TalkSeePhotography: April (#1 of two)

For the 1st of April's two TalkSeePhotography we are delighted to host Hasselblad Foundation's curator and researcher, Dr Louise Wolthers who will speak about her research WATCHED! Surveillance Art and Photography After the Millennium – Northern Europe in Focus.

"While historically linked closely to the photographic medium, contemporary surveillance practices (dataveillance, biometric tracking etc.) are increasingly post-photographic as well as ‘post-panoptic’. However, contemporary technologies and practices of surveillance, which are highly informed by the digitization of photography and other lens-based media, are still linked to, but also challenge notions of vision, visibility and monitoring. This means that visual media – and particularly photographic practices – offer strategies of counter-surveillance as well as inclusive, enabling monitoring of vulnerable subjects.

Discussing a range of recent cases of photographic registration together with examples of lens-based art works, the talk will point to how various types of everyday surveillance becomes a constitutive part of contemporary social life. New forms of discrimination and segregation emerge, but so do new means of empowerment and ‘sousveillance’."

Dr Wolthers has done research and curated exhibitions at institutions such as The National Museum of Photography and The National Gallery of Denmark. She has co-curated internationally travelling contemporary art and photography exhibitions such as Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive (2009-2010) and Places: Denmark in Transition (2010-2012) as well as being a frequently published author.