SCAN TARRAGONA International Photography Festival The city of Tarragona is the setting for a new edition of the SCAN Tarragona photographic festival, an international event established in 2008 by the Catalan Autonomous Regional Government and the Tarragona City Council. The new project is being coordinated by the Fundació Forvm per la Fotografia. The new SCAN Tarragona will be held biennially. Exceptionally, this coming edition will be held during the months of November and December 2010 and the opening week will be on 4, 5 and 6 of November. Future editions will be held in the month of June. Although the SCAN Tarragona festival will be biennial, under the new project it is planned to have a continuous programming of photographic activities in the widest interdisciplinary sense. The aim is for SCAN Tarragona to be a continuous project in time; for its trademark to be identified with photography and for it to be enjoyed by the city in all its aspects: exhibitions, talks and workshops, also in the periods between one festival and another. SCAN Tarragona is a festival with an open nature and an international vocation. It brings together initiatives from a wide range of public and private origins and is aimed at promoting photography. It aims to be a meeting point for the creative photography sector and, above all, to allow the general public to enjoy an interesting offer of exhibitions and activities. To make this possible, SCAN Tarragona can count on the loyal and enthusiastic participation of the city’s cultural agents: institutions, organisations, museums and foundations that manage cultural and art educational 1 institutions. They will all help to nourish the festival programme with high-quality content of artistic interest. In the SCAN Tarragona programme as a whole there are two activities that stand out and give form to the philosophy of the festival. The first is Talent Latent, an expositive project to promote new international artists who are selected with the collaboration of numerous Spanish and foreign professionals. The second is the international seminar, an activity of reflection devoted to subjects related to the theory of the image, education and thought revolving around photography, which is organised with the collaboration of the Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona. Talent Latent The Talent Latent exhibition, to be held this coming autumn, will present a magnificent international showcase for emerging European artists previously selected by the exhibition organiser, Jesús Micó, who has reviewed the work of hundreds of European photographers thanks to the invaluable collaboration of the international specialists who helped set up the major database that is the backbone of the Talent Latent experience. The final selection offers an ample representation of the most important stylistic lines and thematic areas of European contemporary creative photography. These range from personal identity and the body to social condemnation and political reflection; from the autobiographical diary –internal and intimist– to classic reportage – exterior and exogenous; from captured photography –which freezes the occurrence and real flow of life– to constructed photography –staged, set up, fictionalised–; from photography that aims to be objective and neutral notarial to the unashamedly subjective –more evocative and narrative, paraliterary ; from photography vérité to that which has been retouched; from the increasingly infrequent analogical photography to the already completely ubiquitous digital photography, etc. Our idea has been to select works in which the viewer would find a certain flow of affinities between the diverse projects presented. The aim has been to produce a collective exhibition, although not a simple exhibition of thirteen completely extraneous and independent works. It is evident that the wealth of Talent Latent is in its polyhedric view of contemporary photographic creation, but it is also clear that the mission of an exhibition organiser is to gestate a symphony of projects that, despite their independence of proposals and forms, are not completely exclusive of each other. The idea that the viewer would be able to begin an itinerary and transition fairly smoothly between the different genres and subjects presented is what has led to the final selection of these thirteen excellent artists. Artists: Toni Amengual (Spain), Rosa Basurto (Spain), Marc Beckmann (Germany), Tomás Correa (Spain), Cécile Decorniquet (France), Lucía Herrero (Spain), Anastasia Khoroshilova (Russia), Sabine Koe (Austria), Rafael Lafuente (Spain), Juan Carlos Martínez (Spain), Danaé Panchaud (Switzerland), Oliver Roma (Spain) and Levi van Veluw (Holland). Curator: Jesús Micó Coordination: Josep Rigol Coordination for the Tarragona City Council: Jordi Abelló and Joan Pons With the support of: ESPIMSA and Hewlett-Packard 5 November 2010 - 9 January 2011 Inauguration Friday 5 November at 19.30 2 Tuesday - Friday 16.00 - 21.00. Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays 11.00 - 14.00 16.00 - 21.00. Closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Mercat Central Plaça Corsini, s/n Organised by: SCAN Tarragona Tel. 977 223 118 [email protected] www.scan.tarragona.cat Seminar Why Photography Matters as a Document as Never Before? With Jean-François Chevrier, Steve Edwards, Jessica May, John Roberts, Rudolf Stumberger and Ian Wallace. A seminar led by Jorge Ribalta Introduction This seminar on the statute of the documentary idea in today’s photography offers a response to Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), presented as the definitive book for understanding why and how, in the last three decades, photography has progressively become the hegemonic and paradigmatic practice in contemporary art. With this book, Fried, the leading formalist Anglo-Saxon critic of the second half of the twentieth century (together with Clement Greenberg, of whom he is considered to be the heir), seems to reach a culmination of his career, which has developed around concepts such as absorption and theatricality. Fried became influential with his critique of minimalism “Art and Objecthood”, published in 1967. Since then he has built his own conceptual language-world through his writings, in which he has defended a notion of artistic autonomy based on categories of pure visuality and the spectatorship conditions implicit in modernist painting. Fried has published important monographs on the work of mid-19th-century canonic modern artists such as Manet, Courbet and Menzel and has become a major advocate for post- war American abstract painting. He has defended this modernist tradition, as opposed to post-1960s conceptual and minimal practices, by establishing a structural antagonism between visuality and theatricality. This antagonism is not free of the consequences of ethical and political judgment and its inherent notion of artistic autonomy does not identify with that of Theodor Adorno, for whom the very idea of the autonomy of art is in itself a political idea. What does it mean when the intellectual trajectory of the most paradigmatic post-war modernist critic culminates in a discussion on photography? It is paradoxical that an art of description and documentary such as photography may be argued as the culmination of a long tradition of modernist visuality. And it is arguable that photography constitutes the contemporary paradigm of artistic autonomy, precisely when photography has been (and still is) theorised as a questioning, a transcending or a materialist negation of the ideal of aesthetic autonomy itself. The inherent referential condition of photography and its role in the constitution of a documentary culture in the 3 20th century mean that its artistic autonomy is at least ambiguous and problematic, as Walter Benjamin canonically argued in the 1930s. This conference takes Fried’s book as a polemical reference in order to discuss the artistic, epistemic and public status of photography and the documentary idea today. Rather than celebrate the book, it is a contribution to a definition of its possible meaning in the present context, also determined by a new actuality of debates on the document. What is this book symptomatic of? The conference opens the debate by proposing a dichotomy between art and document, between a formalist understanding of artistic autonomy, on the one hand, and, on the other, a Frankfurt School-derived discourse (with its multiple ramifications) that understands photography as part of the larger problem of technological arts and its cultural and social inscription and as part of the modern debate on realism. This permanently open dichotomy can be situated in the long-enduring aesthetical-political debates that since the nineteenth century have generated opposing artistic cultures throughout this period. In this respect, Fried’s approach completely overlooks the documentary culture produced around photography, which is both an artistic and a political culture that cannot simply be abandoned or forgotten by the supposed triumph of photography as art. Or, if it is, the consequences of that abandonment and oblivion should also be addressed. Programme The programme is divided into three parts, with two talks each. The talks will follow each other without a break and there will be a panel discussion with the two speakers at the end of each part. 11.00 Introduction by Jorge Ribalta. 11.30 – 14.00 “Modernity and document: how did the birth of the documentary idea circa 1930 reinforce or problematise the