The conference
Time and again, humour has proven to be a strategy that can contribute to the popularity of documentary images. It can transport social criticism through subversion, but also undermine visual narrative patterns and their supposed evidence. At the same time, documentary in photography, films or in art that incite laughter are often accused of dealing disrespectfully with serious social concerns, of undermining the credibility of their arguments or of abusing the relationship of trust between the producer and the person portrayed. Since the 1990s, digitisation, globalisation and social media have created a media-technological environment that changed information flows and public discursive spaces. Today, debates about fake news and the knowledge of the manipulability of digital images reinforce long-standing doubts about visual documentary forms.
The conference takes a look at the relationship between visual humour and documentary concerns in history and today. Guests from theory and practice discuss functions and effects of humour in the documentary visual representation of the world, the genealogies of its expression as well as new narrative formats and their modes of distribution.
Registration
We would be delighted to receive your registration: sven.sonne@uni-flensburg.de