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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathArchive—post/photographic
 
Nudes (Ruff, Thomas), 2002Volume I (Fröhlich, Fred)
 
 
 

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His series «Nudes» (begun in 1999) is based on pornographic images from the Net (whether by amateurs or ‹professionals›).

A completely different examination of the private photo archive under digital conditions can be found in work by Jörg Sasse. His work refers less to the contemporary post-photographic private archive, rather it is more a look back at the photographic archive—using digital means. [73] He collects large volumes of discarded private photographs—for example by buying up old photography at flea markets, etc. The images are scanned, looked through, selected—many of them are briefly touched up, a few others are decidedly worked over. Sasse does not try to dissect the image patterns, which strictly regulate the apparently so spontaneous and private family photograph, rather he attempts to remove them from the digitalized photographs or shift them by making a discreet incision. The viewer thus becomes aware of what he or she ‹naturally› saw—that is, did not see. [74]

A further, unfortunately not yet executed project by Sasse is his world image archive in the World Wide

 

Web. His original idea was to allow all users to create connections between photographs randomly selected from Sasse's archive. The users would have been able to indicate whether in their opinion the images went together well or poorly (on five levels). With time, a kind of topography was to develop from which a conventional photographic image awareness would have been able to be gauged (this form of dealing with images was already been achieved, however, in photoblogs such as flickr.com; refer to the section «cameraphone canada car cat» in Kathrin Peters' contribution «Instant Images.») This ‹set-up for an experiment› could or should have achieved a ‹democratic› [75] reconstruction of the image patterns on which the private photo archive is based—beyond the reconstruction of such patterns using expensive and exclusive image analysis software in the service of military or monopoly-capitalist adjustments of the collective visual memory (the commercial formatting of the archive is the subject of work «Volume I» by Fred Fröhlich.)

Alexandria and the avant-garde

The opportunities provided by digitalization soon

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