Fotomuseum Winterthur : Darkside - Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed

Photography depicts and stylises lust and passion, fantasy and longing, power and violence, voyeurism and self image, all within sexuality. All of this is explored in the current exhibition and book project, titled "Darkside".

Fantasising and lusting make an exciting pact with photography: sexual fantasies demand their visualisation – and photography makes the most of its voyeuristic aspect of eroticism for its own purpose, to be dominant and seductive. These are the images we see as “sexual”.

Gloomy is the room, as the night is dark. The very darkness which lets idle sovereignty and longing sway into the city’s wings of desire. First and foremost, “dark” is a metaphor for the bonding, merging and swallowing of bodies, souls and spirits. A dance of entities, which happens to be the core of life ever since. Yet, the actual feat had been undertaken under public exclusion. At least until pornography started to cast its bleak and intense light upon the shadowy, yet tepid vicinities of the human body in the end of the 20th century,    

Photos by over 150 photographers will be exhibited, including Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Pierre Molinier, von Germaine Krull, Frantisek Drtikol, Ed van der Elsken, Walter Chappell, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Urs Lüthi, Hannah Villiger, von Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Arno Nollen, Paul Armand Gette and many more.

The exhibition is accompanied by a Steidl Verlag book: "Darkside I – Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed”. Edited by Urs Stahel, 344 pages, hardback, with approximately 250 photographs and German/English essays by Dominique Baqué, Henry Bond, Elisabeth Bronfen, Martin Jaeggi, Urs Stahel, Ulf Erdmann Ziegler and Stefan Zweifel.

Darkside - Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed
6. September - 16. November 2008
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45,  Winterthur
www.fotomuseum.ch