Conversations about Images (2025)

Conversations about Images – is an ethnographic project about the practices of looking at images, in collaboration with arterritory, in which Haralds Matulis, in 2025, has a conversation every two months with a cultural figure about a single image.

Conversations about Images – is an ethnographic project about the practices of looking at images, in which Haralds Matulis, in 2025, has a conversation every two months with a cultural figure about a single image.

On one hand, anyone who looks at images is an expert in this activity. Therefore, the selection of conversation partners is somewhat arbitrary, based on the assumption that contemporary image-viewing practices largely overlap. On the other hand, looking at pictures is significantly influenced by each individual's taste and aesthetic tradition, as well as beliefs and worldviews. Some thought has also been given to ensuring a certain diversity in the conversation participants' professional and social world experience, which also stems from generation and gender.

The dialogical nature of the conversations liberates from the academically authoritative and representative form that resembles the traditional, hierarchical discourse of knowledge and power. In the conversation, we are interested in details, minutiae, shifts, subjectivity, the fragmentary, the individual, and everything that people can turn their attention to during conversation, because they don't feel pressured to create an "authoritative" description of the image.

The image selection for the conversation took place in two phases. First, 72 images found on the internet (found photography) were selected, which had attracted Haralds Matulis's attention for some reason. Then the conversation partner chose one of these images for the conversation.