Carla Åhlander
From my point of view / Aus meiner Sicht: Exploring different kinds of documentary photography using the series as a Format
Workshop (English/Deutsch), 2 SWS, 2 LP 
Dienstag, 10-14 Uhr, wöchentlich vom 3.11. bis 22.12.2015, Einsteinufer 43, Raum 203

This course examines the proposition that every photograph is a self-portrait and explores how this idea can create friction as well as opportunity for the artist/photographer. Using your subjectivity and thus finding your own language, your own way of looking at the world, is the central aim of the course.
Students will be given assignments, to be completed during class sessions. The assignments will include portrait; documentations made individually and as a group; photographs with a substantive, conceptual or political statement; images based on a certain theme. We will deal extensively with the theme of memory – compare different kinds of memory as well as work with memory exercises together in class. As an example we look at photo albums and digital networks, as two different memory structures. We will discuss how identities are created within these structures, including gender issues and personal experiences. The photo series are critiqued and discussed. Through the assignments, students will learn to identify elements of documentary photography that have the power to transcend the simple recording of images, as well as develop their own philosophy and artistic mandate. Slide lectures, films and discussions will provide an overview of artists who have developed original approaches to documentary photography, and serial work in particular.
In addition we will explore a variety of aesthetic issues, such as the construction of an image, paying particular attention to the camera's frame and how to best exploit the meaning inherent in the image. The issue of framing encompasses such conceptual and aesthetic questions as: What is your point of view? What is your relation to your topic? How do you approach your subjects? Where do you place the camera?
The workshop closes with the final presentation of one photo series per student.
Because of the pace of the course, students must work digitally and bring their own camera or cell phone camera. No photographic experience is needed.

Leistungsanforderungen für den unbenoteten Studium-Generale-Schein: Continuous presence and acitve participation.

Carla Åhlander mainly works with photography and uses the media as a tool to present everyday life as miniature events and structures in panoramic land- or cityscapes. The immediate situations Åhlander is attracted to and documents in her photographs are rather subtle appearances of power relations and systems of order – in all shades and from the vocabulary of everyday life – situations where something is about to happen or could happen, taken from a multiple of contexts, often with no beginning or end in narrative terms. Recent solo presentations include “Noteringar: tillstånd, plaster”, Fotogalleriet Format, Malmö, (2014) and the public billboard piece “Perspektiven” (2013) for nGbK, Berlin, installed in the subway station Schwartzkopffstraße. She has participated in Police the Police, Biennial for Young Art i in Bucharest (2010), Touched, Liverpool Biennial (2010), Immortality, TENT - Center for Visual Arts, Rotterdam (2009). More information on www.carlaahlander.com.