Doing the Document. Bartenbach Donation

Where does the document end and the artistic gesture begin? This is a question that has always been debated in the history of photography and must also be renegotiated today in these post-factual times amid the increasing aestheticization of archival and documentary materials in contemporary art. The title „Doing the Document“ deliberately dispenses with the supposed opposition between the creative and the documentary in order to explore the oft-cited “crisis of representation” in the works of twenty German and American photographers and their reception. These works are part of a donation of more than two hundred photographs from the Bartenbach family in Cologne, which is documented in this volume in its entirety.