Join us for a guided tour of the exhibition The Camera and Us at The Black Diamond with curators Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and Charlotte Præstegaard Schwartz.
As the first permanent exhibition on the history of photography in Denmark, The Camera and Us presents an extensive selection of works from the Royal Danish Library’s photography collections, which contain millions of images. The theme is the human being as a motif and the exhibition asks what photography does to our perception of ourselves and our conceptions of each other.
The daguerreotypists, the name given to history's first photographers, fascinated the world with the new discovery in 1839. People had never before seen themselves represented in such detail and so quickly. The lifelike images were regarded as pure magic, and suddenly the art of portraiture was no longer restricted to society's elite. Photographs of human beings spread throughout the world – today they are everywhere.
For almost two hundred years, the medium has become our most important means of communication and recollection, while at the same time it has developed as a special art form. In The Camera and Us its history is told, based on various forms of photography which all share the fact that they characterise our present-day visual culture. From the first expensive portraits made on silver-plated copper sheets to the constant image stream of the digital age that permeates our public and private lives.
Source:
The Black Diamond
The Black Diamond