Harold Koopmans
In his famous essay ‘The artwork in the era of technical reproducability”, Walter Benjamin describes among other things the ambivalent characteristics of the medium photography by placing it in relation to the medium film. “It will be one of the revolutionary functions of film to show that the artistic and scientific application of photography, which up until now have been separated, are in fact identical.”It is this ambivalence that fascinates me in the medium of photography. That it can be either one or the other, and in the best cases, both at the same time. I am still to fully discover which role as a researcher I have in this. But as a teacher I try to let students work with this ambivalence. For instance in the elective subject: “Anders Belicht”. In this class, photography performs as an instrument to come to knowledge and insights about our direct surroundings. Students with varying backgrounds learn to use the PAPA-method by Lino Hellings to work with photography in a democratically organised design process. (See also: The Power of the Method)
Projects by Harold Koopmans