Camera Austria International 51 52

This book provides an introduction to the concept of cultural memory, offering a comprehensive overview of its history, forms and functions.

This book analyses the way that HIV/AIDS is often narrativised and represented in contemporary world cultures, as well as the different strategies of remembrance deployed by different (sub)cultural groups affected by the illness. Through a close study of a variety of cultural texts; including cinema, literature, theatre, art and photography amongst others, it demonstrates the trajectory that such narratives and representations have undergone since the advent of the ’discovery’ of the disease in the 1980s. Acknowledging the central - yet often overlooked - role that cultural products have played in the construction of public opinion towards the condition itself and those who suffer it, this ground-breaking volume focuses on a variety of narratives, as well as strategies of coping with HIV/AIDS that have emerged across the globe. Bringing together research on the UK, North and South America, Africa and China, it provides rich textual analyses of the ways in which the HIV positive body has been portrayed in contemporary culture, with attention to the differences between specific national contexts, whilst keeping in view a space of commonality amongst the different experiences reflected in such texts. As such, it will be of interest to social scientists and scholars of cultural and media studies, concerned with cultural production and representations of the body and sickness.

The objective of this publication is to trace and describe the artistic and institutional decisions that have influenced the work of Camera Austria, which has been made visible through numerous exhibitions and symposiums on photography and, since 1980, by the magazine Camera Austria International. Operating through a comprehensive network of photographers, academics, and art critics from all over the world, the?laboratory? Camera Austria has shaped the photographic culture both internationally and regionally. At the centre of the book are positions of artists that Camera Austria has worked with for exhibitions, who have presented their work at the symposiums and contributed to the magazine.