Postmodernism: Mishka Henner

By Kayleigh Waters & Paige Ward

Postmodernism

✤ Postmodernism = new media and consumer culture.

✤ Nothing has a fixed meaning.

✤ Definitions are shaped by an individual.

✤ Everything is open to alternative interpretations.

✤ The urge to depart from the ‘NORM’ lost its impact when it became the norm.

✤ Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was an ‘existentialist’ that believed in subjectivity over objectivity – everything has multiple interpretations.

Mishka Henner

✤ He was born 8th June 1976 in Belgium.

✤ Currently living and working in Manchester.

✤ Described by some as the modern-day Duchamp for his appropriation of image-rich technologies including Google Earth, Google Street View and YouTube.

✤ His photography explores how satellite imagery can tell us new things about man’s effect on the landscape.

‘Diego Garcia, Indian Ocean, 2010’

‘Mauritskazerne, Ede’

Criticism

Henner’s project was described as “a joke” and his images both “an insult to the beauty of photography and The Americans (Robert Frank)”.

A reader wrote “Take your own damn photographs you little piece of excrement, why not just print a blank page and describe everything that is suppose to be there. Nothing = nothing”

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/may/23/mishka-henner-less-ameri-cains

Positive Reaction

A new approach to photography is seeing the light – photographers without cameras. The need to press the shutter is replaced by a direct interest in images – not necessarily in making images.

- Hans Aarsman, Hans Eijkelboom, Hans van de Meer, Hans Wolf and Has Samson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishka_Henner