Terje Borgersen: The City As Photograph

The point of departure for this study is a book which the publishers present as an «album of memories» and «a monument» for later generations: Stavanger. Bilder fra en svunnen tid [ Stavanger. Images From Bygone Days] , Dreyer Aktieselskap, Stavanger 1973 (2. edition). The book contains nearly 250 photographs. The oldest portraits are from the early 1850s; the photos of the city are from the period 1860 to 1918. Here are images of streets with single buildings and rows of houses. Here are parks and streets covered with cobblestones and mud. Here are panorama photographs and traditional showpieces, but also funny motifs which characterize Stavanger as a city of trade and shipping and industry. The captions mainly present information about places and people, but the book contains some photographs which disrupt the controlled narrative of bygone days and open up for other kinds of stories than mere documentation of places and buildings. Some of these images arouse a desire – as Walter Benjamin described it – for finding the traces of something which lies outside that which was controlled by the photographer. The controlled sophistication of the motif cracks open because the photograph itself, due to the authenticity of the medium, invites the spectator to look at it with a heightened attention.

The Stavanger book is an example of a pervasive genre: books in which photographs of the city (its space, buildings, architecture, and people) are woven into a textual narrative. The intention of the study is to use the book as point of departure for a discussion of this genre and of the function of photographs in such books. The photographs in these books tell us more about places and people than any of the writers and editors have seen. In these books the photograph is a cultural expression which may activate a reflection over the photographic medium itself.

Christine Hansen: A roundtrip in the plain Norwegian Landscape

A reconsideration and rediscovery of medium specific qualities in photography

The project aims at creating a more complex understanding of Norwegian contemporary photography and its relationship to international tendencies. The aim of the doctoral project is to respond to central issues in international research on photography. I will pay careful and renewed attention to what I claim are neglected photographic practices in the 80s. In particular, I look into Johan Sandborg, Siggen Stinesen, Per Berntsen and Jens Hauge's “Norwegian Landscape 1987”. "Norwegian Landscape 1987" seems to be difficult to place in the history of contemporary photography, and the reason for that can be that this history often is construed in terms of a dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism. In that way this particular project are going to question this dichotomy.

The ambition is to contribute to a more complex understanding of what seems to have become a given opposition between modernist art photography and post-modern photography. This dichotomy will also be discussed in relation to central theoretical texts both in the Scandinavian context and also in a more international perspective. In my work I further want to call attention to the specificity of the medium, a concept which she mean has been neglected and even become a taboo in much of the literature about contemporary photography.

Liv Hausken: The Phenomenological History of Photography

It is remarkable how easily photography has been pronounced null and void, and how stubbornly it nevertheless continues to live on. We seem to be faced with an unusually tough phenomenon which maintains its cultural significance in spite of its relatively short history and in spite of constant attacks from all kinds of theorists who in the light of changeable modes of thought, competing forms of expression, and technological developments have pronounced photography dead.

The cultural significance of photography is changeable. When the medium was new it was thought of as technical and inhuman, but over the years there has been a humanization of its traditional technology which today seems to have an almost charming, old-fashioned character. Today photography means something else than it did before. But how much can photography change before it is something else? How much has photography changed during its 150 years of existence? Is it at all possible to talk about one phenomenon, Photography, throughout all these years?

Among those who claim today that photography is dead, there seems to be an inclination to ignore the social practices in which photography is upheld, but also a tendency to demand (or assume) that technology and experience shall walk (or does walk) in step. Therefore they neglect the mutual relations between practice, technology and experience. Photography is upheld within certain social practices because it performs some functions which are important for people. And these practices contribute to maintaining the belief that pictures that look like photographs are photographs and vice versa. If technology, practice, and experience are not separated analytically it is difficult to discuss their mutual relations. The three fields seem to change at different speeds: Technology changes quickly, practice more slowly, and experience very slowly. As far as photography is concerned, this means that we must distinguish between a technical (or technological) understanding, a practice-oriented understanding, and an understanding based on experience, and that we cannot expect these understandings to coincide.

Taking an understanding based on experience as the point of departure, the study focuses on a series of central texts on photography. The intention is to sketch the phenomenological history of photography, i.e. its history as experiential object, and to discuss: How and in what sense has photography as phenomenon changed over the years? In relation to which discourses has photography as phenomenon been understood? How did photography appear in relation to painting, lithography, film, television, and video? How do we understand photography in the light of digital technology?

Aud Sissel Hoel:Photographic Anthropometry and Cultural Stereotypes

There is a reflexive potential in the photographic technique, a potential which has to do with the way in which photography is able to transform subjects into objects. That photography is able to perform this objectivizing transformation does not mean that it is «objective» in the classical sense; photographs, the result of the photographic process, should not be understood as reflections of a given order, i.e. as re-presentations. On the contrary, the moment something is photographed, it is drawn out the pragmatic sphere and is resurrected as an idea of itself, and is as such ascribed a cultural surplus value. To photograph something is a kind of visual categorization, and is, as such, never innocent.

The intention is to study some characteristic features of visual and photographic categorization. Visual categorization does not coincide with conceptual categorization. Therefore central categorization concepts like for instance 'type' and ' occurrence ' have to be somewhat modified before they can be used in a visual context and help us understand the ways in which the photographic medium categorizes phenomena.

The point of departure for the study is Francis Galton’s attempts in the late 19th century to systematize inherited intellectual, moral and physical characteristics by means of photographic documentation. The intention is to study his so-called «composite portraits» which may be understood as a kind of pictorial statistics aiming at visualizations of averages by generating a kind of synthetic or virtual prototype of a given family, group or race. In addition similar Norwegian materials will be studied, for instance early police photographs of criminals. On the basis of these materials it will be possible to describe the photographic establishment of cultural stereotypes, but also to discuss the ways in which photographs more generally function as visual categorizations even beyond such (quasi)scientific contexts.

Peter Larsen: Individual and Type. The Photographic Identity

The study focuses on photographic representations of the relation between individual and type and describes how they change over time. The point of departure is three central photographic sources: Francis Galton’s «composite photographs» from the late 19th century, August Sander’s unfinished project «Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts» (ca. 1927-64), and Cindy Sherman’s series of «Untitled film Stills» (1977–80).

Galton, the father of eugenics, worked with series of photographic portraits, using a pre-digital morphing technique to construct The Typical – the «typical Jew», the «typical criminal» and so on. On the face of it, August Sander’s project was related to that of Galton: The intention was to document fundamental German types, but whereas Galton constructed the typical as a kind of statistical average, Sander tried to let it appear by grouping representatives of various social groups. His images demonstrate that he had a keen eye for typical social features, but at the same time his sitters clearly pose for him, trying to appear in a socially accepted way. By means of their posture, they demonstrate how they imagine themselves as seen by a historically abstract Other.

Cindy Sherman’s project is not intended as a piece of social documentation. Nevertheless her images document something: They underline a historical change in the understanding of identity. «Untitled Film Stills» are staged self portraits which with an amazing technique imitate black-and-white images from American movies from the 1950s and 1960s. The series can be read as a kind of artistic commentary to the 1970s discussion of Late Modernity and the New Socialization type. While Galton saw identity as a question of biology, and Sander saw it as social destiny, Sherman’s «Untitled Film Stills» show a subject disintegrating into a multitude of identities which are no longer biologically or socially determined categories, but constructions borrowed from the great archives of modern media culture.

Sigrid Lien og Eva Reme: Pictures of Longing. A Study of Norwegian-American Immigrant Photography

The Norwegian emigration to America was massive. Between 1870 and 1930 approximately 700.000 Norwegians came to USA. Today there are four million Americans of Norwegian descent. The Norwegian immigrants sent thousands of letters back to family and friends in the old country. These letters have been duly collected and have been the object of comprehensive studies during the last thirty years. The letters were usually accompanied by photographs. Large numbers of these photographs are preserved in private homes, but also in archives and museums in Norway as well as in USA. This comprehensive photographic material -- ordinary photographs which have played a significant role in Norwegian family life -- is by and large untouched by cultural historians.

«Pictures of Longing» is a study of this material. The study is interdisciplinary in its scope: The intention is to describe the characteristic anthropological foundation of these photographs – the relation between letter and image, the role of photography in the ritualization of family life, the photographs as reflection of place, relocation and social status – but also to analyze the esthetic and media specific features of these photographs and to give an account of the photographers and their esthetic production with its technical and economical conditions. It is furthermore the intention to utilize the possibilities for theoretical development offered by this interdisciplinary field. As pictures of longing these photographs relate to the past as well as to the present. They can be regarded as impressions, but are at the same time culturally coded expressions. As such this photographic material provides fruitful perspectives for a discussion of the photographic image and its problematic identity.