In connection with the exhibition Sophie Ristelhueber – Hasselblad Award Winner 2025, the Hasselblad Foundation is pleased to present a lecture by curator and art historian Simon Baker.
Baker will speak on the relationship between photography, war, and time in the lecture Conflict, Time, Photography. Taking Sophie Ristelhueber’s seminal work Fait (1992) – a photographic investigation of the traces of the Gulf War – as his point of departure, he will situate her practice within a broader discussion of how photographers have depicted conflicts from the 19th century to the present.
By ordering photographs according to the time elapsed since the depicted events – from seconds after an explosion to decades after the end of a war – Baker opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between image, time, and memory. The lecture will highlight how artists and photographers, including Ristelhueber, create images that not only document but also process and transform the visual legacy of war.
Time: 19 November 2025, 6-7 PM
Place: Hasselblad Center in The Gothenburg Museum of Art
Speaker: Simon Baker, curator and art historian
The talk is held in English
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About Simon Baker
Simon Baker was director of MEP (Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris) from 2018 to 2025, overseeing a complete re-imagining of the programme, spaces and financial model. Prior to this he was Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at Tate, London, having been appointed Tate’s first curator of photography in 2009, responsible for all aspects of the photography strategy and exhibitions across all four Tate museums. He began his career as Associate Professor of Art History at Nottingham University, following a PhD in History of Art at UCL and postdoctoral fellowships at UCL and Princeton. He has published widely on both photography and the history of art, including the monograph George Condo: Painting Reconfigured (Thames and Hudson, 2015), often specialising in surrealism and its legacies in contemporary practice. Recent exhibition projects include Yves Saint Laurent & Photography (Les Rencontres d’Arles, 2025) and Edward Weston: Becoming Modern (MEP, 2025).
Photo: Marguerite Bornhauser
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