Forget About Digital vs. Analog!

In conjunction with the exhibition Unsafe to Dance featuring the work of Hungarian artist Peter Puklus, C/O Berlin will be holding a panel discussion entitled Forget About Digital Vs. Analog! / New Concepts of Photography.

Digital versus analog: Is it still even a relevant dichotomy? How are contemporary photographers, artists, curators, and publishers challenging this binary and thinking beyond these ostensibly fixed poles? And what new artistic strategies are emerging as a result? The sweeping changes in the photographic medium since the advent of digitalization have altered not just how photographs are produced but also how they are used, perceived, and presented in everyday life. New photographic practices are constantly emerging, with photographers moving beyond the purely photographic and leaving classic narrative structures behind.

The increasing use of cross-overs, sampling, remixing, appropriation, and sharing is making established genres more fluid and opening up new possibilities for experimentation. Photography is slowly breaking free from its former confines and conquering three-dimensional space. Rather than merely depicting reality or capturing a specific moment in time, photography is giving material form to processes that are still ongoing and experiments with no final outcome. Established approaches to dealing with the photographic image are being explored and challenged through the use of different formats, forms of presentation, and materialities. The static image is being exchanged for a moving image, positive for negative, analog for digital—and then all turned back around again in the next iteration.

Bruno Ceschel from the London platform “Self Publish, Be Happy”, Simon Karlstetter from the magazine “Der Greif”, Ann-Christin Bertrand from C/O Berlin, and Peter Puklus reflect on the new theoretical and practical potentials of the photographic medium and discuss current approaches to art photography and its production and presentation.