Photography Falls Apart: The Lens
Since its inception in the mid-1800s, photography has been a disruptor technology, challenging, and reconfiguring our understanding of how we represent ourselves and our communities. Viewed through a performative lens, this series will explore photography in its vernacular and art forms and discuss how it challenges questions of truth and representation, while moving rapidly into the shadow of Artificial Intelligence, with its deep fakes and machine learning.
The Lens
Thursday 16 November 2023
The lens is remarkable technology, one that has been used for centuries to focus, bend and abstract light. In the 19th century, however, the lens became bound to the apparatus of the camera, and its mission to document objective reality. The thickness of the lens—its function of transforming the reality it represents—disappeared from view.
The artists in this panel engage deeply with the photographic lens, bringing the history and politics of its documentary function back into focus. They use it to record worlds at the edges of the image mainstream, to tell stories, and to make visible that which might otherwise remain invisible. They return to the lens its thickness, and turn our attention to the camera's capacity to transform not just light, but the very way we see the world around us and its history.
Watch the full lecture. Please note, some slides included in the presentation contain nudity.