In 2022 Condé Nast featured the story “A Portrait of Bravery: Olena Zelenska, First Lady of Ukraine” on the cover of Vogue magazine. The issue included portraits taken by the world-famous photographer Annie Leibovitz showing Zelenska sitting at a table with her husband, the president of Ukraine, in an official office room or standing in front of the wreckage of army equipment with Ukrainian soldiers. The framing, lighting, staging, and the couple’s clothing are oriented on the visual language and aesthetics that Leibovitz has established in her work over the last decades: nothing is left to chance, and every gesture seems coordinated.
The publication of the pictures led to debates in various social networks that questioned the pictures’ content and context, asking if it was acceptable for an American photographer to be flown into Ukraine for the sole purpose of taking pictures of this sort for a Western magazine. This resulted in a discussion about images that are created in wartime and serve different national and international functions.
“For a moment it might seem macabre and useless to consider operating modes of journalistic photography through catastrophes—of all things—but it is often traumatic events and omnipresent images of them that expose these structures to begin with.”
—Florian Ebner, Centre Pompidou, 2010
Crossing Lines examined the distribution, circulation, and mechanisms of photographic image on three levels. What images are communicated to a society through news channels or social media? Who guarantees and takes responsibility for the authenticity of images that reach our smartphones in real time today? What visual worlds are generated to make statements? When does the content of an image become propaganda for political statements?
The exhibition presented over 150 photographs and video installations by twenty international artists.
Curators: Kateryna Radchenko (Odesa Photo Days) and Felix Hoffmann (Artistic Director, FOTO ARSENAL WIEN)
