#ben burbridge

[aestheticsoflostness]

Ben Burbridge: Science Photography and the Art Museum

“What do the histories of art have to teach us about the histories of science and technology?”

[Via the altogether fascinating SEEING SCIENCE: Photography, Science and Visual Culture website, which is a year-long project exploring the central role photographic images play in defining, shaping, promoting, and furthering science and how photographic images made in and about the sciences impact public opinion, policy and funding, science education, as well as visual and popular culture.]

[ninebagatelles]

“The work of Nan Goldin was once discussed in terms of a personal compulsion to record, along with the voyeurism it potentially sanctioned. Photographs documented the world and werelooked at by others. Today, writers frame her work in terms of the public sharing of a private life—a matter of showing and being seen. For curator Martina Weinhart, Goldin’s imagery marks a “step on the path towards post-privacy.” Her public display of highly personal photographs willfully transgressed social norms: part of the countercultural assault on suburban normalcy so effectively absorbed as justification for the “freedoms” of precarious working and kaleidoscopic consumer choice that we all enjoy today. Against the backdrop of our relentless photo sharing, along with the general corrosion of the distinction between public and private, what once appeared to flaunt good taste no longer looks so different from what everyone else is doing.”

Ben Burbridge, from his essay Photography in the Age of Communicative Capitalism

[sharpened--edges]

Ben Burbridge, Guardian

[screendump-project]

Photography has changed as a result of digitization. In contrast to the expense involved in buying and processing film, to produce and to view digital photographs costs almost nothing. With cameras a standard feature on most mobile phones, many of us have them on our person for the majority of the time. This means that many more people are taking many more photographs of subjects and in situations they would not have photographed before. (...) The unavoidable symbols of the recent changes to photography are the notorious photographs from Abu Ghraib. The manner in which they changed, or represented changes to, the roles and significance of photography within culture cannot help but shape understandings of how institutions should aim to respond to this new photographic landscape.

Ben Burbridge, Why Photography May Not Matter As Art As Never Before: A Few Thoughts on the 2011 Rencontres d’Arles

http://www.photoworks.org.uk/blog/post/00000000011