Presented at the German Studies Conference, Montreal, October 4-8 2023.

A Tyranny of Intimacy: Stasi Surveillance & its Photographic Legacy
In what has been described as a ‘tyranny of intimacy’ in their heyday of the 1970s and 80s, the Stasi actively infiltrated private lives and domestic spaces with listening devices, video surveillance and house searches. As such, the surveillance regime undermined the spheres of private and public life for GDR citizens.

The Stasi Records Agency (BStU 1991-2021), now part of the Bundesarchiv has been highly active in securing remedial processes for those who were victimized during the period of the State Security’s existence, including repairing destroyed files, providing access to personal records, and access for academics, researchers, and artists to a range of material. This paper considers select photographic examples from the Stasi archive to think through the ways in which contemporary photographers have sought to create reparative interpretations of this material. These artistic projects are in line with the archive’s efforts to repair lost or damaged files, and as a reparative means to maintain an ongoing dialogue about this problematic history.

IMAGE: Excerpt from Simon Menner, Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archive, 2013.

Keynote Address: Times of Metaphor: A Symposium on the Temporal, Metaphorical, and the Still and Moving Image, Royal College of Art, London UK, 8 July 2022. Convened by Carmen Hannibal & Cole Robertson https://timesofmetaphor.wixsite.com/symposium.

In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson maintain that the essence of metaphor enables the “understanding and experiencing of one kind of thing in terms of another.” Metaphorical language, therefore, uses analogous frameworks to provide interpretive methodologies as a way to convey meaning. This sense of embeddedness is time itself, expressed through the material, experiential, and aesthetic qualities of the photographic, often considered by way of metaphor.

Bauhausler László Moholy-Nagy, enthusiastically embraced photography as an art form that might concretize the fourth dimension by integrating light with space and time. Through his writings and his photographic practice, Moholy embraced metaphor as a way of thinking beyond representation driving photography beyond the ability to provide a trace of something seen to that which lies beyond sight.
This paper takes the concept of photographic metaphor, or rather photographs as metaphor, to explore the ways that Moholy extended the medium to transform the experience of time and to represent another reality, that is both visually absent and beyond the physical.

Presented at Disaster Discourse: Representations of Catastrophe, University of Bucharest, 2-4 June 2022. https://engleza.lls.unibuc.ro/conferinte/

The mutual development of modernity with the photographic medium in turn-of-the-century Britain intersected with events of anarchy, natural and industrial disasters, conflict, and a global pandemic, recorded by the media for public consumption. One such disaster occurred in September 1916 when a German airship was shot down over Cuffley, Hertfordshire, with the fiery descent seen for miles around. The Cuffley disaster brought the madness of what was called ‘Zepp Sunday’, an event that was seared into public imagination and the media. Headlines such as “Zeppelin’s Last Gasp,” or “How the monster came down: scenes at the wreck,” are just a few that encompass the media coverage of this sensational event. This paper considers the ways in which the visual record was used to report such disasters accompanied by a burgeoning visual culture by way of postcards and stereo-views that were produced for public consumption and became active protagonists in the British propaganda campaign. Further it reflects on the changing aesthetics of disaster images driven by technological advancements, public desire, and media practice.

IMAGE: H. Scott Orr, The destruction of airship SL-11 near London Sept 1916

Presented at IMPACT, the AAANZ Conference, University of Sydney, 8-10 Dec 2021.

The mutual development of modernity with the photographic medium in turn-of-the-century Britain intersected with events of anarchy, urban tragedies, and a global pandemic. From the Clerkenwell explosion and mining disasters to the Spanish influenza and the Crystal Palace fire, the media recorded such events for the public in news articles increasingly accompanied by visual media such as drawings, engravings and later - photographs. This paper considers the ways in which the visual record was used to inform the public of such events, and the changing aesthetics of such images driven by technological advancements, public desire, and media practice. Enhancing the sense of spectacle driven by media and political propaganda, a burgeoning visual culture brought catastrophe and disaster into the homes of millions via the production of stereo views and postcards.

IMAGE: H. Scott Orr, The destruction of airship SL-11 near London Sep 1916

Presented at the Photographic Digital Heritage: Institutions, Communities and The Political, convened by Gil Pasternak (De Montfort), UK October 2021

In March 1942, the Director of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey made a public appeal via the BBC Radio. Godfrey requested listeners to send in holiday photographs and postcards of Europe, particularly places of potential military interest. Over 80,000 people responded with holiday snaps forming a comprehensive library that by 1944 totaled ten million images. Relevant photographs garnered from the public for Operation Overlord were incorporated into military briefing materials, along with maps and zero-elevation aerial photographs, then issued to assault troops in preparation for the invasion of France in June 1944. Over seventy years later, German photographer Simon Menner accessed the Imperial War Museum archive to digitize part of the collection for a photographic project that was not fully realized. This paper considers Menner’s engagement with these records as a means by which this obscure national achievement has come to light beyond military history research.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/photographic-digital-heritage-institutions-communities-and-the-political-registration-172665576387

Presented at the German Studies Association Conference, Indianapolis, USA, October 2021.

Andrè Breton considered the cast shadow as an ambiguous sign that is rigorously simultaneous with the object that it doubles. As a temporal and indexical agent for its referent, the shadow is both nondetachable in its presence and yet always already susceptible to its absence. Walter Benjamin likewise understood the shadow as treacherous and slippery in its refusal to be fixed by time and space. As a modernist
German photographer Ilse Bing consistently employed doubling by way of reflection
and shadow play in self-portraits and in her experiments with solarisation. Bing encountered Surrealism in Paris in the early 1930s and yet her shadow renditions both preceded and followed this period in her practice. This paper considers llse Bing’s Surrealist Turn as having an underlying continuity from her early work in Germany, through to her surrealist period in Paris, and her exile in New York. It contends that
Bing’s occupation with doubling in mirrors and shadows indicates an ongoing sense of displacement through this turbulent period of history and its aftermath in exile.

Presented at the Light Matters Symposium, UTS, 2019.

The question of what a photograph is has been central to discussions about the medium in our post-photographic era. Artists and scholars have questioned the ontological nature of what constitutes a 'photograph'? Where do they exist in the realm of data, pixels, or social media? This paper will instead consider the life of the photograph (both analog and digital) as an autonomous thing in terms of what they do, what happens to them, and where they go. Within the sheer deluge of images travelling around the globe, trapped in our phones and computers, many are lost, misplaced or unseen, or remain simply as latent images in our memory repositories. This position considers Barthes premise of the death of the author as a provocation to rethink the photograph and its afterlife.

IMAGE: Photo: Francois Lagarde, on 25th April 1979/Alamy

Photographic History Research Centre conference, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, June 2019

The Ministry for State Security for the German Democratic Republic (commonly known as the Stasi), established a mass-surveillance machine that recorded the everyday activities of its citizens and foreign interests, and so-called illegal activities such as escape attempts. This surveillance took the form of documents, audio recordings, moving footage, and approximately two million photographs. The function of Stasi surveillance was to obtain ‘operationally meaningful photos in the observation process,’ in order to gain true and objective evidence. To this end, the Stasi established a photography and observation school to train operatives in camouflage, microphotography, infrared, and surveillance photography. They also invested in the research and development of a large range of cameras and technologies in order to meet observational challenges. As costs increased into the 1980s, the Stasi administration investigated economical means of photographic surveillance.

This paper investigates the business of photography for the Stasi regime in terms of its operative surveillance goals in the face of economic reality, and the protocols and practices put in place in order to photographically record evidence that resulted in a real economic and social cost.

IMAGE: BStU Berlin

Material Practices of Visual History, Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, 18-19 June 2018.

Photographs in the Stasi archive were taken for the purposes of surveillance or evidence, and with a specific sanctioned audience in mind. Many of these photographs record the surveillance activities of the regime, or document traces of attempted and successful escapes from the GDR, with the photographs themselves stored in files, in envelopes, in negative holders, or pasted into pages with rudimentary notations. In 1989 Stasi officers attempted to destroy the evidence when citizens rampaged the offices in Berlin and Leipzig. This combination of happenstance and precise editing, complicated by the fact that the files and photographs were not intended for public consumption, has led to a certain amount of interpretation of the files that remain to some extent in flux.

This paper proposes that the means of interpreting the Stasi photographs is possible only by studying the material properties of the image and its context – such as the files, the notations, and the torn photographs, all forming a basis for understanding the archive’s purpose. The photographs themselves are read and interpreted within, and indeed they are dependent upon this context for their meaning. The material aspects of the photographic practices of the GDR are considered here as a means by which the archive can be appropriately analysed in terms of its own visual and material history.

IMAGE: BStU Berlin

New Territories: Landscape Representation in Contemporary Photographic Practices, Humboldt University, Berlin, June 2017.

Image: Thomas Struth

Photography.Ontology.Symposium, University of Sydney, 2-3 June, 2016.

From 1961 to 1989 the border between East and West Berlin became a focus for extreme surveillance activities by the border guards, the Stasi, the West Germans, the Americans and the British with hundreds of thousands of photographs taken every year. The border authorities recorded each escape attempt from East Germany in notes, sketches and photographs, which were used as evidence by the Stasi and then archived. Among these records are disturbing photographs of unsuccessful attempts, where subjects are forced to re-enact their escape attempts before the camera. This paper examines a selection of these photographs drawn from the Stasi archive by German contemporary photographer Arwed Messmer and other photographic records from London’s Imperial War Museum archive. The paper will consider these photographs both in terms of their use as evidence and as emotive records of oppression, fear and treachery.

IMAGE: Arwed Messmer, using a print, call number BStU MfS HA IX Fo 2180 Bl. 0004.

Passages of Exile Symposium, Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Dec 2016

From 1961 to 1989 the border between East and West Berlin became a focus for extreme surveillance activities by the border guards, the Stasi, the West Germans and the Allies with hundreds of thousands of photographs taken every year. The border authorities recorded each flight attempt from East Germany in notes, sketches and photographs, which were used as evidence and then archived. Among these records are photographs of evidence left behind such as briefcase, a watch or glove in addition to disturbing images of unsuccessful attempts, where subjects are forced to re-enact their escape attempt before the camera. On the western side of the Wall the British recorded East Germans successfully fleeing the oppressive regime through tunnels or hidden in car boots.

This paper examines a selection of photographs which operate as a sanctioned reparative process for the victims. These photographs, largely taken by unknown photographers, record the passage of exile travelled and experienced by large numbers of refugees escaping from the oppressive regime of the GDR, many of whom were processed by the Marienfelde Refugee Centre in Berlin. These emotive records of loss, despair and fear record the moment of stasis as a state of inbetween-ness, a neither here nor there, reflecting a temporal state of homelessness and unbelonging. The ways in which contemporary artists and art historians now interpret these photographs will be considered alongside an analysis of how emotion, memory and trauma are conveyed through the photographic medium.

IMAGE: Imperial War Museum, ESLDON BERNARD R (REVD.) HU 99609, HU 99582

Centre for Contemporary Photography. Walker Evans: Reading the Magazine Work, 7 October 2016.

In an interview in 1974 Walker Evans described photography in terms of its illusive nature as “the thing itself is such a secret and so unapproachable.” He thought of his simple and straightforward photography as an “unconscious phenomenon” that culminated in an amazing accident that arose so convincingly to speak to a generation of Americans. This paper will explore his photographs that imaged the ruin and decay of everyday life in America and what he called the “aesthetically rejected subject”.

IMAGE: Walker Evans, Damaged, 1928-30

Reframing Seeing and Knowing in the 21st Century Symposium, 20 February 2016. MAAS, Sydney

In this paper I examine the work of John Berger and Hito Steyerl to reconsider how contemporary photography interprets and represents recent history in an age of fragmented images.

Symposium information:

The act of seeing and looking has many layers. Who is doing the looking and why? What is being seen? How is this being communicated? How might this translate into knowing?

With John Berger’s ground breaking work, Ways of Seeing, now in its 44th year, what is it that we bring to seeing and knowing in the 21st century that is new? How might cultural, social and historical perspectives, technology, accessibility and scientific or art informed innovation contribute to interpretation of what is being seen? In a time when ‘media snacking’ on a constant stream of online visual images and text based information is the norm, what, if anything, has shifted in the way we see and know?