A discussion with photographers about the specificity of photographically documenting NSK activities; moderator Brane Kovič

Photography as an autonomous medium has undergone a series of changes on various levels, from the aesthetic to technological, as well as in function and purpose in diverse production contexts. In the second half of the 1960s, it found a new use as an artistic medium in the field of conceptual art and other trends focused on the dematerialization of the art object. According to Dominique Baqué, French theoretician on photography and expert on developments in this field, this brought about a paradoxical turn with regard to the deconstruction of modernist ideologies, giving photography the place and role of an equal, rather than minor, artistic activity, related above all to its inherent reproducibility.
Photographic documentation (including video recordings) of such epiphenomena as interventions in space, happenings, actions, performances and other (more or less) conceptualist events, land art, body art, and so on, was characteristic of late modernism and the (neo)avant-garde, while postmodernism and the retro-avant-garde opened up other possibilities of cooperation between artists and photographers. Several ways and forms in which these practices took shape can be found in the works of individual NSK groups. The lecture will examine this and related issues, from the perspectives of various artistic poetics and creative approaches, to see how those involved in this process realized and presented specific artistic ideas.

Brane Kovič