Niepewność przedstawienia. Od kamery obskury do współczesnej fotografii. Wydanie drugie rozszerzone

Abstract

The book Uncertainty of representation: from camera obscura to contemporary photography proposes a cultural interpretation of pinhole photography, a technique which was particularly popular at the turn of the 20th and 21st century. Why I became interested in this specific photographic genre? Nothing gets older more quickly than technology. Nevertheless, the object of the analysis presented in the book – pinhole photography was old (or ancient) already in the moment of its invention. Might this be a reason why pinhole photography even today does not seem to be out of date. This direct successor of camera obscura, due to its aesthetical values (David Brewster rated highly in pinhole images some pictorial effects as lack of sharpness, which made the image more poetical), became the part of art discourse in 19th century. The advent of modern era in art marginalized pinholes for some time, but in the late 20th century the sudden fascination with lensless images thrived again together with the cultural and artistic activities of artists and theoreticians, who saw in photography not a mimetic reproduction of reality, but an image full of symbolic meanings and self-referential reflection on the language of medium. Such interpretation let artists like Gottfried Jäger, Paolo Gioli and, last but not least, the author of a seminal book on pinhole photography Eric Renner, come back to the basis of technological history of modern vision. The great interest of both experienced artists and young adepts of photography was influenced by the number of pinhole exhibitions also in Poland (by authors, whose artworks are the objects of interpretation in this book, such as Wiktor Nowotka, Paweł Borkowski, Piotr Zabłocki, Magdalena Poprawska, Zbigniew Tomaszczuk, Piotr Wołyński, Marek Noniewicz, Katarzyna Majak, Jarosław Klupś, Georgia Krawiec, Paweł Kula, Stefan Wojnecki and others). Digital era brought new possibilities for pinhole and it is still a medium of communication which negotiates memories, creates feeling of closeness, or expresses longing for a distanced object of desire.