curating the (im)personal and a(political)

It was Marx who said that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, which points to an insurmountable fact of life – the personal is political and the political is personal. Photography, as an expression of the human subjectivity, is too, therefore, fundamentally political. Photography emancipated the image from the painter’s brush and it allowed for the capturing of novel subjects, for the documentation of human squalor and horror. It posed such an ontological threat to visual art that the vilest of reactions was unleashed upon it by academicians and painters. The reaction was ineffective to say the least, for photography questioned matters of objectivity and technique – was it the photographer that produced the image or the camera? The hyper-democratisation of access to photography has undermined these pertinent questions, for the camera is used as an everyday technology (rather than a medium of art). The focus on the street, on the people, is central to (mis)understandings, for the profoundly anti-intellectual notion of a division between politics and ‘everyday life’ is explicitly rejected.

My migration experience was central to (mis)understandings, stimulating the documentation of entirely different time regimes across Europe. Subject matter like leisure, protest and the market were therefore juxtaposed to deconstruct the artificiality of the private/political maxim.