One Thing After Another: the Broken Promises of Photographic Sequence

A Folkwang Photo Talk by Andrew Fisher, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) Essen (in English)The Folkwang Photo Talks are a lecture series featuring international scholars and researchers who present and discuss emerging research projects in the field of photography.This talk frames the topic of sequence in photography with reference to Jacques Ranciere’s claim that politics is at root a contest over the narrative organisation of time. It explores major historical meanings the term sequence has had for photography – centering on the promise that sequencing strategies help make narrative sense of a conflicted world – and sets out to evaluate their continuing relevance and interest through discussion of two artworks: Rabih Mroué’s »Images Mon Amour« (2021) and Lamia Joreige’s »If Not Now When« (2016). These works use expanded ideas of photography to come to terms with the histories of war and violence that have shaped the artists’ homeland, Lebanon. The talk explores the ways they take up different media and appropriate different historical approaches to critical sequence making, so as to register difficult to make sense of historical and political processes of disruption and elision, loss and catastrophe.