Fotografiet som dokument

Abstract

Departing from John Roberts’ notion of “the social ontology of photography”, I discuss how recent research and theories about photography in an expanded field have interacted with contemporary art’s use of photography in recent years, especially in an intersection between documentary and art, and especially among artists working with more or less political topics such as migration and the postcolonial. It is photography beyond “the politics of representation” in the sense that it is not about problematizing photography’s relationship to reality, but rather about actively using the medium as a social encounter and making hitherto unseen, sometimes personal and memory-based, material from the “archive” visible. Common to many of these recent works is that they incorporate several forms of photography and photographic archive material in an effort to convey, revitalize and possibly also criticize various historical issues, here linked to Danish colonialism and migration. Whereas Danish art institutions historically have had problems including documentary practices, they have embraced these new “mixed” forms more recently. In 2022/2023, three exhibitions at Copenhagen art institutions brought such practices into focus, and the article is based on examples of the use of photography in them: Moments in Greenland with Inuuteq Storch (with John Møller) and Teit Jørgensen at Nordatlantens Brygge, Tina Enghoff 's Displaced at the Royal Danish Library, and Vladimir Tomić’s and Ana Pavlović’s works in the group exhibition Connections — Danish artists from Ex-Yugoslavia at The National Gallery of Denmark.