Space and Photographic Spaces in Literature and in Virtual and Physical Archives

1. CONSTRUCTED SPACES
Space and Photographic Spaces in Literature
and in Virtual and Physical Archives
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design,
Jerusalem
Romi Mikulinsky (Ph.D)
March 28th, 2012

2. The Construction of Space
• Lewis Carrol
• Georges Perec
• The Bechers
• Hans Peter Feldman
• Roy E. Stryker
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
• W. G. Sebald

3. The Construction of Space

4. The Construction of Space

5. Georges Perec
-

6. Georges Perec
-

7. Georges Perec
-

8. Georges Perec
-

9. Georges Perec
-

10. Georges Perec
-

11. The Bechers
-

12. The Bechers
-

13. Hans Peter Feldman
-

14. Hans Peter Feldman
-

15. Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm
Security Administration

16. Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm
Security Administration
Holes/ punches mark the images as unacceptable
Video

17. Sugimoto’s Theatres

18. Sugimoto’s Theatres
I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural
History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-
answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a
whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I
sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I
walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as
the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when
the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and
the vision exploded behind my eyes.
Hiroshi Sugimoto

19. Sugimoto’s Theatres

20. Atlas – Reconfiguring the Order of Things,
Places, Times

21. Atlas – Reconfiguring the Order of Things,
Places, Times
―To make an atlas is to reconfigure space, to redistribute it,
in short, to redirect it: to dismantle it where we thought it
was continuous; to reunite it where we thought there were
boundaries‖

22. Piecing Together the Order of Things
When we arrange different images or different objects —
playing cards, for example — on a table, we are free to
modify constantly their configuration. We can make piles or
constellations. We can discover new analogies, new
trajectories of thought. By modifying the order, we can
arrange things so that images take positions.

23. Piecing Together the Order of Things
A table is not made for definitively classifying, for
exhaustively making an inventory, or for cataloguing once
and for all – as in a dictionary, an archive or an
encyclopaedia – but instead for gathering segments, or
parcelling out the world, while respecting its multiplicity and
its heterogeneity — and for giving a legibility to the
underlying relations

24. Piecing Together the Order of Things
This is why ATLAS shows the game to which numerous artists
have given themselves, this ―infinite natural history‖ (according to
Paul Klee) or that ―atlas of the impossible‖ (according to Michel
Foucault regarding the disconcerting erudition of Jorge Luis
Borges). We can discover, then, in what sense contemporary
artists are ―scholars‖ or inventors of a special genre: they gather
the scattered pieces of the world as would a child or a rag-and-
bone man – two figures to whom Walter Benjamin compared the
authentic materialist scholar. They bring together things outside
of normal classifications, and glean from these affinities a new
kind of knowledge which opens our eyes to certain unperceived
aspects of our world and to the unconscious of our vision

25. Piecing Together the Order of Time
―It is therefore time itself which becomes visible in the
montage of images. It is up to everyone – artist or scholar,
thinker or poet – to make such a visibility into a power to
see the times: a resource for observing history, for
undertaking its archaeology and its political critique, for
―dismantling‖ it in order to imagine alternative models.‖
•
Georges Didi-Huberman
•

26. W. G. Sebald
• -

27. W. G. Sebald
-

28. W. G. Sebald
-

29. W. G. Sebald
-

30. W. G. Sebald
• -

31. W. G. Sebald
-

32. W. G. Sebald
-

33. W. G. Sebald
-

34. W. G. Sebald
-

35. W. G. Sebald
-

36. W. G. Sebald
-

37. W. G. Sebald
-

38. W. G. Sebald
-

39. W. G. Sebald
-

40. W. G. Sebald
-

41. W. G. Sebald
• -

42. W. G. Sebald
-