Speakers

Michelle Henning is Professor in Photography and Media in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. She write on photography, museums, digital media, cultural history and is the author of Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018), Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (2006) and the edited collection Museum Media (2015)

Ben St. John is a Canadian software engineer from who's lived the last twenty years in Munich. He currently leads the small digitization group at Google Arts & Culture, responsible for the Art Camera and Tabletop scanner. These programs have helped bring thousands of artworks and photographs (and documents, kimonos, stained glass, tapestries and more) to the internet, in very high resolution.

Part of 'Between Camera & Network: Art and Documentation in Post-Photographic Culture'

A series of events exploring new approaches to documentation both inside and outside the museum.

From the Google Art Project to the screenshot, from the JPG to the Gigapixel image, photographic technologies continue to mediate our experience of art and culture. Between Camera & Network: Art and Documentation in Post-Photographic Culture is a series of talks at The Photographers’ Gallery over three weeks in March involving artists, curators, photographers, conservators, educators, technologists and museum professionals. Each talk explores a different aspect of the changing role of photography in art and digital culture, focusing on a range of approaches to documentation both inside and outside the museum.

The programme presents a series of case studies which reflect on the work of art in an age of photographic hyper-circulation. At a time where art selfies mix with installation shots on Instagram, how are practices of audience documentation changing the status and meaning of art? How can institutions engage with this expanded field of documentation, and what are the implications for art history and cultural memory? How is the pandemic changing the cultural value of documentation? How do contemporary practices of photographic reproduction intersect with critical discourses of authorship, ethics and control in new media platforms?

Between Camera & Network: Art and Documentation in Post-Photographic Culture forms part of Documenting Digital Art, an AHRC funded research project and partnership between University of Exeter, London South Bank University, Australian National University, LIMA (Amsterdam) and The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Events

With and Without Walls: Photographic Reproduction and the Art Museum
Thursday 4 March, 18.00 GMT
Michelle Henning & Ben St. John

Collecting Social Media
Thursday 11 March, 18.00 GMT
Natalie Kane & Anni Wallenius

Documenting the Ruins of the Web
Thursday 18 March, 18.00 GMT
Olia Lialina & Ofri Cnaani