Lecture on Photography - Aleks Catina

“Of the time when they mattered to someone ”

Photography, the reproduced image, is the most prominent art form of the modern age. But what do we hope to see when we look at a photo? Something beautiful, something new, something real?
We are asked to make sense of the world through the eye of the camera. Sitting halfway between the objective and the subjective, captured moments of reality in photography always point as us, as artists, subjects or interpreters.
But how real is what we see?  Is this really up to us?

In this short talk photographs will be discussed as reality, and their failure to capture it. What these images mean is under question.  What use they are to us, is to be seen.   

Aleks Catina, grew up in Romania and Germany, and moved to London to study architecture.  After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2006 he started teaching in both design and theory of architecture.
Over the years Aleks has started to think critically about the relation between good intentions, their communicative principles, and the failure to translate them into reality. In his cooperation with students, he has been able to elaborate on and develop a family of questions, which do not fit categories of either progressive or reactionary, but aim to map out the possibilities of seriousness after certainty.

His currently working on a series of essay on the theme of irony in architecture.  The project aims to overcome the interpretative frameworks handed down through theoretical dogma, and liberate the ideas from their authors, in order to make them available to an open-ended positive interpretation.