Foam x The Hmm:
Photography is...
Foam joins forces with digital culture platform The Hmm for a series of online talks. In Photography is..., we investigate how internet culture permeates and alters different layers of photography—extending the photographic field exponentially. How does our relationship with the photographic image shift and change to the internet's cultural and technological developments?
This online event series is designed for everyone curious about the photographic medium's evolution in the digital age. Are you intrigued by the future of visual culture online? Join us as we examine photography's changing face in our image-saturated world.
11 December 2024: Photography is... surreal
(Re)interpreting reality in photography.
In our image-saturated world, where real images can win an AI image award and fake images are believed to be true, how is the photographic medium surpassing our sense of reality? And how is the medium going beyond its own 'reality', its traditional, two-dimensional forms? The final event of the series explores the variety of photographic expressions that emerge from the internet, embracing the changing medium in all its weirdness and surreality.
Traditionally, the photographic medium has held a certain claim on the truth. From its invention, a photo was seen as the ultimate document of reality, even though early on manipulation and framing were part of the medium. Fueled by digital technologies, the possibilities to edit, alter and construct images grew exponentially and embedded itself within internet cultures. Manipulating, appropriating, and even generating visual material is very much part of the language of the internet, diverging more and more from any original meaning or reality. What is the impact of such imagery, that is increasingly harder to connect to something that exists in the world?
Speakers
Sarah Amrani: visual artist based in Rotterdam with an ongoing fascination for beauty standards, female cultural identity and its representation.
Jason Koebler: Cofounder of 404 Media and was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard.
Silvia Dal Dosso: Multidisciplinary artist and researcher of digital technologies. Co-founder of Clusterduck, an art collective that works across research, design, and transmedia.
Francesco Luzzana (kamo): Media artist, founder of the project Smartphone Camera Obscura.
Linda Dounia Rebeiz : Artist, designer, and writer interested in the philosophical and environmental implications of technocapitalism.
13 November 2024: Photography is... text
Exploring text as an image-making technique.
From typing in an image search query to inadvertently helping train machine learning algorithms by 'selecting all images with traffic lights', text can be seen as the internet’s middleman. Whether it's captions underneath social media posts or textual metadata in online image archives, our relationship with images online is largely mediated through words. Machine learning algorithms are trained on large datasets of text-labeled photographs and with the recent rise of AI image generating tools, a photorealistic image can be created online through a simple textual prompt.
What do these fast-paced developments in image-making techniques—when text literally becomes the image—mean to the photographic landscape? How are AI systems codifying large datasets of photographs through text? And how does textual bias in large language models influence image outcomes and the visual landscape as a whole? Photography is... text explores the impact of text on our understanding of photography online.
Speakers
Simone C Niquille: Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher. Through technoflesh Studio she produces films and writing that investigate computation as the new optics. Her work is concerned with vision technologies, the images they make and the worlds they create - from computer vision, 3d animation, computational photography to synthetic training datasets. Her work advocates for non-binary technology and against machine learning as a tool to validate and instrumentalize assumptions and reduce reality.
Gregory Eddi Jones: Gregory Eddi Jones is a post-photographic artist, writer, and publisher based between Philadelphia and New York. Jones' work is grounded in methods of appropriation and the re-authorship of existing photographic, literary, and aesthetic traditions. His practice often engages with visual criticism, dark humor, cultural commentary, and building conversant bridges between past and present cultural, political, and technological conditions.
Idil Galip: Idil Galip is a lecturer in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam. She studies internet memes and runs the Meme Studies Research Network. She will talk about images and photos as a form of communication, focusing on a trend where AI-generated images combined with a memetic caption turn into immersive experiences.
16 October 2024: Photography is... hoarding
Navigating the endless flood of digital images
In 2024, an estimated 1.94 trillion photos will be taken worldwide, with 5.3 billion photos captured daily, or 61,400 per second. With approximately 14.3 trillion photos in existence, and 14 billion images shared daily on social media, it seems like we have a hoarding problem. We often forget that behind the immaterial metaphors of ‘the cloud’ are real, physical technologies. The storage of these vast amounts of data requires extensive energy and infrastructure, contributing to carbon emissions while we mindlessly save every moment from our phones to the cloud.
Yet, this abundance of digital imagery also serves a vital social purpose. Photographs have become powerful tools for social justice, serving as a witness of human rights abuses and environmental crises. Activists and citizen journalists wield their cameras to document injustices and share vital information online, often putting their safety on the line in the process. The act of saving and sharing these images, in the face of censorship or erasures, amplifies voices and preserves important narratives that might otherwise be silenced.
This duality raises pressing questions: What is the value of a single photograph in a flood of digital images? How do we balance the need to document significant events with the environmental impact of our digital habits? How will we store and preserve these large quantities of visual data?
Speakers
Anouk Kruithof: Anouk Kruithof is a visual artist with a trans-disciplinary approach which encompasses sculpture, photography, collage, video, books, websites and (social) interventions in the public domain. The scope of her world view extends from environmental pollution and the consequences of climate change to government surveillance practices, privacy to inequality and protest.
Oscar Talbot: Oscar Talbot is an academic working on abolition and ecology, and has been helping the Netherlands Student Intifada Archive project. This archive preserves the student uprising, documents police violence, shapes the narrative, and learns for future protests.
Razan AlSalah: Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, Canada.
11 September 2024: Photography is... reflective
What can the past tell us about photography's future?
Building on photography’s inherent reflective nature, sometimes it's worth 'looking backward to the future'—to examine our past as a way to look ahead. In the first event of the Photography is… series, we will take stock of the current landscape of photography by reflecting on the ways in which internet culture has shaped photography in the past 30 years.
The entanglements between the internet and the photographic image have led us to question what is even considered a photograph and to redefine how photographic images are created, consumed, and communicated online. During this event, we'll return to Foam Magazine #29: Curating the Future—an issue dedicated to envisioning the future of the medium. At that time, nearly thirteen years ago, the introduction stated that “the digitalisation of the medium brought about fundamental changes that have redetermined our entire visual culture, utterly transforming what we consider to be a photo".
What should photography have been like today, according to the past? Which topics and questions do we return to repeatedly when thinking about the internet's impact on photography? Which questions are still left unanswered? Together with a handful of the original contributors to the issue, we will peek back into the past to reflect on what has occurred since to speculate what might come.
Speakers
Fred Ritchin: Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography School. Author of four books on photography. His newest book, The Synthetic Eye, is forthcoming in 2024.
Constant Dullaart: Artist, director Distant.Gallery and professor Networked Materialities at ADBK-Nürnberg.
Marisa Olson: Artist, writer and curator.
Full programme
11 September 2024: Photography is... reflective
What can the past tell us about photography's future?
Speakers: Fred Ritchin, Constant Dullaart and Marisa Olson.
16 October 2024: Photography is... hoarding
Navigating the endless flood of digital images
Speakers: Anouk Kruithof, Oscar Talbot, Razan AlSalah.
13 November 2024: Photography is... text
Exploring text as an image-making technique
Speakers: Simone C Niquille and Gregory Eddi Jones.
11 December 2024: Photography is... surreal
(Re)interpreting reality in photography
Speakers: Sarah Amrani, Jason Koebler, Silvia Dal Dosso, Francesco Luzzana (kamo) and Linda Dounia Rebeiz.
explore connections
Foam x The Hmm:
Photography is...