Photographic images were and are used to serve ideo- logical purposes, to exaggerate or devalue something. "Every photographic image is above all a sign that some- one has spent time and effort to communicate something; every communication in photography is characterised by a tendentious colouring of its rhetoric."(Allan Sekula). In times of alternativ facts, climate change, pandemics, migration and an omnipresent flood of images, ideologically influenced, populist, movements and ways of thinking determine which problems are re- presented and positioned by which images.

The interesting thing about photography, however, is that it is not just a serving medium for ideological rhetoric and products, but also a medium that can lead to a distribution of the sensible (Jacques Rancière), that can be political. Therefore, the notion that images and image-making have the potential to make sense of the world, and that photography can be assumed to have its own form of thinking, is at the heart of the RAY MASTER CLASS that I am leading. Furthermore, especially in times of ideological intensification and the terror of the same (Byung Chul Han), there must always be a decided subjectivity, an attitude of one's own and an ethic of image-making, as well as the "imposition" not to simplify the complexity of reality, but to leave it in the picture.

Text by Johanna Diehl