The "Spatial Turn" in Photography: The Case of the Düsseldorf School (Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth)

The Thesis deals with two photographic series of the students of the Düsseldorf school, Candida Höfer and Thomas Strut. To analyze photographs in terms of the spatial turn, the author works with the space theories of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre. In them, she identifies a number of categories that make it possible to analyze Libraries and Museum Photos: discipline, compensatory heterotopies, power and gaze, knowledge, social practices, representations of space, and understanding of space as a “social product”. She also refers to the work of Doris Bachmann-Medic, which outlined the relationship between spatial and pictorial turns. The author examines the relationship between these two turns and identifies some of the key positions in the history and theory of the photographic medium that allow us to show the importance of photography in transforming the experience of space. To do this, she turns to the works of theorists and researchers of the visual: André Rouillet, Rosalind Krauss and Michel Frisot.