Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art aims to contribute to the understanding of the multifaceted and complex character of the photographic medium by dealing with various case studies selected from photographic practices in contemporary art, discussed in the context of views and theories of photography from its inception. uses case studies to explain photographic practices in contemporary art and place them in the context of theory presents current debates on theory of photography through comparisons to research of other visual media applicable to vernacular and documentary photography as well as art photography

This book is the result of a collaborative project, commissioned to the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography and Visual Studies at the KULeuven by the Concertgebouw Brugge. Malou Swinnen has portrayed seventeen Mozart performers, right before entering the stage, in two different states. The fascinating relationship between photography and music is addressed in an essay written by Katelijne Schiltz and Hilde Van Gelder. Liesbeth Decan has interviewed Malou Swinnen in depth.

As scratches of reality, Sekula's photographs and films leave their traces in our minds. They encourage, yes, even force reflection, and through that, slow changes can probably become a reality, certainly at the level of the individual.

Imagine a world in which each individual has a fundamental right to be reborn. This idle dream haunts Hilde Van Gelder’s associative travelogue that takes Allan Sekula’s sequence Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996/1998) as a touchstone for a dialogue with more recent artworks zooming in on the borderscape near the Channel Tunnel, such as those by Sylvain George and Bruno Serralongue. Combining ethnography, visual materials, political philosophy, cultural geography, and critical analysis, Ground Sea proceeds through an innovative methodological approach. Inspired by the meandering writings of W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, and Roland Barthes, Van Gelder develops a style both interdisciplinary and personal. Resolutely opting for an aquatic perspective, Ground Sea offers a powerful meditation on the indifference of an increasingly divided European Union with regard to considerable numbers of persons on the move, who find themselves stranded close to Calais. The contested Strait of Dover becomes a microcosm where our present global challenges of migration, climate change, human rights, and neoliberal surveillance technology converge. Read more on the book's dedicated website: www.groundsea.be

Collective Inventions constitutes the first collection and book-length publication on Surrealism in Belgium on which Belgian and Anglo-American scholars have collaborated.Collective Inventions offers new writings by leading international scholars and experts on the movement's diverse manifestations in Belgium. The essays range from comparative analyses of Surrealism in Belgium with other versions of Surrealism, particularly French, to detailed critical engagements with individual oeuvres. The authors use contemporary theoretical and critical models to explore artistic production in a variety of media, including painting and photography, film and fashion, postcards and Perspex. Collective Inventions significantly alters and widens current understandings of Surrealism.

This publication is the first career-encompassing monographic study of the artistic production of Philippe Van Snick. The result of a long-term collaboration between the artist, a team of researchers and a group of designers, it serves as an instrument for discovering Van Snick's oeuvre as a totality. This book reveals Van Snick's long-standing experimentation with a wide variety of materials and techniques, such as drawings and works on paper, photography, film, sculptures and works in situ. A red thread through the artworks is their close ties to everyday reality, life and nature.

In this photo book, Els Vanden Meersch investigates the latent presence of violence and dominance in the everyday reality of the urban fabric. Subtle images contain combinations of banal details, through which emerges a restrained tension that points at the paranoid as it is felt in architecture. Control mechanisms such as surveillance camera's, spy holes and rear-view mirrors are set against one another. They gradually raise the stakes towards displaying an impenetrable control system that is built on the principles of military architecture, sophisticated technology and compelling viewing apparatuses. In this machine of anxiety, both the operator of the system and its target remain invisible. An aimless matrix of meaning appears, in which a mirror reveals as much as a dead-end corridor. In an astutely accurate way, Paranoid Obstructions offers a representation of what cannot be outspoken nor imagined but which inevitably has happened. Paranoid Obstructions contains an essay by Hilde Van Gelder and a poem by Alice Evermore.

De ontwikkeling van de Vlaamse schilderkunst vanaf de Middeleeuwen tot heden, met een karakterisering van de perioden, stromingen en stijlen alsmede individuele schilders en hun werk.

The passage of time, central to all aspects of human experience, is fundamental to the perception of works of art. However - unlike problems of space - it has only rarely been addressed by art historians. In this volume, an international group of scholars offers a variety of fascinating approaches to issues of time and spectatorship. Their subjects range from the sites of ancient Greece to the discourses of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, from the canonical works of the Italian Renaissance to prominent examples of production and reception in England, France, Germany and the Iberian peninsula. Three principal themes emerge. One of these, concerning the medium, relates to the images themselves, their ability to steer the process of reception through devices such as composition, narrative or inscriptions. A second topic concerns temporal experience of spectatorship, usually related to the perception of an architectural setting, above all in the context of religious practice. If time is here understood particularly in terms of duration, the third theme emphasizes the momentary aspects of the phenomenon. Here, some contributions analyze the manner in which moments are thematized by an image, while others discuss historical moments of spectatorship, the conditions of artistic success or failure at a certain point in time. - As well as investigating problems relating directly to the beholder's experience, the essays also analyze insights provided by aesthetic theories ranging from Alberti's concept of an active spectator and Lessing's "fruitful moment" to Greenberg's ideal of a perception detached from time.