
Often, they were placed in a line with my grandfather in the middle who - with his golden locks - looked like the typical aryan boy. He used this to shoot the German fortifications at Dueodde in all secrecy, where he was the official photographer of the German soldiers. During World War II, he became an eager part of the resistance, and he made a Voigtländer camera with a built in prism to make it possible to photograph around corners. He was a german teacher in primary school and rode a bike around Germany, which he knew quite well as a result. When he was just 10 years old, he had a box camera, and later on he got several other other cameras, always German. "My grandfather's name was Holger Jensen. By re-narrating the archival materials, signifying subaltern histories of the global south, the project tries to dig into social changes in contemporary history from below, uncovering the unconscious colonial memories that relate to the technological history of image production.
Phantasmagoria game song archive#
On one hand, the archive presents the identity of a social group in the context of the history of the city of Tehran after the Second World War, revealing the effects of the war and the subsequent economic devastation and bankruptcy of smaller cities, but on the other hand it also underlines the entanglements between the global and the local in relation to the effects of grand political events and of foreign film productions, especially Bollywood and Yugoslav partisan films, on an isolated working-class neighbourhood in the south-west of Tehran. For most surviving images known across time, however, their geniuses and roles will always be questioned.īy conducting a historical analysis of archival images from a working-class immigrant community – taken by a local itinerant photographer, Gholamreza Amirbegi – this art project attempts to present the relationship between class identity and means of production in Tehran in the period roughly between 19. Sometimes they lead to their own destruction, while at others they bring about their own process of resurrection. Our visual memories are like images continuing to migrate through space and time. Images of important nature have the inherent quality to condense and transform cultural memory, to reflect the past into the present and inspire the future. In this regard, the ultimate quality of an image lies in its openness, its mutability, and eventually in its fragility. From this perspective, images can be read differently depending on the context and audience, hence they become questionable and controversial. Tactile or visual impressions intervene in the discourse that constantly shapes memory and transform space-time contexts in which the individual is inserted. Images mediate between what is “real” and the construction of the narrative. Among them are Walter Benjamin’s idea of the image and the imaginary.įrom fiction to research to documentary, history is a construct of images attempting to define our perception of events. Contemporary scholars in the field of visual communication remain determined to identify and describe these many processes. Hence, unlike walking or reading, we are less aware of the many processes that contribute to what we see.
Phantasmagoria game song how to#
Throughout our history humans had to learn the process of walking, talking, how to write and read, but not how to see. In his 1990 book ‘Eye and Brain’ Richard Gregory wrote: “We are so familiar with seeing that it takes a leap of imagination to realize that there are problems to be solved.”
