Today everybody seems to be accustomed to a certain lack of understanding. What is not understood when looking at the big picture can be substituted by generating sense out of small things and images. These things are collected to allow for different simple and pleasant narratives that can banish feared alienation by creating notions of “home.” Cheap cameras (Kodak) became a widespread commodity around 1900 because they made the recording of personal moments an easy task. The stereotypical images of happy families in tidy homes soon carried a political agenda, because they didn’t reproduce reality, they instead recycled clichés. In contrast to the efforts of an artistic avant-garde that championed progress and innovation, the visual culture of private spheres constituted itself mainly through the longing for tradition and conservatism. To dwell in an accumulation of—what I would like to call—re-collectables entails the negation of the attempt to understand and qualify a changing world “out there.”

Hier finden Sie das PDF (eventuell institutioneller Zugang benötigt):
Ansehen

Imorde, Joseph (2019b): „At Home: the Visual Culture of Privacy“, in: Kerstin Schmidt / Julia Faisst
(Hg.): Picturing America. Photography and the Sense of Place. Leiden / Boston, S. 139–150.