20.09.2014
Lectures/Events

Lecture series: Punctum

Accompanying the exhibition Punctum is a lecture series of artists and theorists on topical subjects of photography today.

Sa, 20 September 2014, 5–7 pm
Seamus Kealy, Francis McKee, Esther Ruelfs
(as part of the Open Day at the Künstlerhaus)
& catalog presentation “Punctum”

Séamus Kealy: Arriving at Punctum
Séamus Kealy will give a lecture on realizing the exhibition Punctum. He will describe the background to the project, its conception and organisation, as well as some of the artworks in the exhibition. He will also explore some of Barthes’ ideas on photography as they might be applied to our context today.

Francis McKee: The Passage of Light
The history of photography often places great emphasis on the decisive moment. Barthes’ punctum also seems to underline the singular detail, the telling facet of a picture. There are however alternative traditions within photography that not only swerve away from the notion of the unique towards a very different set of possibilities for the image, most obviously the photobook or photographic sequence. This talk will explore those alternatives.

Esther Ruelfs: Roland Barthes’ punctum and the possibilities of erotic reception of art
The lecture explores Roland Barthes’s ontological description of the nature of photography as a counter model to the distanced viewer of idealistic aesthetics through the example of Herbert Lists’ photograph of the “gay icon” of Michelangelo’s slave.