After the Fact

Precisely when digital technologies arrived to remap photographic imaging, and visual culture once again exploded and transformed, the documentary mode within both overall photographic representation and contemporary art in particular experienced a remarkable renaissance. However, this seemingly new affirmation of the document was never a blank belief in simplistic mimeticism or a nostalgic “return of the real”. It was rather a confirmation of the complexity and power of visual representation, of how photographic media link and shape vision and world.
 
Exploring the new millennium’s emerging forms of documentary and narrative practice, where fact and fiction are intricately intertwined, where chilled analysis combine with feverish immersion, where information share beds with libido and desire; After the Fact engagers the powers of contemporary photography as it encounters the predicaments and ongoing crisis of our age.
A central aspect of documentary practices today is the range of contexts within which they operate. In fact, the document or documentary work is encountered across the entire visual terrain of contemporary culture –  in popular culture, printed or broadcast media, internet, the film industry and the contemporary art system. After the Fact offers a broad look at this diversity of instances and venues for documentary practices, at how documentary practices appear across a broad discursive and institutional spectrum.
Here, in After the Fact, photographers, filmmakers, artists ask the fundamental questions: How is knowledge possible with and through the photograph? With what means can we continue a public discourse today? Where? How is photographic expression reconceived and reformed within the current inertia of global media?
Furthermore, while carrying such questioning, they never cease to tell us about the world.
Jan-Erik Lundström, Curator