DORA :: Browsing by Author "Pasternak, Gil"

Browsing by Author "Pasternak, Gil"

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Amateur Photography, The Final Frontier: Developing Histories of Marginalised Popular Photographic Practices
(2014-06-16) Pasternak, Gil
My talk explored whether it is possible or desirable to position unaccounted for amateur photographic practices in relation to other dominant histories of photography. Considering how exclusive and limited the field of photographic history has been so far in its scope, I looked into photographic practices carried out away from photography’s professional and artistic spheres, within the domestic environment and its surroundings, as well as at one’s own leisure, as part of the convivial gatherings of photography enthusiasts. A great portion of the talk was dedicated to DIY analogue photographic processes, with a view to opening up the question of photographic history anew.
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“… And I will Live Forever”: The Intimate Politics of Family Photographs
(2012-09-18) Pasternak, Gil
This invited talk investigated the practice of family photography and its interrelationship with the social domain, with state politics, and issues of cultural difference, class, nationalism and racism. Addressing some visual examples taken from popular culture as well as from less conventional sources, my talk engaged with the fragmentary histories of family photography, and challenged some of the most prominent historical and sociological debates about family photographs. I questioned what political agency family photographs might contain within and beyond the narratives of family life and the domestic sphere. My talk coincided with Fiona Tan’s exhibition at the Gallery, whose artistic practice makes use of family photographs to explore private modes of representation and their meanings in broader social and cultural contexts.
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Artistic Occupation: Camouflaging Difference in Photographic Imagery of the Middle East
(2012-09-19) Pasternak, Gil
In this invited presentation I looked into processes of cultural exchange and hybridisation carried out in and through photographic practices and images. It focused on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century visual negotiations of social identities in the Middle East, in the light of colonialist expansion and military conquest. I demonstrated that these inform the visual vocabularies and subjectivities in question, complicating normative narratives about, and the perception of the peoples living in this geographical terrain.
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At Home with "Palestine": Performing Historical Photographs of the West Bank in Israeli Households
(Bloomsbury, 2020-07-23) Pasternak, Gil
This chapter offers insights into the multiple roles played by photography in the sociocultural embodiment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Looking into the emergence of photographic cultures in Israel of the post-1967 war period, it focuses on the participation of photographs that Jewish-Israelis captured within the West Bank in performances and celebrations of Israel’s 1967 war victory. Jewish-Israelis started flooding into this territory only a week after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war ended. Commonly carrying cameras, they subsequently took photographs in spaces that had just returned to accommodating more prosaic activities than armed conflict. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic work with local participants, the chapter demonstrates that the photographs that Jewish-Israeli citizens captured in the West Bank of that period informed their understanding of Israel’s claimed right to this territory alongside their perception of its Palestinian residents. Portraying the lives that the photographs have lived in the Jewish-Israeli household since that time, it argues that they helped Jewish-Israeli citizens cement their perceived historical relationship to the West Bank at the same time as they reassured the itinerants, their friends and families that their morality was intact, the situation in the country safe and their relationship with the Palestinians affable.
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At Home with Palestine: Performing Historical Domestic Photographs of the West Bank in Israeli Households
(2015-11-20) Pasternak, Gil
Only a week after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war ended, Israeli citizens began traveling to the territories conquered by the Israeli Defense Forces in the recent battles with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Commonly carrying cameras, they photographed in spaces that just returned to accommodate more prosaic activities than armed conflict. Drawing on my recent ethnographic fieldwork in Israel, this talk looked into the ways in which members of Israeli society perform their postwar photographs in the household nearly 50 years after their making. A large part of the talk considered photographs taken in the West Bank, which meanwhile the Palestinian people have fought over in their struggle for an independent Palestine state. Focusing on the types of situated knowledge that these photographs help shape in specific domestic settings, I argued that they give rise to complex life-worlds in which Israeli citizens turn back to the photographs to resist the prevalent, politically loaded reality in the country.
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“Bad Photos”: A Political Theorisation of Lomography
(2013-06-21) Pasternak, Gil
In recent years vernacular photographic practices have become integral participants in the formation of narratives within the media, the art sphere, as well as academic discourses on global and local political phenomena. What seems to have begun as a practice offering counter-narratives to those disseminated by authoritative sources has gradually been adopted by the latter as a means used to enhance their own credibility. This neutralization of alternative photographic forms of political narration has effectively deprived mainstream unprofessional photographic practices of their political diversity. In this paper I focused on the photographic practice of Lomography as an exploratory technology capable of reengaging viewers with the most fundamental complexities of the relationship between photography, the political and the politics of vision. Established in Vienna in 1992, the Lomographic Society International (LSI) has encouraged its members to use the former Soviet Union LOMO LC-A camera and its newly designed successors as an alternative, unpredicted and unstable image-making technology. Prompting Lomographers to obey no representational rules while also organising exhibitions to display their work on the democratic LomoWall, the LSI has effectively fostered a community of photographic image-makers preoccupied with the transformation of mundane realities into representational alter-realities that do not often conform to established and institutionalised visual regimes. Lomography, I argued, foregrounds an alternative vernacular visual politics which allows for the negation of the normative Kodak ideology, opening up the question of the relationship between photographic representation and politics anew.
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Beyond Intimacy: The Radical Conventions of Family Photography
(2012-10-03) Pasternak, Gil
Drawing upon my talk at the Photographers’ Gallery – “… And I will Live Forever” (18 Sept. 2012) – this talk expanded my investigation into the practice of family photography and its interrelationship with politics and the social domain. I questioned the political agency family photographs may contain within and beyond the narratives of family life and the domestic sphere. I looked into the visual formation and manifestation of cultural and social difference within the domestic environment, and the role family photographs play in the creation of knowledge, familiarity with the Other, and the enhancement of one’s social status. Addressing some visual examples taken from popular culture as well as from less conventional sources, the talk engaged with the fragmentary histories of family photographs, and aimed to challenge the commonly naive perception of this vernacular genre. A close attention was paid to advertising campaigns for point-and-shoot cameras, and the modes of photographic production they tend to propagate. By exposing family photographs as inherently connected to state and social politics, I expanded the current understanding of family photography and laid the groundwork for further studies of its potentially radical and subversive properties.
Open Access
Beyond the Familial Impulse: Domestic Photography and Sociocultural History in Post-communist Poland, 1989-1996
(Taylor and Francis, 2017-05-23) Pasternak, Gil; Ziętkiewicz, Marta
In 1994 the Jewish-Polish Shalom Foundation announced a photographic contest whose intention was to reconstruct the social and cultural histories of Polish Jews who lived in the geographical region of Poland before, during and after the Second World War. For this purpose the Foundation invited contributions from the public. Its initiative emerged shortly after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime in Poland, and alongside other similar projects that reflected the desire of Poland’s ethnic minorities to salvage their sociocultural histories – histories the communist government had virtually erased from the country’s formal historiography. In a short period of time the Foundation received more than seven thousand annotated photographs in response to its public appeal, most of which emanated from domestic photographic collections. As scholars interrogating domestic photography do not often have access to empirical data about the practices it entails, in this article we consider the Foundation photographic collection as a resource preserving invaluable information about the diverse uses and perceptions of photography in the sociocultural sphere. Yet, whereas existing scholarly literature in the field of photography studies tends to frame domestic photography with reference to affectionate familial behaviors allegedly common in democratic states, we introduce the Foundation collection as a case study that sheds light on domestic photographs created and maintained in a sociocultural environment that did not see democracy before 1989. Analyzing and discussing the various ways in which the photographs’ owners saw the photographs’ relationships with the broader politically unstable reality that has enclosed their production and preservation, our study diversifies some of the meanings and functions current literature often associates with domestic photographic collections.
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“The Brownies in Palestina”: politicizing geographies in family photographs.
(Bloomsbury, 2013-03) Pasternak, Gil
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Covering horror: family photographs in Israeli reportage on terrorism.
(University College London, 2009) Pasternak, Gil
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Crushing Communism, Realising Democracy: Public Photographic Displays and Polish Sociocultural Politics in the 1980s and 1990s
(2017-05-10) Pasternak, Gil; Zietkiewicz, Marta
Our paper explored attempts made by Polish intellectuals to reorganise Poland’s sociocultural politics between the 1980s and 1990s through the installation of strategic photographic displays that explicitly challenged the very foundations of communist philosophy. In doing so, we elaborated knowledge about the participation of photography in facilitating the gradual transition of Polish society to democracy. Analysing materials preserved in private collections and Polish public archives, we discussed a range of socially oriented curatorial practices typical to the period the paper considers. Primarily, however, we payed close attention to one series of public displays put together by Aleksandra Garlicka, including for example: Photography of Polish Peasants (1985); Workers (1989); Others Among Us (1992); and Polish Intelligentsia (1995). Garlicka was an academic who came to recognise photography’s political potential when she visited the exhibition The Family of Man during its 1959-60 installation in Poland – an exhibition originally curated by the New York MoMA in 1955 to disseminate western humanistic principles and democratic values. But Garlicka was able to start putting her photographic understanding to practice only when communist politics started weakening. Featuring photographs that she gathered through open public calls and in forsaken Polish archives, each of the displays she organized demonstrated that Poland’s historical social photographies (images as well as practices) simply do not support the ideas that ‘communist elites’ wanted the Polish people to accept as their reality and collective memory. Her initiatives inspired other Polish intellectuals and ethnic minority groups to embrace photography for the same and similar purposes. The sparse literature addressing photographic practices in the former Eastern Bloc tends to pay much attention to the role photography had played in the dissemination of formal politics. Through our paper, however, we broadened considerations of the role photography has also played in challenging Eastern European communist regimes, their official legacies and social as well as cultural politics.
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“The Devil of the West” and “the Satan of the East”: Studying Photography in Shifting Academic Landscapes
(2016-05-31) Pasternak, Gil
The study of photography in “western academia” is today more prolific than it has ever been in the history of photography. While, however, since the 1970s scholars in this environment have published a relatively large body of work about the photographic histories, practices, and cultures of numerous human geographies, the existence of sparse literature on central and eastern European photography remains one of the history of photography’s many curiosities. In this keynote talk I traced the development of the study of photography as we know it in the so-called west against the shifting academic landscapes that have helped shape it since the 1970s’ flourishing academic interest in photography. Attending to the earlier complex relationship between photography and academia in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, I first showed that scholarly work on western photography and central and eastern European photography was equally scant before the 1970s. Analyzing the historiography of photography studies since then, I argued that the emergence and expansion of photography studies in “western academia” has been under the influence of research methodologies whose underpinning agendas (Frankfurt School cultural politics and the 1960s and 70 sociocultural revolutions in the "west") often render central and eastern European photography irrelevant to their aims.
Embargo
Diabeł z Zachodu i szatan ze Wschodu. Re eksja badawcza nad fotogra a wobec przemian we współczesnej nauce
(Society Liber pro Arte, 2017) Pasternak, Gil
The study of photography in “western academia” is today more prolific than it has ever been in the history of photography. While, however, since the 1970s scholars in this environment have published a relatively large body of work about the photographic histories, practices, and cultures of numerous human geographies, the existence of sparse literature on central and eastern European photography remains one of the history of photography’s many curiosities. In this book chapter I trace the development of the study of photography as we know it in the so-called west against the shifting academic landscapes that have helped shape it since the 1970s’ flourishing academic interest in photography. Attending to the earlier complex relationship between photography and academia in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, I first show that scholarly work on western photography and central and eastern European photography was equally scant before the 1970s. Analyzing the historiography of photography studies since then, I argue that the emergence and expansion of photography studies in “western academia” has been under the influence of research methodologies whose underpinning agendas (Frankfurt School cultural politics and the 1960s and 70s sociocultural revolutions in the “west”) often render central and eastern European photography irrelevant to their aims.
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Dispersion
(2003) Pasternak, Gil
Photographic drawing produced as a composite of a set of distinct prints on the theme of familial history, lived experience and memory.
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Dominant Participants and Active Producers: Popular Photographic Cultures in Photography Studies
(2017-05-19) Pasternak, Gil
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, and for the first time in history, virtually all disciplines within the arts, humanities and social sciences have their own photography scholars. Historiographical at its core, in this paper I surveyed the development of photographic scholarship from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. I showed how the study of photography has gradually moved from exclusive examinations of photographic visual content to investigations of the social and cultural work photographs do in public and intimate environments alike. Through analyses of influential studies, I identified the origin of this transition in the prominent interest scholars took during the 1990s in popular practices of photographic production, uses and consumption. I argued that following their engagement with popular photographic cultures, photographic scholarship of the last two decades recognises photographs as underrated research resources. Photography studies have consequently began considering their contribution to the elaboration of historical, cultural and social studies through explorations of the visual, material and affective significance of photographs within professional, creative, and other everyday frameworks. In the twenty-first century, the popularisation of photographic practice through the incorporation of cameras into smart technologies makes it more difficult to imagine what the personal and collective experience of everyday life could be without photography. This reality turns photographs into organising forces of everyday lived experience, further accelerating scholarly interest in photographic mass production, and cementing the status of photographs as dominant participants in popular culture as well as its active producers.
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Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict
(Bloomsbury, 2020-07-23) Pasternak, Gil
This chapter explores the significance of cultural production to the realities and enactment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It demonstrates how tangible and intangible cultural products made by Israelis, Palestinians and others have determined what aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become visible and known, where, how and also to whom. Part of the text explains how scholarly literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has traditionally revolved around the so-called national and Marxist historiographical paradigms, studying (contested) national histories and endeavours, on the one hand, and critically analysing issues concerning social, economic and political sovereignty, on the other. Assessing the implications and the risks involved in focusing on national aspects and criticism alone, the chapter promotes the importance of cultural products as research sources that allow us to attend to issues of relevance to individual, social and political diversity. It suggests that in conceptualising cultural products this way, we will be able to access realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that go beyond its formal national and state politics, and open up subsequently posibilities to expand its historical imagination and pave the way towards inter-national dialogue in which each party can recognise the emotional and practical needs of the other with greater empathy.
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European Travellers in Palestine: The Issue of Trust and “Political Correctness” in the Otolith Group’s Nervus Rerum and Ursula Biemann’s X-Mission
(2012-11-19) Pasternak, Gil
In this talk I perused the visual traditions utilised in the Otolith Group's Nervus Rerum (2008) and Ursula Biemann's X-Mission (2008) with a view to investigating what support they offer to the informative and political values these two video essays diffuse. Both the Otolith Group and Biemann’s work focus on the perceived physical, political and existential conditions shared by Palestinian refugees. Nervus Rerum is explicitly preoccupied with the challenge of representing people who have no formal political representation. Likewise, X-Mission employs pseudo-scientific informative conventions to portray an incoherent Palestinian reality, isolated from the realities of any other refugees. I suggested that in both of these cases, the Palestinian people paradoxically emerge as “modern heroes”, engaged with political thought and in global politics while recognising a necessity to obliterate these if they wish to earn political emancipation. Yet, as the Palestinian people have been internationally deprived of any formal representative political agency, the Otolith Group as well as Biemann’s video essays cannot be perceived as loyal to the Palestinian cause or experience. Instead, I proposed to think of them in line with the nineteenth-century representational conventions used in colonialist travellers’ diaries. As such, Nervus Rerum and X-Mission are understood as audio-visual documents that give expression to European post-colonialist desires in the era of “political correctness”.
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Exhibiting Ethnic Minorities, Democratizing History: Cold War Legacies and the Jews in Poland’s Visible Sphere
(Duke University Press, 2023) Pasternak, Gil; Ziętkiewicz, Marta
This book chapter explores how Soviet Cold War visual doctrines and their legacies have conditioned the appearance of Jews in Poland’s visible sphere of the Polish People’s Republic and during the emergence of the post-communist Third Polish Republic. It focuses on the effects of a 1994 crowed-sourced photography contest that culminated in an exhibition, a book, and a collection of over 7000 photographic records concerning Polish-Jewish visual and living heritage. While doing so, the chapter unravels the means which the Polish state employed during the communist era to control the representational visibility of ethnic minorities and secure an impression of Poland as a socially and politically homogenized country. Analyzing the sociocultural outcomes caused by the reintroduction of images of Jews into Poland’s post-communist visible sphere, the chapter highlights the role they have played in assisting Polish society to overcome Soviet Cold War definitions of Polish culture, collective memory, history and identity.
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Exposing Minorities: Domestic Photography and Cultural History in Post-Communist Poland, 1989-1996
(2016-03-21) Pasternak, Gil
In 1994 the Jewish-Polish Shalom Foundation announced a photographic contest whose intention was to reconstruct the sociocultural histories of Polish-Jews who lived in the geographical region of Poland before, during and after the Second World War. Calling upon members of the public to submit their annotated domestic photographs for inclusion in the project, the Foundation’s initiative emerged shortly after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime in Poland, and alongside similar projects whose aim was to salvage Poland’s multicultural histories – histories the communist government had largely erased. Whereas existing scholarly literature in the field of photography studies tends to frame domestic photography with reference to the social behaviors prevalent in democratic states, I considered the Foundation’s project as a case study that sheds light on domestic photographic practices in a country that did not see democracy before 1989. My talk drew on research I carried out along with Marta Ziętkiewicz (the Institute of Fine Art at the Polish Academy of Sciences), and the findings presented intended to diversify some of the meanings and functions often associated with domestic photographic collections in current studies in the field.
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Food Eating
(2005) Pasternak, Gil
Musical performance, performed in front of audience

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