Maximilian Glatzhofer
With a background in commercial photography, I currently study on the photography pathway of the V&A/RCA History of Design programme. My research is focussed on photographs as material objects, especially in the context of how photographs have been used as what can be described as ‘functional images’. From early family and travel albums, through the rise of mass amateur photography to photography used in times of crisis and conflict, my research is aimed beyond just the visual surface of images. How have photographs been used within the lives of their creators? How has a need for seeing transformed into a need for being seen? Departing established questions of art historical relevance, I aim to explore how images and visuality, now so deeply embedded in all our lives, have come to have such power – while always questioning what, if anything, this power is.
Throughout my work I aim to include a transnational approach, aiming to reflect on previous scholarship from a multilingual range of sources. Following the belief that is important to see local developments in a wider context, I attempt to bring a comparative approach to disseminating and reflecting on historical sources.
In a present mediated through images, I am interested in establishing an understanding of historical visual culture at the intersection of technology, political interests and social standards.
Images © Walter Woodbury, 1853-1866, London, RPS.3093:115-2018; XRP 636; XRP635, V&A Museum
Degree Details
School of Arts & Humanities
History of Design RCA2020 Team
As first-year students, our contributions to RCA2020 form a work-in-progress encounter with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This serves as a springboard for collecting, discussing and sharing ideas on the topic of Digital Discomforts. The project explores issues brought about by the impact of digitization and the web, such as structural inequalities in digital access, the design of sites and content encountered online, user experiences in the internet and evolving conversation channels.
Resulting from intense weeks of collaborative work, the following diagrams are representations of our practice as design historians, intended to reflect real-life corridor-conversations we would have usually had in person as part of our studies. Impromptu, spontaneous and intellectually unpredictable these conversations embrace spelling mistakes and thematic jumps as characteristic of the method of communication. Our diagrams show the twists and turns of such informal, creative encounters. You may find them sometimes difficult to navigate, or even difficult to read. This is a deliberate dramatisation of the experience of digital inequality, bringing with it digital discomfort.
