| Description |
Contents:
Interview
Paradigm Shift
Thomas Struth interviewed by Mark Prince
Thomas Struth is part of a celebrated generation of German photographers taught by the likes of Bernd Becher and Gerhard Richter. Struth's detached photographic gaze wrestles with the significance of the subjects he documents. Here he discusses visual overload, the psychology of images and why three months in Naples changed his life.
'As a primary-school child I was surrounded by this atmosphere of destruction. You didn't see much actual destruction, but you saw few old buildings. It was a view of disrupted history.'
Feature
Into the Vortex
Christopher Townsend on the virtues of misanthropy
Despite the best efforts of art historians who work to enliven the past by showing its relevance to the present, the Vorticists remain deeply unfashionable. While the group's bad manners and dodgy politics are difficult to stomach, couldn't we borrow some of the group's intractable contempt and apply it to our own philistine government?
'Let's borrow some of Blast's sardonic humour, its sarcasm, its contempt. Let's blast George Osborne and his cronies, let's bless the students who occupied London Metropolitan University.'
Feature
Photography as Work
Stephanie Schwartz questions the utopian potential of digital photography
Photo-sharing websites like Flickr and citizen-photojournalist agencies like Demotix are frequently hailed as a democratisation of documentary photography. Add in Twitter's role in the Arab Spring uprisings and some commentators are hailing the revolutionary potential of new media. But – when compared to the interwar Worker-Photography Movement, which treated photography as revolutionary labour – doesn't indymedia's Web 2.0 strategy simply democratise capitalism, allowing a mass of amateurs to feed corporate media giants?
'The issue of access to technology aside, has the emergence and subsequent fetishisation of digital photography effaced the very claims of realism upon which the promise of the photograph's revolutionary potential was based?' |