N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
What happens inside our homes, in the domestic environment, is something that truly fascinates me, particularly when considering how that intimate environment can be brought into the public sphere, with integrity and respect. In the first months of Nihilsentimentalgia that was pretty obvious. I shared artwork by Esko Manniko, Holly Lynton, Tina Barney, Melissa Ann…
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Some of my early posts were about the body (its modification, mutilation and sexual dimension). At the time I did a lot of performative photography and self-portrait, so these were pressing issues. It’s difficult to structure the line of thought that arises from revisiting these posts, but three main questions keep lingering in my mind:…
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Author Busisiwe Deyi writes about Cultural Appropriation in Africa is a Country, in the context of the SPUR restaurant chain. Although the text is about this specific brand, the arguments go for other situations. What the fuck is happening in the fashion world these days that everyone wants to be Native American? Or do they? Of…
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© Ana Teresa Barboza, Untitled (?). Images via ArtNau. A friend called my attention to Ana Teresa Barboza‘s work (Lima, Peru, 1981). A good friend, I should say, for she knows how I’m drawn to mixed techniques applied to photography, specially when it involves some sort of sewing. Ana Teresa’s work is anything but simple, though…
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© Andy Warhol, The Shadow, from The Myths, 1981. excerpts from Sven Lütticken‘s The Feathers of the Eagle, published in 2005, in New Left Review, No.36, pp.109-125. “If the culture industry is based to a significant degree on the appropriation of material from art and various subcultures, as well as from different historical epochs and…
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What follows are excerpts from a very interesting article by Thomas Susanka, published in “Paradoxes of Authenticity”, pp.95-113, edited by Julia Straub and published by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2012 In the context of the following paper, as Susanka clarifies, ‘authenticity’ should be understood “as one strategy to achieve verification and hence persuasion, namely by demonstrating…
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Part I of essay here and part II here © Duarte Amaral Netto, Z (France, April 1940), 2012 65×50 cm Framed, Inkjet on Fine Art, Ed. 2 + 1 AP Storytelling isn’t far from the discursive play, on the contrary. Martha Langford would call it an oral-photographic method of telling stories, in the sense that…
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© Thomas Meyer, Untitled, from the series New Museum in Berlin In part II of Untimely Meditations (1873), Nietzsche speaks about the malady of history and culture and how paying reverence to them restrains our ability to be free. Nietzsche suggests that the only two antidotes against this disease are: being unhistorical or being suprahistorical,…
Read MoreIt’s never too late to talk about punctum. Roland Barthes created The concept, very simple to access but very difficult to locate in linguistic terms. It remains submissive to the subjective order and to the the representation of an image of affection. If one believes in an authentic point of view one should also be…
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photo caption (above) © Christian Boltanski, Odessa Monument, 1991. Four gelatin silver prints, lights and wiring “Since the late 1960s, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris) has worked with photographs collected from ordinary and often ephemeral sources, endowing the commonplace with significance. Rather than taking original photographs to use in his installations, he often finds and…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 