#38 death, when you think about it
A third of the population never talks about death with their loved ones. The society of the global North has lost its natural attitude towards death. Through the ideal of infinite growth, consumer life, and the cult of eternal youth, death gradually became taboo. The presence of death has been delayed by society through a healthcare system focused on improving citizens’ physical condition, thus effecting the greatest possible delay to dying – not only in practice, but also within the collective consciousness of mainstream society. The importance and depth of the process of departure is reduced. One possible result is the suppression of fears connected to the end of life, which make it impossible to experience life in the present.
For theorists of photography such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, the medium of photography was itself a kind of death or its imprint. As Sontag points out: “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.” The fragile line between death and life has been the subject of art since antiquity. What are the forms taken by the topic today? It might be difficult to go through all the layers of emotion that surround our cessation, but we will try to imagine the diverse moments of encountering death and the different perspectives one might adopt, with the aim, ideally, of accepting respect and gratitude for life, allowing us to perceive it in the present. The art of accepting death at that moment can become the art of living.
#41 postdigital photography — Profiles
Filip Láb

Filip Láb, who died unexpectedly and prematurely in May 2021, was not only a prominent theorist and teacher of photography, but was also one of a generation of artists that dealt with the shift in political polarities and radical changes in the photographic paradigm…
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Eva and Franco Mattes

Two recent works by Eva and Franco Mattes – Personal Photographs (2019) and Nostalgia May 3, 2021 (2021) – invite us to see photographs, and their authors, as online platforms see them…
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Agnieszka Sejud

Apart from studying law in Wroclaw, the Polish author Agnieszka Sejud also studied at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. Her training, therefore, is in photography, even though she presents herself more as a visual artist and activist in her work, often as a member of the art duo KWAS, which she forms with her ICP classmate Karolina Wojtas…
Read moreTaste Fotograf #40
#41 postdigital photography — Profiles
Bára Mrázková

We see something, we don’t exactly know what. We want to find out; we enter the image into the search engine. It finds something, we don’t know exactly how, usually more or less the right thing…
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Sanaz Sohrabi

Although it might sometimes seem that way, photographs never exist in themselves. And this is doubly true of those made by machines or for archival or documentary purposes. As the art of Sanaz Sohrabi demonstrates, images (and particularly reproduced images) are part of often unwanted testimony embedded into dense nets of relationship…
Read moreContent
- ––– Topic
- Do you all just cry there?
- ––– Autorské knihy
- By the Sea: Photographs from the North East, 1976-1980
- Anonym 1968-1984
- Did You Know?
- White Gaze
- Peeing in Public: An inventory of the Wildest Urinators
- Myself, friends, lovers and others
- ––– Intro
- Death, when you think about it
- ––– Wanted
- Benedek Regős
- Gvantsa Jishkariani
- Pamela Kuťáková
- ––– Project
- Noémi Szécsi
- Dóri Lázár
- Jana Bernartová
- ––– Profiles
- Teresa Margolles
- Tereza Zelenková
- Urszula Kluz-Knopek
- Korakrit Arunanondchai
- Dalibor Chatrný
- Andrey Anro
- The Party of the Dead
- Kairus
- Oreet Ashery
- ––– Interview
- Interview with Carl Öhman by Kateřina Marková Data of the Dead: What We Leave Behind for Future Generations
- ––– Theory
- To Live the Coming Death
- ––– Events
- Letters from the Pandemic Era
- ––– Institution profile
- How Can the Spirit of Free Creativity and Community Connection be Preserved During a Pandemic and at a Time When Knowledge Is Made into an Economy?
- ––– Exhibition
- Between Worlds
- ––– Book reviews
- Incalculable Loss
- Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses
- The Metabolic Museum
- Invisible Museum
- The Imagination of Otherness
- Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
- ––– Artist's Books
- By the Sea: Photographs from the North East, 1976-1980
- Anonym 1968-1984
- Did You Know?
- White Gaze
- Peeing in Public: An inventory of the Wildest Urinators
- Myself, friends, lovers and others
Archive
- #35 living with humans
- #34 archaeology of euphoria
- #33 investigation
- #32 Non-work
- #31 Body
- #30 Eye In The Sky
- #29 Contemplation
- #28 Cultura / Natura
- #27 Cars
- #26 Documentary Strategies
- #25 Popular Music
- #24 Seeing Is Believing
- #23 Artificial Worlds
- #22 Image and Text
- #21 On Photography
- #20 Public Art
- #19 Film
- #18 80'
- #17 Amateur Photography
- #16 Photography and Painting
- #15 Prague
- #14 Commerce
- #13 Family
- #12 Reconstruction
- #11 Performance
- #10 Eroticon
- #9 Architecture
- #8 Landscape
- #7 New Staged Photography
- #6 The Recycle Image
- #5 Borders Of Documentary
- #4 Intimacy
- #3 Transforming Of Symbol
- #2 Collective Authorship
- #1 Face