ACCESS // EXCESS
Collage, Assemblage and Montage as exploratory practice and access to violence in documentary media
TEACHING
SYNOPSIS
This seminar concerns itself with documentary photographs and images that deal with violence — and with the access they seem to promise. That access is never simply given. What reaches us at all depends on relations of power, on who was in a position to photograph or create, and on what was allowed to circulate afterwards and under what conditions. Whatever we are granted access to exceeds what any image can hold — and this is precisely what makes the images necessary. Within the seminar we focus on massacres, genocide, the violence of war, structural annihilation as well as quieter forms of violence. Three questions guide this course: Under what relations of power is an image made (access)? Under what conditions is it granted credibility (trust)? And what does an image ask of us in return for what it shows (witnessing)?
The seminar moves historically, from early documentary projects of film and photography through the four photographs taken from inside Auschwitz-Birkenau to images circulating on social media today. Its methods are collage, montage and assemblage. Students work with them not as ways of illustrating an argument but as ways of pursuing one. Fragments are brought into relation, gaps are left open rather than closed, and the work of construction stays visible — and therefore open to discourse.