Done.Book signed

Done.Book
Picturing the City of Society: An Inquiry into the Depth of Visual Archives. (The Venetian Notebooks of John Ruskin versus the Picture Library of Alvio Gavagnin.)

In this visual study, the German philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe, who teaches in Venice, examines the means and scales of representation in order to use Venice as an example to find out how the city's image archives enable an understanding of its social character. With the conceptual work Done.Book he examines two obsessive efforts to archive Venice: John Ruskin's notebooks and the previously unseen collection of photographs by the resident of a working-class district of the city adjacent to the Biennale's Giardini. In both, the conviction in the cognitive quality of the image as a means of knowledge is expressed, and both arise from a comparable ethical commitment to pictorially recording the fabric of a city, which sees its truth in the completeness-conscious capture of its minutiae, the hidden details. In his much discussed and award-winning project Migropolis, Wolfgang Scheppe had already dealt with the city of Venice as an exemplary prototype for the escalation of the globalized city.