ONLINE COURSE
Photo Exhibitions That Made History: What Can We Learn from Them?
The experience of viewing photographs in a deliberately designed exhibition space is fundamentally different than seeing the images on a digital display or the printed page. In the history of photography, there are certain significant photo exhibitions that you encounter again and again. What made these exhibitions in particular stand out and retain their relevance today?
This course is for people who want to develop a deeper understand of how the presentation of images in a physical space can — or has, historically — created new narratives and perspectives. We will look at historical group photography exhibitions and consider questions such as: what types of images were exhibited? how were the photographs displayed? who were the photographers? who were the organizers? why are these exhibitions still remembered today?
Participants will visit an exhibition on their own during the course, document it photographically, and make a presentation to the group. Through lecture, discussion, and mutual analytical exercises, we will learn how individual 20th-century photography shows — ranging from New York to Johannesburg to Tokyo — became landmark exhibitions and how they can inform our storytelling today.
Dortje Fink is an art and photography historian, educator, cultural organizer and podcaster based in Berlin. With academic training at Humboldt University in Berlin and Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, her research interests involve photographic archives, exhibition histories, lens-based media art, visual culture, biases of canonization, and decentering the history of photography. Her deep engagement with works of Carrie Mae Weems, Philip Kwame Apagya, Boris Mikhailov, Martin Chambi, Nickolas Muray, and Manfred Paul has inspired her writing, which has been published in exhibition catalogues and magazines. Since 2014, she has been working with C/O Berlin — an exhibition space dedicated to photography and visual media. She hosts, along with Julia Wolf, the German podcast “rein theoretisch – Fotografisches mit Fink&Wolf” about photographs whose visibility is restricted for a variety of reasons.
Dortje teaches the history of photography for StrudelmediaLive.