History and Theory of Photography Research Centre Autumn 2016 Events

History and Theory of Photography Research Centre Autumn 2016

Free and open to all, at 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

This autumn we welcome to Birkbeck Professor Steve Edwards, who will also be joining the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre, and look forward to two seminars on illustrated magazines:

Monday 24 October, 6:00-7:30pm

Room 106 (was 112)

Tim Satterthwaite (Visiting Lecturer, University of Brighton)

Spiritualising the machine: the modernist photography of UHU magazine

The photo-illustrated monthly UHU was at the heart of the progressive photographic culture of Weimar Germany. In a stream of articles and photo-pages in the late 1920s, UHU showcased the work of modernist photographers, such as Albert Renger-Patzsch and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, alongside the radical new perspectives of scientific and aerial photography. UHU’s modernism offered more, however, than a simple embrace of technological modernity; like the great photographic exhibitions of the period, the magazine sought a reconciliation between the rationalising forces of the machine age and the organic principles of the natural world and traditional life. This talk describes how UHU’s modernist synthesis was expressed through a unifying aesthetic of repetition and regularity. The magazine’s photographs of microscopic plant forms, aerial landscapes, and the textures of urban life, were symbolic of alternative visions of social order – the organic or technocratic principles of an ideal future society.

Wednesday 16 November, 6:00-7:30pm

Room 116 (was 112)

Samuel Bibby (Association of Art Historians)

‘New! Art… Plus Added Social Purpose’: BLOCK and the Periodical Landscape of 1970s British Art History

Dates for next term:

Thursday 2 February 2017, 6:00-7:30pm

Marcia Pointon (Professor Emeritus in History of Art, University of Manchester, and Research Fellow, Courtauld Institute of Art)

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , , ,