on an anonymous slide collection featuring a woman with an ever-present white handbag. The book is intended for an audience receptive to the analytical appeal of images, prepared to go beyond what can be taken at face value.

According to Walter Benjamin, the past that is not recognized by the present threatens to disappear irretrievably. As a consequence, photographs cannot save the moment from oblivion by pure depiction alone, but only by keeping the depicted moment actual at every present moment.
Instead of counting on the documentary quality of photography that speaks in the past tense of "what has been", Silke Helmerdig suggests a different approach to photography: an extension of a future subjunctive (photographic) tense speaking of "what could be, if", allowing one to think possible futures instead of harking back to the past.

These essays confirm the continued relevance of 'north' as a site of cultural practice and artistic endeavour. If northern regions are tangible realities, the place of varied topography, light, climate, and biogeography, the location of distinct peoples and culture, typically they have been depicted through the traditions of northern landscape representation and the cultural narratives of an era. These discussions – focusing on Scotland, Northern England, Northern Europe, Siberia, the Arctic and Nordic lands – by photographic practitioners as well as theorists, explore and question this tradition, considering landscape as experience, reinterpreting notions of wilderness, emptiness and the sublime.

In Digital Image Systems, Claus Gunti examines the antagonizing reactions to digital technologies in photography. While Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Jörg Sasse have gradually adopted digital imaging tools in the early 1990s, other photographers from the Düsseldorf School have remained faithful to film-based technologies. By evaluating the aesthetic and discursive preconditions of this situation and by extensively analyzing the digital work of these three photographers, this book shows that the digital turn in photography was anticipated by the conceptualization of images within systems, and thus offers new perspectives for understanding the »digital revolution«.