Please Note: This event has expired.
Launched in October 2012, the FotoFocus Biennial is a regional, month-long celebration of photography and lens-based art in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Biennial brings together the community to celebrate October as the Month of Photography. The FotoFocus Biennial will return in October 2016 with exciting new exhibitions, screenings, lectures, and performances by artists, curators, critics, and art world professionals, all focused on the theme: Photography, the Undocument. Participating venues throughout the region are invited to address the Undocument theme as they plan their upcoming exhibitions. The ArtHub will return and feature programs and events throughout the month-long celebration. #FotoFocus2016
Photography, the Undocument
The FotoFocus Biennial 2016 Theme
Photography is identified with objectivity, documentation, and realism. Yet the medium essentially abstracts the visible world, reducing its surfaces to two dimensions, editing down to a narrowly chosen single frame, and often presenting the world in black and white. Digital technologies of recent decades, allowing for seamless manipulation of photographs, have further eroded photography’s documentary authority. Surrealism historically played on these contradictions, conjuring from within the photographic image the eerie, the uncanny, and the outright bizarre. “Beauty will be convulsive,” wrote André Breton in 1928, referring to art’s ability to break the surface of realism, of the everyday, to reveal sudden insights, even truths. The Undocument is an exploration of alternate understandings of the documentary photograph—its claims to objective realism and simultaneous potential for pure fantasy.
For the FotoFocus Biennial 2016, participating venues are invited to propose exhibitions that examine the wide sphere of activity between photography’s documentary tradition and such challenged notions as “objectivity,” or “authenticity;” to photography as a means of questioning “realism” and “reality;” to photography as a medium easily capable of fictions of fabrications. While any photograph may be examined through the lens of the subjective, the artificial—as an un-document—projects that emphasize and actively explore this idea in a given body (or bodies) of work are strongly encouraged.
