Failed Images
Photography and its Counter-Practices
- Print on Demand version available
- Makes a case for a different approach to photography: celebrating the medium's rich palette of possible modes of image-making
- Combines cultural theory and many case studies to analyze the ways in which the photograph transforms that which exists before the camera
Author: Ernst van Alphen
Design: Sam de Groot
Series: vis-à-vis
2018, Valiz | supported by Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds | paperback | 288 pp. | 23.5 cm x 16.5 cm (portrait size) | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-45-9
- Find here the Spanish Edition of Failed Images, El fracaso de la imagen, Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo. CENDEAC (2022)
Failed Images tries to understand photography in its difference from the reality it shows. It sets as a task to analyse the different ways the photograph transforms that which exists before the camera. Photography is not only determined by technical features, but also by a conventional approach to it. This approach can be recognized in what is now called a ‘snapshot’. But the photographic medium enables also very different practices and as a result very different kinds of photographic images. To see this, one needs to look at the diversity of photographic images and practices outside the dominant approach. In this book the photographic image will be explored by focusing on photographic practices refusing the dominant approach to the medium, namely staged photography, blurred photography, under- en overexposed photography and archival photography.