Project Details
Projekt
A Media-Based Comparison of Fragment Migration: Photographs in Periodicals and Books in the Twentieth Century
Applicant
Professor Dr. Jens Ruchatz
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Term
from 2019 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262766954
Following on directly from the phase-one project on "Constellations of Fragments", the present project on fragment migration sets out from the premise that cultural photographic practices presuppose the photographic image as a fragment that has to be aesthetically, contextually, and media-specifically supplemented and formed into a unity. The project is not only concerned with the question of how journals create meaningful constellations of photographs, but also asks how such practices differ from those applied to books. Journals and books accordingly function as alternative presentation contexts that incorporate this new image form via photomechanical reproduction, in order to create constellations between individual photographs and other photographsor between photographs and other image forms or written texts. On the basis of photographs published contemporaneously in journals and books, i.e. photos that "migrate" between these media, we shall examine these different media-specific processes of constellation creation. These different ways of utilising images mark the media-specific difference between journals and books and thereby contribute to the formation of the journal’s media identity. Here the project does not consider media and media formats as already given but rather as continually and performatively produced. Journal mediality therefore has a history that it acquires through its relations to other media, such as the internally oriented defragmenting operations applied to photography, which differ from book-based modes of incorporating photographs. Specifically, the project considers the intersections between the use of photographs in illustrated fashion, lifestyle and sports magazines and their publication in books. Here it is expected that differences will be observed in the ways in which journals and books exhibit characteristics such as unity, coherence, permanence, and quality, and that the re-use of photographs will be seen to initiate processes of canonisation that contrast with the logic of ongoing usage associated with the journal. In some cases, the project will also consider the photographic exhibition as a mediator between the journal and the book. With regard to its transience, the exhibition displays similarities to the journal, while in accentuating quality it paves the way for the book. Strategies for the construction of media difference will be researched on the basis of a corpus of English, French, and German-language publications. We shall begin with the gradual emergence of photo books assembled from periodical images around 1920, before turning to the crisis of illustrated magazines in the 1970s, and the reformatting of mediality and media difference at the hands of digitalisation in the 1980s.
DFG Programme
Research Units
