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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathInstant Images
 
 
 
 
 

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devoid of any kind of stylistic recognition. Pillar concerns himself with photographic trash, which often concerns itself, quasi self-referential, with trash—«car involved in an accident,» «trash as sculpture,» «falling towers»—without raising it to the status of drollery. Pillar does not search the Internet for pornographic photographs, which is also extremely popular among artists, but for «house+back» and «decoration+munitions,» in this way dissecting the value of residential property, idyll and defense out of both of them.

Game

Two striking threads of discourse have settled on the history of photography: an aesthetic and a sociological one. If one follows the aesthetic discourse, one has no choice but to clearly reject all of the collections of images previously mentioned: In no case do they comply with the demands regarding originality, expressiveness, formal refinement or unity of the entire range of works (precisely Gustav Seibt’s complaint). Even if in their comments, Flickr users pursue precisely this direction of aestheticizing

 

qualification—«wow, i love this color!» or «i very much like your pictures. you are very talented»—the poststructural finding holds good that photographs (and least of all snapshots) cannot be ennobled to objects of art without misappropriating their instrumental, medial or pretentious status. Found-footage artists respond with ironic or inquiring strategies to the non-aesthetics of instrumental or private images. In contrast, software-generated collating does not yield to the principles of compression or selection bound to authors. This may represent their advantage in view of the suspension of authorship; however, it is their disadvantage in view of commensurability—they simply store too many images.

With regard to their social function, the findings made in 1965 by Pierre Bourdieu and his research group with regard to family photography can apparently be seamlessly transferred to electronic photo sharing: «The geographical dispersal of individual relatives absolutely demands the more or less regular resuscitation of contact to relatives, and this is satisfied

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