Lecture by German curator Esther Ruelfs on 25 Mar

Sightseeing brings together suites of six images by contemporary photographers in both Germany and New Zealand. Sightseeing uses postcards as an artifact to invert pictorial postcards’ traditional role as a device to frame, venerate and celebrate landscape. Instead, Sightseeing highlights political and social issues such as authenticity, surveillance, territorial and property rights, environmental impacts, displacement and diaspora over the scenic and pictorial impulses of the travel photography tradition.

The works in Sightseeing are postcard size, able to be written on and posted, but they present sites that are not typically promoted for tourism and recreation. They are more accurately described as tourism anti-sites: underground spaces, refugee centres, fake landscapes, and commercial zones. The images disrupt notions of the touristic and confound ideas of beauty, pictorialism and nationalism.

On the occasion of the launch of the publication Sightseeing: an exhibition and publication of postcards that explores the representation of place in contemporary German and New Zealand photography, German curator Esther Ruelfs will give a special public lecture entitled: Postcard Landscapes: Observations on the relationship between picture postcards and contemporary landscape photography on Thursday 25 March, 5.30pm.

Esther Ruelfs studied Art History and wrote her doctorate on the photographer Herbert List. She is currently employed as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg.