In this article, you can read the editorial from our last newsletter of this year written by Eidolon-editor Endre Cserna, which was sent out on December 2nd, 2024. We publish our monthly editor's letters, in which we reflect on recent events, approximately two weeks after the newsletter is out.
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Dear Eidolon readers,
As we approach the end of the year, things are getting exponentially busier for us at Eidolon, and we cannot wait to share the projects and events we have been working on over the past few months. In fact, we don’t have to wait to share this one: we have just announced our second talk event, Talks on everyday imaging vol. 2: The Self-Centred and the Networked, which will take place on February 13th and 14th in London at The Photographers’ Gallery, an institution we have long admired for its innovative and progressive approach to photographic culture.
After our first talk event, which took a more holistic view of everyday photography, this time we are intensely focusing on the contemporary digital aspects of vernacular photography, the phenomena of online subcultures, networked images, and the algorithmic logic of platforms. Our aim is to bring together diverse perspectives on present-day visuality while addressing critical contemporary issues such as agency and exposure in social media culture, surveillance society, the ecological footprint and economics of image-making, and the psychological effects and uncanny nature of infinite visual content.
Over the course of the two-day event, theorists Ben Burbridge, Hille Koskela, Nadia Bozak, Andrew Fisher, and Daniel Rubinstein will share their insights on these topics. Artist and meme-page admin Cem A., better known as @freeze_magazine, will host one of his infamous Crit Club workshops (for a limited number of attendees). We will also premiere a new short film by filmmakers Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck. Finally, professor Olga Goriunova and Flickr Foundation co-founder George Oates will join PhD researcher Kendal Beynon in a discussion on the computational aspects of everyday imaging.
Find all the detailed information about Talks on everyday imaging vol. 2: The Self-Centred and the Networked on this link.
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As the year draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the past, as many do, but not specifically on my personal history. I also search for fixed, steady, and profound points that might provide a more secure foundation for moving into the next year. Since I work with images every day, one of my all-time favourite paintings, Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, occupies my thoughts a lot these days. (I know it’s somewhat of a cliché, but it’s still my favourite.) While the painting itself is a remarkable work of visionary genius, of course, what fascinates me the most is its artistic or even cultural anthropological intention—perhaps one of the earliest attempts to depict everyday life „realistically”.
It leaves behind gods, saints, and mythology to capture something just as deep, profound and worthy of preservation: how people live through time, how days, months, and weather change, and what emotions and forces shape people’s destiny, often unknowingly, but always apocalyptically towards an end. Looking at the painting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I always feel an underlying tension (which I can’t quite grasp in a digital reproduction): the ice could break at any moment, the hunters might slip, and the house on the left could burst into flames at any second.
Hunters in the Snow was reimagined by Andrei Tarkovsky in his loosely autobiographical 1975 film Mirror. The painting is referenced in a wintery scene before a longer sequence of found footage depicting the horrors of World War II and the turmoil of Chinese Cultural Revolution. Just after showing the explosion of a nuclear bomb, Tarkovsky cuts back to an image of the young protagonist standing on a snowy hill. It’s a chilling blend of art historical references and real-life imagery, made all the more powerful by Tarkovsky’s thoughtful and still avant-garde montage. (In the film, the ice does break, houses do catch on fire, and people do fall in the snow, by the way.)
Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, Andrei Tarkovsky's mother posing for a picture in 1932, and Margarita Terekhova, in Mirror playing the protagonist's mother
The intricate and mysterious interplay of photographs, memories, and other images is central to the film. In a dream sequence (?) shot in sepia, the adult protagonist argues with his wife, played by Margarita Terekhova, who also portrays the protagonist’s young mother in a different timeline of the non-linear narrative. During their argument, she picks up a bunch of photographs of herself and the protagonist’s elderly mother who, in fact, is Tarkovsky’s real mother, Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, in the photographs. She believes they resemble each other, but the protagonist disagrees…
Still from the film
Not the quintessential Holiday-movie, but a masterpiece in blurring and merging time, memories, images, and the past in a way that is completely ineffable. And about the relationship between mothers and sons, which perhaps does have something to do with Christmas.
Happy Holidays,
Endre Cserna
Head of Programming at Eidolon
You can find all previous editor's letters at this link.
