Isabel Hartwig

Doctoral candidate, Free University of Berlin

Re-Staged Photography on the Social Web (in English)

Bernard Arce, Trapped in Caravaggio (2009)

This presentation examines images of a fascinating kind: internet photographs that re-stage famous works of art. Since the advent of social media, its users have established manifold photographic responses to art history, often related to the ever-growing popularity of smartphone cameras and selfie photography. Among these practices, re-staged photographs have gained popularity, in particular thanks to the online contest “Remake,” which was organized by the Canadian art blog Booooooom in 2011. The 257 submitted photographs serve as the sample group for this analysis, which focuses on the interpictorial relations of the artworks and their re-stagings. Furthermore, references that go beyond the image pairs of “model” and “copy” are considered, such as references that the historic artworks already bring with them or influences of the surrounding social media images. Finally, questions of “high” and “low” culture as well as Institutional Critique are addressed.

Isabel Hartwig is a Ph.D candidate in art history at Free University of Berlin, Germany, and works on re-staged photography on the social Web. She holds a scholarship from Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the German Green Political Foundation, and is affiliated with the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy). She obtained her master’s degree in History of Art & Visual Culture from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, after completing her bachelor’s degree at Free University of Berlin, Germany, and Université Paris-Sorbonne, France. Her research interests include digital image cultures, feminist art history, and the intersections of arts and society, especially cultural education and policy. In addition, she works as an editor for art and academic publications.

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www.isabelhartwig.de