Webinar: Colin Pantall – Breaking Genre

15.11. + 22.11. + 29.11.2022
7-9pm (GMT+02:00)
online

Portraiture, Landscape, Documentary: Breaking Genre

In three introductory lectures on landscape, documentary, and family, this three-part series will look at how these ideas have been built up through historical forms of representation. It will also look at how contemporary photography, and photobooks in particular, are moving beyond rigid ideas of genre, and the ways in which influences from art, film, and politics are changing the face of photographic practice.
This series of lectures will give you a historical grounding in key concepts, ideas on the theory of photographic representation, and an introduction to contemporary photographic and publishing practice.

#1: The Face – Who does the looking
In this lecture we will look at the origins of portrait photography, how the face became the ‘mirror into the soul’, and how power and control have been invested in the person taking the photograph. We will also look at the global nature of photography, and the ways different theories of image, self, and photographic identity emerge from different visual traditions and are used in contemporary photobooks.

#2: Landscape – Where we look and what we show
Who does the looking matters. What we choose to look at matters too. And so does where you look at, and what we show. This lecture will look at the diverse global origins of landscape photography, examining the idea that the landscape is inherently political and economic in the way that it is and has been portrayed. The lecture will go beyond the picturesque to look at theories that extend to contemporary surveys of the landscape in representations of environmental issues, climate change, and land ownership and the ways these have been used in contemporary photography and photobooks.

#3: Documentary matters – expanding the documentary view
The 1930s saw the birth of documentary film, mass observation, and the early ideas of the documentary view. This lecture will look at those ideas and look at how ideas of documentary have expanded into a plethora of different contemporary forms. It will challenge the idea of documentary as something either objective or rigid, and apply an open perspective of documentary that allows the personal, the subjective, and the uncertain to enter into the design and making of photobooks

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer, and educator based in Bath, England.
His work focusses on his immediate domestic environment and includes his book All Quiet on the Home Front, his publication Brexit Pictures, and his projects The Mental Load of Motherhood, Sofa Portraits and My German Family Album. He is interested in how environment, domestic space and family narratives overlap and interfere in our understanding of personal, visual, and political histories.

Dates: 15.11. + 22.11. + 29.11.2022
Time: 7-9pm (GMT+02:00)
Location: Zoom
Language: English
Speaker: Colin Pantall
Price: 95€ (Early bird discount 10% until 31.10.22)
Sign up: info@foto-forum.it
Number of participants: 10 – 16
Deadline: 8.11.2022