Sunday Seminar | The Moving Page: At the Crossroads of Cinema and Photobook

The Stedelijk Museum proudly presents a program on the relations between cinema and photobooks, in conjunction with the exhibition Ed van der Elsken - Camera in Love ( Feb 4 – May 21, 2017).

The exhibition focuses on the renowned Dutch artist’s works of different media: photographs, films, books, and slide projections. This program, consisting of talks and a performance lecture, zooms in on the multidisciplinary relation between films and books in Ed van der Elsken’s oeuvre and beyond.

Guest speakers:
- Curator of Photography Hripsimé Visser (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam)
- Head of the photo collection Roland Fischer-Briand (Austrian Film Museum)
- Curator Tamara Berghmans (FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerp)
- Artist Paulien Oltheten (lives and works in Amsterdam and Paris)
- Creative director and publisher Lesley A Martin (The PhotoBook Review, Aperture)
- Freelance curator and researcher Daria Tuminas (lives and works in Amsterdam)

Photobooks such as Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank (1954) are often described as having “cinematic flair,” “a quasi-cinematic non-linear narrative,” or “raw cinematic stream-of-consciousness.” But what exactly constitutes this “cinematic” feel of photobooks? Is it coming from the sequencing of pictures or from other elements? Is the orchestration of photographs in a photobook similar to montage techniques, or might it turn out to be a completely independent practice? Can we see a photobook as a platform for moving images? And finally, what is the range of the relations between cinema and photobook? Starting from these questions, the guest speakers will discuss what the “cinematic” can mean in the context of photobooks. 

The broader discussion on the subject appears in the new spring issue of The PhotoBook Review, produced collaboratively by Aperture and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The issue will be launched during the event of The Moving Page: At the Crossroads of Cinema and Photobook, and all the visitors will receive their copies of the newspaper.

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Hripsimé Visser is curator of photography at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and curator of the exhibition Ed van der Elsken - Camera in Love. Working for the Stedelijk Museum since 1990, she has been responsible for the collection policy for photography and curated many exhibitions such as Jeff Wall (2014), Rineke Dijkstra (2004), Sam Taylor-Wood (2002), and Thomas Struth (1998). She has contributed texts to many books, catalogs, journals, and magazines, including Perspektief: Magazine for Photography, European Photography, and Kunstschrift.

Roland Fischer-Briand, is the co-Founder and editor of STREULICHT, a magazine for photography and related matters, a visiting professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the curator of  Antonioni’s Blow-up and photography (2014); Colorful Lucency – Transparent Sills of the 1920s and 1930s (2016); and Film Stills. Photography between Advertising, Art and the Cinema (2016). He is head of the photo collection at the Austrian Film Museum, where he is also in charge of the special collections of Dziga Vertov and Michael Haneke. He is currently preparing a publication about cinematic photobooks.

Tamara Berghmans is curator of the collection department at FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerp in Belgium. She has a PhD in Art History, has worked as an assistant curator of photography at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and has lectured at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. She is the author of several publications, including Looking for Love on the Left Bank (2013) and Artiste photographe—Photographe d’artistes (2017).

Paulien Oltheten is an artist working with video, photography, texts, and performance. Oltheten studies the daily street routines, rituals, and body language of people in public spaces from around the world. She graduated from the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and in 2013 she was a resident artist at ISCP, New York. Since 2017, she works at Cite des Arts in Paris.

Lesley A. Martin is creative director and publisher of The PhotoBook Review (Aperture), a newsprint journal dedicated to the evolving conversation surrounding the photobook. Her writing on photography has been published in Aperture, American Photo, FOAM, and Lay Flat, among other publications. She has edited over seventy-five books of photography and has curated several exhibitions. In 2015, she was named a visiting critic to the Yale MFA photography program.

Daria Tuminas is a freelance curator and researcher. In 2014, she co-organized the annual Dutch Photography Experience, which included a series of educational events in St. Petersburg as well as an exhibition on Dutch photobooks, Undercover. She continued with the next photobook related project and exhibition – Reading a Photobook – and is currently busy with the research on the relations between cinema and photobook within which she guest edited the spring 2017 issue of The PhotoBook Review. The research was kindly supported by Mondriaan Fonds

CREDITS

This program has been made possible with the support of the University of Leiden.
Organizing curator: Daria Tuminas
Advising curators: Hripsimé Visser (curator of photography), Britte Sloothaak (assistant curator) Publication partner: Lesley Martin (creative director, Aperture – The Photobook Review) Communication partner: Lesley Martin (Aperture – The PhotoBook Review)
Production: Henri Sandront (producer, Stedelijk Museum)