Vendela Grundell Photographic Thoughts
Essays
Friction as Tactical Experience: Interfacing Photographic Instances through Rosa Menkman’s Sunshine in My Throat, article in Art Photography in Media Environments, José Gomes Pinto (ed.), Lusofona University, Lisbon, forthcoming.
En stilla retad nerv / A Nerve Slightly Bothered, in the anthology Me – Every Body Volume I: Billion Worlds (Swe/Eng) about an extensive multi-media art project by artist/choreographer Olof Persson, 2015
Digital Destabilizing. Distance and Embodiment in the Collage Film Periscope, MA Thesis, Art History, Stockholm University 2011
This study is focused on a seeing practice that links the viewer to an environment through digital art photography. A main aim is to add to the knowledge of such images by clarifying if a work like Periscope can connect the viewer to the place of origin in an embodied way. This film consists of twenty digital collages, made from photographs taken by the author through a broken window on a train. A double position as artist and art historian enables the methodological aim to enrich the analysis with imaginative and intuitive information. The special interest in embodiment is a response to the convention that photography, landscape representation and collage create distance rather than connection – especially in terms of visuality and digital technology. Since a connection is found, and it has a destabilizing effect on subject and object alike, the writer/viewer is implicated in the experience. The objectives are reached through three questions: How does Periscope bring the viewer into contact with the original environment? How is this connection related to conventions of visual distance and embodiment? Can this connection be generalized as a seeing practice specific to digital art photography? The discussion is informed by a performative take on visual experience. This perspective recognizes that making and seeing digital photography entail both a visual description and a transformation. The study presents the possibility that digital photography engages viewer and viewed in a relational process where destabilizing functions like friction and fragmentation prove key to a meaningful embodied connection.
Seende landskap (Seeing Landscape), MA course Landscape as memory, image and construction, Art History, Stockholm University 2011
This essay is focused on the visual experience of landscape as a performative interplay between the individual viewer and the built environment. Denis E. Cosgrove’s term landscape-as-seeing forms a starting point to rethink issues concerning distance, instability and belonging in relation to an everyday view from home. The central material consists of the photography suite Harbor/Port of Call, produced by the author in 2000-2002 and revisited in 2008.