Hundreds of thousands of pictures were taken at the opening of the Olympic Games in London summer 2012. And only one photographer were present at the landing of Normandy in 1944.
In the last couple of decades, image stream has been increasing exponentially, and its substance did not nesessarily acquire more sense. On the contrary, an abundance of images makes it hard to find the essence in them. The time between a shutter speed and a final publication of the picture is a matter of seconds. Archiving shouldn’t be so less important, but it seems impossible with such a rapid and massive flow of photographs.
What’s happened to our relation to photograph? Pictures are sent via internet to a company which was selected from a huge number of photo labs, to sort and place them in a personal photo album. Old family portrait tells us about our society of past years, and a portrait of nowadays can’t even tell us what this portrait depicts.
Documentation is the one of the photography’s foundations and through time it gives an image a greater authenticity. Does thet mean it is inevitable that our photographs now will delineate our present tomorrow?
By making excerpts from the flow of images students of Higher Photography Education are searching for the substance in two upcoming exhibitions:
30/5 Modern Art Research Institute, Kiev, Ukraine
5/6 House of Photography, Stockholm, Sweden
https://www.facebook.com/events/134313950094311/
