Talk

A Seminar on Holes

Gamle Munch

Sep. 14th – 12am, 2024

In 2019, the first photograph of a black hole was presented. The telescope that "saw" the black hole was not singular, but a network of eight telescopes in six locations worldwide, a sort of virtual telescope with an aperture as large as the Earth itself. An entire infrastructure of knowledge - political, social and technological - was needed to capture this picture, and it shows the black hole as a giant eye with the event horizon as its pupil. At the event horizon of a black hole, space and time change so that everything that moves past it disappears forever, including light. And here the image-realism in the image of the black hole collapses; the telescope and the black hole compete for photons. The image of the black hole represents a form of anti-photography; an image of that which devours light. The black hole is thus a kind of camera itself. Or even better; an archive of past, present and future.

Using the above topic as a point of departure, we will speculate on the future of photobooks and photography. What does it mean to work with photography when the ontological conditions of the medium are changing by different technologies? How will artists publish in the future? How should one deal with production and distribution in a future where locality and reuse are key? Is the artists' book a subversive force or what will it take for it to become so? What is the photo book of the future? In what way can photobooks relate to the digital ecology with a distributed and immaterial photograph? What gaps/holes exist at the intersection of past, present, and future; historical, ideological and technological?

Invited to talk is Jonas Enander, Marit Paasche, and Cecilia Grönberg, with close readings of photobooks by Sara Eliassen and Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson. Please note that the lectures will be held in Nordic languages.

Organizer	Forbundet Frie Fotografer
Curators	Line Bøhmer Løkken, Marte Aas
Website	fotobokfestivaloslo.no
Address	Oslo, Norway