Darkside @ Steidl

© Christer Strömholm

DarkSide, Vol. 1: Photographic Desire and Photographed Sexuality

Photography is present in all the pubic and private areas of our lives. It is also found in seclusion, where it is “dark”, where we shut ourselves off from society or where an act excludes society. Sexuality – as eroticism, desire, fantasy and fetish – is one of the central drives of man’s thoughts, actions and feelings. Frequently though, sexuality is minimized, considered to be nothing more than lustful entertainment or dismal deviation. Darkside shows photography as an important medium in the presentation of sexuality. Photography stylizes lust and passion, power, violence and voyeurism. Wish and desire enter into a pact with sexuality: sexual fantasies push to be presented, seek exposure – and photography, with its own voyeuristic pull, uses the power of (photo) eroticism for its own purposes. Darkside

presents this photography and discusses it in numerous essays.

Volume 2 will be published in 2009. It is devoted to the photography of violence and disesase, those other central powers that can influence body and soul.

Darkside - Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed

© Jeff Burton

FOTOMUSEUM WINTERTHUR

06.09.2008 - 16.11.2008
DARKSIDE

For sexuality and fantasy, photography is a central visual instrument: as document, stimulation, instrument of power, and as a form for artistic creation. Photography shows and stylizes pleasure and passion, voyeurism and self-representation, sexual power and consumption. Fantasies and desires form an exciting pact with photography: sexual fantasies demand representation, actively seek disclosure—and photography uses this power of (pictorial) eroticism for its own ends, to be powerful and seductive. Darkside is dedicated to photographs of ideal, natural, and grotesque bodies; conceives of sexuality as a part of existence; presents photographed sexual practices, desires, and phantasms; discusses sexuality in Surrealism; reflects on reification and fetishization in sexuality; compares voyeurism and exhibitionism with one another; takes up the topics of sexuality and the body within the context of debates around gender, as well as power and the market. Throughout it is always a question of the images we make of “sexuality,” of the endless interflow of fantasies and reality in visual desire over the last one hundred years. With works of 150 photographers, including Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Pierre Molinier, Germaine Krull, František Drtikol, Claude Cahun, von Christer Strömholm, Anders Petersen, Ed van der Elsken, Walter Chappell, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Urs Lüthi, Jürgen Klauke, Hannah Villiger, von Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Arno Nollen, Paul Armand Gette, and many others.