Innholdsfortegnelse for #1 2021 i Artdoc Photography Magazine

“The eye does not see things but images of things that mean different things.- Italo Calvino Dear Reader, The Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote a surrealist novel, The Invisible Cities, in which the traveller Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan the many cities he visited. His fictitious and surreal descriptions can be read as metaphors for the current state of our culture. In the chapter The city and the Signs, Marco Polo says prophetically: “The eye does not see things but images of things that mean different things.” This quote can be interpreted in two ways: the way photography functions as a system of signs and how modern cities function, with its uncountable traffic signs and advertising billboards. In our current issue, titled Empty Metropolis, we show portfolios of cities…

Scientific, news, artistic and documentary photography all use the archetype of beauty as a connection to truth. Beauty, however, is based on the beliefs of a culture and does not necessarily define truth. Understanding of photographic truth, like all other truths, depends on an understanding of culture, belief, history, and the universal aspects of human nature. A news photograph is often not just an interesting picture used to highlight a story; sometimes, it is a mode of storytelling that incorporates ideas of truth, reality, cultural value systems, and perception. Documentary Photography One reason art is practiced is due to the human need for understanding. Another function of art is to satisfy the need to keep a record of events that are deemed significant. Before photography, events were chronicled through written…

The activists Todd Darling photographed represent a broad cross-section of society here. However, many are the younger generation of students in high school and college. Darling: “They come from diverse economic backgrounds as well. Supporters of human rights struggles can be bus drivers, bankers, butchers, students, grannies, air traffic controllers, and priests. Currently, a very significant portion of the population is supportive of the movement in one way or another although the establishment and its supporters deny that.” Identity Todd Darling explains his idea about his series Portrait of Hong Kong. “A fundamental issue many people wrestle with is defining who or what is a Hongkonger? While people may wrestle with that deeply rooted question, they are confronted with pressure to conform to cultural, social, or political ideologies. This is…

Gross and Daley, observers of the byways, carefully isolate each building in their fullcolor and black-and-white architectural portraits, acutely attentive to subtle stylistic differences and social significance in communal meeting places of labor, commerce, shopping, and recreation. There are churches and grange halls, schools and grocery stores, gas stations and fast-food restaurants, agricultural storage bins and outbuildings, cobblers’ shops and tinkers’ sheds, even a coffin warehouse and a whatnot shop. The inauspicious buildings that Gross and Daley document are the wellused proletarian architecture of the Second Industrial Revolution, a period of unbridled wealth and global dominance that utterly transformed the United States in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, roughly 1870 to 1930. Galvanized by automotive transport, telephone communications, electric lights, and the advent of fossil…

“At the time when the democracy movement lasted over a year and the outbreak of the coronavirus began, I was exploring the metropolis of Hong Kong. Contrary to the prejudice that the metropolis of Hong Kong is crowded and loud, I lead the viewer to a quiet, almost deserted place. The Backstreets border directly on the lively alleys. The streets provide the skyscrapers with infrastructure and are the backside of the shining skyscraper scenery. This ramble shows the viewer the backside of the shiny high-rise metropolis. I am particularly interested in topics of public space. In my work, I examine the traces and habitats of contemporary civilisation. The artefacts and found objects are a legacy of culture. I also examine the relationship between man and the environment. Further, I love…

“With the series When I killed your tulips, I explore the social biography of objects through the medium of photography, and how the meaning of objects changes throughout history. Snapshots depicting statues and pure materials are repeatedly printed out, re-photographed, and playfully juxtaposed to still lifes. My cross-disciplinary way of working intertwines photography, sculpture, and collage, with which I aim to explore the limits of photographic space and to question the perception of things taken for granted. To investigate what we perceive as a photograph, I reflect upon the fragmentation of the contemporary digital sphere with re-arranged objects in conversation with printed matter. In the last years, my projects took the form of installations in which I juxtaposed photographic prints to objects and materials, expanding them from the walls to…

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