Doctoral Students

Katrin Korfmann
Started in

Research summary

Photographic Times

On Temporal Dimensions in Photography in and through Artistic Practice

By engaging with photographing, image processing, and presenting, this research endeavors to forge photographic explorations concerned with examining social constructions in public space and the decoding and interpretation of these constructions. In the process of unpacking, bending, and rearranging the photographic time-space technique and the social structures depicted, the concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ is problematized.

The project will think with images, using human-machine collaboration methodologies and zooming in and out of photographic spaces where ‘time is out of joint’ by sifting and practicing the photographic languages of the virtual, namely: composite images, photogrammetry, so-called AI image generation software, the networked image, and zoom navigation. The study pursues an embodiment of micro and macro visualizations of photographic temporalities that perform and provoke questions about the architecture and infrastructure of the digital image and what its kinship to time is and can be.

‘Photographic Times’ seeks out photographic future temporalities, perspectives, and routes through art practice to explore the shifting techno-photographic relation to time through photographic practice. The temporal spaces of current digital photographic technologies fundamentally differ from photographic temporalities we used to know.

Considering photographic time other than just exposure time, this artistic research is investigating the current relationship of time and the photographic and is searching for present-day temporal concepts of picturing in:

  • The ‘temporality of making’, namely the photographic practice and photographic technology;
  • the ‘temporality of representing’, specifically as the image or code;
  • and the ‘temporality of experiencing’, manifested in the receiver interpretation.

If photography arose with modernity, where technology accelerated speed and enabled photography to stop time, ‘Photographic Times’ asks what photographic temporality means in the age of machine learning where the speed of traditional photography is replaced by digital real-time and the photographic appears as code representing navigable imagery in multiple perspectives.

 

Biography

Katrin Korfmann (1971, DE) is a photographic artist, researcher, and educator who graduated in photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, was a residency artist at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, and is currently lecturing at the KABK The Hague.

Her artistic work is rooted in photographic practice, employing images and installations as a means to explore the potentials, promises, limitations, and perspectives inherent in the medium. These explorations are concerned with the investigation of social constructions in public space and the decoding and interpretation of these constructions through the use of the photographic medium.

Her work has been awarded numerous prizes, including Prix de Rome (2nd), Esther Kroon Award, Bieler Fototage Prize, and received various grants from international institutions such as the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Robert Bosch and Würth Foundation and Mondriaan Fund. Korfmann published three artist monographs and has received commissions from several organizations, including the Ministry of Finance, Rijksgebouwendienst, Schiphol Airport, AMC Amsterdam, and Stockholm County Council. She has exhibited internationally including Photography Museum Rotterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art The Hague; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Kansas; Aperture New York; Three Shadows Art Centre Xiamen, and Frankfurter Kunstverein.

katrinkorfmann.com

 

Individual projects