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
I won’t pretend to understand the full history of what’s happening in Syria. Even attempting to understand the historical, political, sociological and geographical conditions that led Syrians to their current situation, I would still fail to grasp the brutality of what’s been happening there since the uprising back in 2011. A genocide is happening…
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Still from HyperNormalisation showing journalist Daniel Pearl. This is mostly a critic of Adam Curtis‘ work for the show Mezzanine XXI, performed by Massive Attack, although their curating act is equally up for critics. I went to their concert a few days ago, in Lisbon, and was ill impressed (to say the least). I knew…
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Throughout this year, I’ll be publishing reader’s posts. Here is an article by one of Nihilsentimentalgia’s special readers: Jonathan Morse. Seen below, one of history’s little ruins: evidence that in or after 1915, something pressed itself upon a glass photographic negative and broke it. When the cracks radiated through the negative’s matrix and tore…
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© Binh Danh, Iridescence of Life No. 22. Chlorophyll print on nasturtium leaf, butterfly specimen, & resin, 2008 © Binh Danh, Iridescence of Life No. 5. Chlorophyll print on nasturtium leaf, butterfly specimen, & resin, 2008 In Michigan Quarterly Review (Volume XLIII, Issue 4, 2004), John Schafer writes about Binh Danh’s intertexual images before going…
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I 445 Portraits of a man. More about the work HERE. Katherine Griffiths, Photobooth Project, since 1973. More about the work HERE. II Arianna Arcara & Luca Sanese, Found photos in Detroit 2009-2010. Thomas Sauvin, Beijing Silvermine. “For the past three years, collector Thomas Sauvin (French, b.1983) has visited a Beijing recycling center each month…
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The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force; and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation. R. Barthes Last week, after a tv news report, I came across a story about a…
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© Gil Pasternak, Esther Pasternak, 1970s. Esther Pasternak collection of family photographs, 1946–99. Description: The defiant lion is a tombstone monument erected in 1932 to commemorate a group of eight Jewish pioneer settlers who, as the Israeli version of the story goes, fell to Arab village militias in the settlement of Tel Hai in 1920…
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Le Fabuleux album d’Amélie Poulain […] The photo-finders will refer to themselves as artists or curators, editors or collectors—often, as an unclassifiable mixture. Depending on their self-described status, the archives of found, anonymous photographs they produce will be labeled works of art, exhibitions, projects, or studies—or something in between. Departing from an understanding of the…
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A person is more holy than a land, even a holy land, since faced with an affront made to a person, this holy land appears in its nakedness to be but stone and wood. Emmanuel Levinas. Josef Koudelka has become a mythical name for photography. A myth not only associated with the quality of his…
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© Andrei Liankevich, all photographs from the series Goodbye, Motherland, 2011 The “Goodbye, Motherland” project explores the attitude to WWII in Belarus. Belarus has only one ideology – war ideology. Belarus Independence Day is the day when the capital was freed from the Nazi occupation. The main streets in the capital are named after war…
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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 More© Sandro Ferreira, Não lhe digas para onde vais amanhã (Don’t tell her where you’ll be tomorrow), from the project “6174” Set of a hundred booklets, with dimensions identical to those with speeches of some dignitaries of the Portuguese dictatorial regime: “Estado Novo”. © Sandro Ferreira, from the project 6174. The left card reads The…
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© Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (Cultural History 1880-1983), 1980-83. Installation view at Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York. Lannan Foundation Bill Carke: You first saw Cultural History in 1996 at the Dia Art Foundation’s Chelsea space. Can you recall what your response to the work was back then and how it’s evolved since? Dan Adler: (Laughs) My…
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© Craig Ritchie, from the project Malaficia © Craig Ritchie, from the project Malaficia © Craig Ritchie, from the project Malaficia “In the Malaficia project, London based photographer Craig Ritchie delves into a Scottish area that was once a central location for witch trials and executions. This gruesome piece of history is not what first…
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© Helga Härenstam, The Gap, from the series The Society, 2006-2008 © Helga Härenstam, Jesus, from the series The Society, 2006-2008 The Society is a fictious documentary, trough which Helga Härenstam has been looking for and/or constructing environments, scenes and events, that are based on memories from the small society where she grew up. The…
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© Sunil Shah, from the project Uganda Stories © Sunil Shah, from the project Uganda Stories © Sunil Shah, from the project Uganda Stories © Sunil Shah, from the project Uganda Stories “This project is both a subjective journey to recollect the past and an interrogation of documentary photography in its use to reassemble fragments…
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© Carrie May Weems, Untitled, from African Jewels, 2009 © Carrie May Weems, Untitled, from African Jewels, 2009 installation view from African Jewels, 2009 Carrie’s web home here
Read MoreA must see! Full video here This is a trailer for our upcoming feature length documentary based in Chile and the Mapuche indigenous territory of Wallmapu. The concept for the film was born with the death of a former military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. His regime murdered thousands and tortured tens of thousands after the military…
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@ Sharon Kivland, from Mes Fils @ Sharon Kivland, from Mes Fils @ Sharon Kivland, from Mes Fils Sharon Kivland investigates how our lives are governed by systems of order that complement, overlap and contradict one other while undergoing continual periods of change. Spheres such as language, time, philosophy, politics, nature and history are involved.…
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CRITICAL IMAGE: MICHAL HEIMAN, By Dr. Ariella Azoulay Michal Heiman chose the position of the spectator looking at someone else’s photographs taken by someone else, in which someone else is photographed, which someone else collected. Heiman turns this quintessential position of spectator (in a museum, but not only) into her own, elaboration and giving it…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 