Paul Frosh

How do ‘old’ media endure in conditions of radical technological change, and what are the potential consequences of that persistence? Focusing on photography, Paul Frosh’s project asks how it has survived and flourished, including in new digital domains. Assuming that most traditional technical components of photography have been replaced or altered, how has it retained recognizability and meaning over time? And what are the implications of its retention for the societies in which it occurs? To address these questions the project places cultural memory centre stage. It proposes that photography survives radical change by being systematically remembered and reproduced – through technology design, by institutions (museums, professional associations, educational programmes, etc.), and in professional and everyday practices and representational conventions. This proposition shifts emphasis away from photographs as means for remembering (the usual focus of research), instead foregrounding cultural memory as the process through which photography itself persists, along with the values and worldviews associated with it. At the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, Frosh focuses particularly on how memory narratives of photography are mobilised around contemporary political and social conflicts, shaping the increasingly uncertain truth-status of visual images in a so-called ‘post truth’ culture.