Description

ABSTRACT – Fotograf magazine

Fotograf magazine presents its first digital sample version for iPad available in English and achievable all over the world – on the occasion of publishing 21st printed issue.

Fotograf magazine printed version is a semi-annual, comprehensive, 120-page magazine that publishes the work of photographers and contemporary artists working in photography and related arts since 2002. It also publishes articles and reviews on the theory, criticism and philosophy of photography and visual arts.

Unlike most other publications Fotograf focuses on the theories that introduce readers to a specific topic. This gives individual issues a timeless aspect and provides readers the opportunity to refer back to specific issues of the magazine as study/reference material. Thus it provides additional value compared to standard art journals. Every issue documents and helps to create the shape of Czech photographic and artistic scene and serves as a connection within the international panorama. Fotograf magazine is part of platform, which enriched Fotograf gallery and Fotograf festival, all based in Prague, Czech Republic.


ABSTRACT – issue “on photography”

FOTOGRAF MAGAZINE # 21 (May 2013)
“on photography”

The issue “On Photography” quotes Susan Sontag in its title, but it is not meant to be an accompaniment to her theoretical essays. In the meanwhile, photography has become a social, already a different type, of medium than it was in the 1970s, when Sontag wrote her essays on photography. Since that time, photography has become a new establishment among the creative media; after its fast penetration into the upper echelons of artistic disciplines in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. The history and the medium’s essence itself were once again exposed to new questions in correlation with the evolution of digital photography, along with the related gradual disappearance of certain original photographic principles such as the negative-positive process, etc. This all culminated in the fully evident wave of interest among photographers in photography itself; whether it be with a nostalgic reaction to the gradual disappearance of one of its analogue forms, as previously stated: the negative-positive, chemical processes, darkrooms, or the quotation of photographic history and its discovering acts. Of course artists from previous generations have already explored the photographic medium as such, but their efforts were rather attempts to find new possibilities, to push existing boundaries (perhaps the most in the modernist period). However, the work of new artists and photography „about photography“ became a new phenomenon, which this issue will address.