WINTERTHUR.- How real or abstract is photography? This question has preoccupied photography since its inception. As early as 1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes proposed photographing the world in its entirety, after which it could be burned down: “Form is henceforth divorced from matter”. Alvin Langdon Coburn asked in 1916: “Why should not the camera also throw off the shackles of conventional representation and attempt something fresh and untried?”. In the 1960s and 70s one spoke about “generative photography”, self-generating photographs with their own aesthetics of production. This general question has yet to be settled, and in recent years it has again become highly relevant. Shining through in works by Wolfgang Tillmans, for example, is the notion that all photographs are “to the same degree, representational, concrete and abstract; constructions that arise from translations and manipulations”. For ten years Shirana Shahbazi’s work has a