Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

From the Photo Album to the “Big Picture”

This lecture will resolve around the transformation of the photographic image from its analogic forms as a medium of memory and documentation to its new (post) digital ontology.  Following William J. Mitchell’s book, What Do Pictures Want (2005), in which he breaks away from the perception of an image as an object, I will relate to the photographic image as a “living image” and show the substantial impact of digital technologies on the way photographs “function” and “come to life” and become interfaces for a wide range of information, much wider than presented on their visual surfaces.  Although Mitchell is one of the key representatives of the pictorial turn in cultural studies, I will suggest seeing textualization as a key factor in the “living” attribute of the photograph as analyzed by him.