Contacts. A hard, merciless light. The worker-photography movement 1926-1939 exhibition tours

Seminars and Lectures

Georgy Zelma. Se fotografía a los mejores mineros, 1930 — Georgy Zelma.Se fotografía a los mejores mineros, 1930

Held on 15 jun 2011

The appearance of the worker-photography movement took a complex political, artistic and social construction – involving the confluence of an economic crisis, modern visual culture, reformism and the politics of representation – and translated it into images. These images, then, as metaphors for photographic contact, become footprints that can be followed to take a new look at a set of contradictions from a specific time. This program invites specialists from different areas to decipher these contradictions.

Registration

send an e-mail to programasculturales3@museoreinasofia.es

Participants

Jorge Riechmann is a poet, literary translator, essayist and full professor of moral philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He has published Pablo Neruda y una familia de lobos (Creática, 2010), Futuralgia (Calambur, 2011), La habitación de Pascal (Los Libros de la Catarata, 2009) and Entre la cantera y el jardín (La Oveja Roja, 2010).

Erika Wolf is an Art History professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand and a specialist in Soviet photography. She is the editor of Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

Víctor del Rio is a professor of Modern Art Theory and Contemporary Art Theory at the Universidad de Salamanca. He is the author of Fotografía objeto. La superación de la estética del documento (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2008) and Factografía. Vanguardia y comunicación de masas (Abada, 2010).

Marta Arribas is a film director and scriptwriter. She directed, along with Ana Pérez de la Fuente, Héroes sin armas. Fotógrafos españoles en la Guerra Civil (2010) and also participated in the complementary publication, as well as other documentaries such as El tren de la memoria (2005) and Cómicos (2009).

Program

June 15, 2011

At what precise moment had the modern era fucked itself up?

Jorge Riechmann

Mario Vargas Llosa formulated this now classic question in Conversation in the Cathedral: at what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up? This question can be generalised and we can ask, paraphrasing his question: at what precise moment had the modern era fucked itself up? This tour through the exhibition suggests some elements for an answer, illuminated by the light that it projects from above onto a time of world socio-ecological crisis.
June 17, 2011

What is worker-photography?

Erika Wolf

The international worker-photography movement differed in its local manifestations, and so it is difficult to formulate a single answer to this question. It could be photographs taken by a worker, photographs of workers, or photographs that represent the view of the working class. This tour considers these questions by exploring a series of themes in the exhibition, including the idea of the camera as weapon, photographs as ammunition, the documentation of working life, and the eye of the social class.
June 22, 2011

Imagining proletarian culture: photography, film and the technical means to reconstruct history

Victor del Río

This presentation examines the genesis of the so-called proletkult (proletarian culture), which was established on revolutionary foundations and in which the technical means of image production acquired an unprecedented importance in history. It starts with the Soviet case as the genetic nucleus of a program based on related concepts like factography and proletkult, looking at how they spread internationally, and also entertains a critical review of mass culture.
June 24, 2011

The Spanish Robert Capas

Marta Arribas

What connection existed between the worker-photography movement and the Civil War? Were there Spanish photographers involved? Who were they? What happened to them after the conflict ended? Where did their archives end up? These questions allow us to examine instinctive photographers, such as the Mayo brothers, Marín, Díaz Casariego, and Alfonso, who were knowledgeable about Russian and German currents, and whose archives are now starting to be uncovered.

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His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.

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