Heterogeneous Objects

de Raphael Pirenne, Alexander Streitberger

Heterogeneous objects provides various essays that explore the encounter of photography with other media since the 1960s. The essays offer new ways of thinking about photography beyond modernist notions of medium specificity and autonomy based upon the idea that a photograph does not rely on a coherent system of codes but is almost always encountered as a fragmented, partial object. Addressing recent debates in art history and photography theory, film studies, and media theory, the contributions cover a broad array of approaches, relating photography to issues of the panorama, surveillance, sculpture, transformation and processuality, and the development of new media categories. Rather than conceiving of photography as a medium, the aim is to reconsider the photograph as a historically, theoretically, and culturally embedded heterogeneous object that is always related to, in contact with, or shaped by other media.