The Photobook Show
Can Photography Be Funny?
episode 9
Registration for this event is closed, but you can join our mailing list to hear about future events.
In this month’s show we ask Can Photography Be Funny? Photography can be a serious business, with imagery of conflicts, crisis, and chaos; very often, there is nothing to laugh about. This begs the question: what’s the place for humor in photography? In this episode, we’ll look at books that dabble with a most tricky thing: they try to be funny. This, of course, can go horribly wrong and take us into some dangerously shallow territory. Let’s hope that the joke is not on us when we look at books by Elliot Erwitt, Paul Kooiker, and Robert Cumming.
Watch the recording of this episode
Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
Stefan teaches the poetics of space, nighttime photography, and much more (including presenting The Photobook Show) for StrudelmediaLive.
vierundsechzig.de/f64/
