Folkwang Photo Talk with Andrew Fisher

20.11.2025

We are looking forward to welcome the philosopher and photo theorist Andrew Fisher for the next Folkwang Photo Talk. Andrew will speak about

One Thing After Another: the Broken Promises of Photographic Sequence

The 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 will explore 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.

Andrew Fisher is founding editor of the international peer reviewed journal Philosophy of Photography which has been published since 2010. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, working to develop new research on forms, processes and problems of sequencing in historical and contemporary photographies. From 2019 to 2024 he was a Research Fellow at FAMU, the Department of Photography of the Academy of Arts, Prague, where his work centred on the significance of various conceptions of scale in and for photography. This resulted in a series of  publications including: »Living with the excessive scale of contemporary photography« (a contribution to the book »Photography Off the Scale«, co-edited by Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka, Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and »Der fotografische Maßstab« (a contribution to Ästhetik der  Skalierung, a special issue of »Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft«, co-edited by Carlos Spoerhase, Steffen Siegel, and Nikolaus Wegmann in 2020).  

The talk will take place on November 20, 2025, at 6 pm at Folkwang University’s Quartier Nord, room 2.13. Everybody inside and outside the university is welcome!