Images Recalled

Is it still possible today to take photographs that depict something completely "new"? Or is the more interesting question the following: how do existing images order our world and govern our perception of the world by way of suggestion. The number of images available to us or forced on us on a daily basis by the media, in advertising, magazines, and the news has continually increased since the advent of photography. The number of images we create ourselves and save on our hard drives has also grown.

This world of images is the world of images. The world emerges from its forms. It is precisely the massive number of images that makes it evident that what is depicted is subject to an order. The constructive nature of images of the world remains largely hidden.

Art images, on the other hand, make this order itself apparent—in that they are based on images from areas such as journalism, advertising, or science. One means of reacting to this torrent of images is to thematize the broad spectrum of images that impresses itself on our pictorial memories. How do photographers take up and recombine available images? Existing images are cited, appropriated, and collaged. Or self-reflexive strategies for dealing with images demonstrate why a photograph might be regarded as "true" or "authentic".

The theme of the festival is how we become visually literate, whose disclosure we have art photography to thank. While the key theme concerns itself with the theoretical question of how photographers view the orders of images, other individual exhibitions are dedicated to related thematic fields that pose our question with particular emphasis: body and youth, war and landscape image, archive and absence.