Andrew Fisher is founding editor of the international peer reviewed journal Philosophy of Photography (2010-present). He has published widely on the history and theory of photography and related media. He was Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London, from 2007 to 2019. From 2019 to 2024 he was a Research Fellow at FAMU (the Department of Photography of the Academy of Arts, Prague), where his work centred on the significance of various conceptions of scale for historical and contemporary photography. This resulted in a series of publications, including: ‘Living with the excessive scale of contemporary photography’, in Photography Off the Scale (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and ‘Der fotografische Maßstab’, in Ästhetik der Skalierung, Sonderheft 18, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Felix Meiner Verlag, 2020).
Andrew’s work at KWI will trace continuities and breaks in photographic concepts and practices of sequence to understand the transformation of photography since the late 20th century. Generally, sequence denotes a collection of items placed in order in relation to one another, with an implication that their succession has narrative or logical consequence. It is a familiar term in photography practice and criticism that deals with ordered sets of images, especially those constructed with narrative intent. Additionally, sequence also has wider and less often acknowledged technical and theoretical meanings for photography. Andrew’s work at KWI will investigate sequence as a prime register of the expectation that photography can make sense of the worlds we suppose ourselves to share, just as it gives these worlds their obviously heterogeneous, unequal and conflicted visual form. In this way, sequence is exemplary of photography’s promise to make sense of the world. However, it underscores the photographic potential to highlight discrepancy, disorder and narrative failure just as much as it creates connection, order and narrative meaning. Attention to sequence as a fundamental category of photography today provokes ethical and political questions that haunt our visual milieu: Who is in a position to impose order on the visual? To whom is order imposed in his world? And what mediates the relationship between these possibilities? The grounds for answering such questions are shifting in light of new and emerging visual technologies and need to be interrogated anew, especially if one believes that today’s photography still harbours truth-telling capacities, however attenuated these may be.