photography from germany after 19892
Photojournalism most comfortably finds its home on the pages of popular magazines, newspapers and journals. As part of our daily serve of current affairs and news, it plays an important role in shaping the ways in which we understand the world around us. Images of troubled hot spots from across the globe cropped and captioned, give us a neatly packaged and media sanctioned view of the world. Photos of war-torn Bosnia, Rwanda and Timor sit beside images of refugees in Australia-seeming equally distant from the comfortably cocooned world of the average viewer. Framed within the context of investigative journalism and reportage, these images offer up cultural stereotypes as a glimpse of 'how the other half live'. Feeding our sense of curiosity and provoking feelings of sympathy, photojournalism helps us contain the confusion and chaos that encapsulates our world.
lt is in this way that photojournalism, like other forms of popular media, can often have the curious effect of bringing the global community closer together while at the same time making us feel further apart. In an increasingly globalised world , photojournalism often gives us the impression that the world is both shrinking and expanding, unifying and dispersing. The World as One: Photography from Germany after 1989 investigates the ways in which photojournalism, freed from the commercial demands of popular media and repositioned within the context of contemporary art practice, can offer critical and creative ways of looking at the world. Asking us to examine the relationship between aesthetics and journalism, The World as One challenges the ways in which the mainstream media facilitates our easy consumption of images of horror and devastation.
Curated by Ulf Erdmann Zeigler, The World as One