I PHOTOCULTURE/PHOTOCULTURES

Marianna Michałowska

The image and its contexts – about methods of researching photoculture

Małgorzata Radkiewicz

Pioneers of photography at the beginning of XX century

Małgorzata Jankowska

Photography in unstructured movement. About the use of photography in interactive installations of the 1990s

Witold Kanicki

In between the museum and the white cube. Photography as exposition space

Katarzyna Kończal

Sense caught through the sight – in iconotexts by W.G. Sebald and J.S. Foer

Patrycja Cembrzyńska

Dead object of photography. Wax bodies

Jan Wasiewicz

Where do peasants fit within collective memory of modern Poles? Looking at a certain old photo

Marianna Michałowska, Magdalena Birkenmayer

Visual essay as an experimental form of cultural studies – about Magdalena Birkenmayer’s work

Piotr Grochowski

Selfie as photo-folklore genre and communication formula

II CULTURAL STUDIES WORKSHOP

Piotr Piskozub

In revenge we trust, or on the subject of ideology in Zero Dark Thirty

Artur Szarecki

From mass songs to corpo-anthems. Music, body and work in the context of power systems transformation

Przemysław Wiatr

Vilém Flusser – communicology

III CULTURE OBSERVATORY

Michał Starczewski, Lidia Stępińska-Ustasiak,

Open source or open science

IV REVIEWS

Patryk Szaj

Theory rules

Tomasz Misiak

(After)images and windows

Piotr Juskowiak

Political ontology of photography

Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski

Discourse goes where it wants

Justyna Budzik

In search of lost (?) original

V REPORTS

Bartosz Raducha

Who do we open science for? Report from Open Science Conference

The article deals with the meaning of cultural practice and photography theory. It pays special attention to the influence of photo technology on cultural change and the rise of diversified common interest communities (which I call photocultures) that focus on photography. These phenomena require the search for new research methods, which include the so-called visual as well as textual sphere and the sensory experience of both creators and recipients of the image. In the text I show interpretative clues, which allow showing diversity and richness of photocultures. I indicate the role of photography in cultural spheres such as art, info media, amateur movements, and everyday life and research practice. I use theories created by art historians (M. Fried), anthropologists (E. Edwards, J. Hart) engaged curators (A. Azoulay), as well as media technology researchers (M. Villi). The critical potential of photography lets us look afresh at modern visual culture.

The pioneering period of photography is connected with women emancipatory process, who perceived the new technology as a chance for free artistic creation, getting to know the world, as well as documenting every day life – their own and their close one’s. Research on women’s participation shows how geopolitical, cultural and class conditions influenced the development photo industry, photo art and most of all access to equipment and education. The text offers a new look and photography pioneers from three different perspectives. The first – artistic – is connected to modernist intellectual and cultural movements just as in case of Bloomsbury Group made climate for photographic activity of women such as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The second – professional perspective – which embeds women’s activity in rich photographic tradition, important in case of Ruth and Lotte Jacobi, both of German origin. The third – institutional perspective – is connected to the importance of women’s professional education in photography as well as social dimension of women’s activities seen in biography of Janina Mierzecka from Lwow.

In the context of Photography in unstructured movement. About the use of photography in interactive installations of the 1990s the author elaborates on variety of aspects related to the reuse of documentary photography in new media art. The article deals with the ways they functioned and coexisted in artworks of interactive nature. Selected issues and strategies will be discussed based on fundamental interactive installations: Lynn Hershman-Lesson’s American Finest (1990–1994), Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin: a photo-safari in the land of War (1998), Graham Weinbrena’s Frames (1999), and Georg Legrad’s Slippery Traces (1996).

Since the beginning of its existence photography has served its museum function. Photographers were able to document art collections and the pictures were later objects of comparative research. Just like museums, photographs made it possible to collect, own, perpetuate, protect and show copies of objects with cultural value, gathered to express imperial power. Acting as new forms of exposition photographs competed with museums and galleries in XX century. That is why Brian O’Doherty compared photographs to the ideal modernist gallery – white cube. The similarity in function can be seen in document photography of ready-mades, but also in pictures of ephemeric artworks – faint and easily distracted – which were conserved and protected through photography.

The purpose of the article is to research (meta)critical function of photography in latest prose, which deals with memory and trauma. The author is going to carry out a comparative analysis of two iconotextual novels: Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald (2001) and Extremely loud, incredibly close by Safran Foer (2005). Through the analysis of Sebald’s and Foer’s works I research strategies, which enable literary representation of trauma, but I also consider the changes in text (including its reception process) when its verbal spectrum is widened by photographic image.

As Hans Belting said “What wax figure achieved through modeling of form, photography achieved through photo technical copying, in which no intervention of the artist was able to forge the real image of the body”. Photography creates an illusion of wax figures, which is very visible in Hiroshi Sugimoto photography made in wax figure cabinets. Sugimoto’s works are also a pretext to analyze the relation of daguerreotype and embalming, as Sugimoto’s photos resemble the XIX century bereavement photography where the dead “came to life”. Death lurks in time stopping and body embalming gesture of pressing the shutter. But photography can also be used by lifeless matter of life pretense – create a “living image of dead object”, it allows us to taste eternal life in the land of simulacra.

Photography is a place where two phenomena characteristic for modern culture interfuse: memory boom and visual image domination. Photo image has become on the one hand, one of the main factors grounding visual hegemony, on the other since the beginning has been treated as support and medium of both individual and collective memory. Treating photographic image as a specific “memory place” (P. Nora) the author of the article shall draw a background to look into how they have been, are, and will be used to specify the role of peasants and their disappearing world in Polish collective memory.

The article is and analysis of the phenomenon known as selfie, indicating that it is an example of modern Internet folklore and a formula to generate standardized visual communication, which is read by recipients in an automated and explicit way. A selfie, just like other forms of photo-folklore, has varied functions and cannot be simplified to mere entertainment in computermediated communication. The main thesis of the article is that forwarding; modifying, commenting and judging visual objects of photo-folklore are means for creating and strengthening individual and collective identities. The processes are based on practices, which, on the one hand, lead to setting limits through determination, propagation and execution of norms and values characteristic for certain communication communities; on the other, are also means to express access to participate in those communities and cultivate communal ties.

The main goal of the article is to discuss the matter of the ideology in Kathryn Bigelow’s movie, Zero Dark Thirty. First part of the paper is based on relations between popular culture and ideology according to the condition of modern society. Second part indicates social, political, philosophical and moral aspects, which are shown in Zero Dark Thirty. The author describes and analyzes these sections in the light of the thought of modern critical discourse and by references to real events throughout recent years. In the opinion of the author this article may prove one more time, that the art, unfortunately, is often only an ideological tool in the hands of artists.

The article deals with the topic of relations between music and working process in context of corporation practices of body control. Thinking about the song sag by Auchan supermarket chain emploees, the author indicates that singing may be treated as mobilizing techniques for productive bodily powers and tuning them with constrains of institutionalized order. The case is analyzed within a wide historical frame including both capitalist and socialist power regimes and adequate body regulating techniques with the use of music.

The article is an assay to grasp the essence of communication from the perspective of Vilém Flusser’s communicology. There are two complementary parts to the theory. The first concerns speculations about communicology as a field, where communication is the subject, whereas the other looks at communication from the perspective of already mentioned communicology. The two parts are closely related as researchers approach depends on the essence of communication. Also the approach (method and purpose) defines the field (object) of the research. The detailed speculations included in the article are limited only to the essence of communication and main methods and purposes of commiunicology as perceived by Flusser. More detailed speculations about forms of communication (communication structures: discourse, dialogue; codes and symbols) as well as content (the essence and the role of medium) are too many to include in one case study.