Join Jörg Colberg and Lewis Bush as they dig into the compelling, provocative ideas in Colberg’s new book Photography’s Neoliberal Realism. Considering the work of some of the world’s most successful photographers, they discuss fabricating reality, the aesthetics of camp, and the mechanics of ‘cancel culture’.
Thursday 29 October 2020
18:00 GMT, London
14:00 EDT, New York
Running time: approx 45 mins
About Photography’s Neoliberal Realism
Confronting the work of widely celebrated photographers Annie Leibovitz, Gregory Crewdson and Andreas Gursky, Photography’s Neoliberal Realism examines how these artists produce capitalism’s equivalent of the Soviet Union’s socialist realism by giving photographic form to widely held and rarely questioned beliefs and ideas. The ideological framework that Colberg terms ‘neoliberal realism’ serves to cement an economic system whose many fault lines are becoming increasingly clear, such as staggering inequality and racial disparities. This extended essay provides an alternative reading of photographic works laden with artifice, and argues how focusing on this artifice misses the more far-reaching ways such images operate in our visual economy.
DISCOURSE is a series of small books in which a cultural theorist, curator or artist explores a theme, an artwork or an idea in an extended illustrated text.
To order copies of the book visit here
