Studio Joyce Vlaming 

‘DIN’ is an ongoing series that explores standards and norms in photography, in perception and in our Western cultural way of seeing things.

 

DIN refers to ‘Deutsches Institut für Normung’, a German institution that has made standardisations for thousands of products since 1917. One of their best-known standards is DIN 476: the standard that introduced the A-format paper size series. Another well-known standard is technically entangled with photography itself. DIN in short (which later transformed to ISO) became the standard expression for film speed: the amount of sensitivity of photographic material.

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Understanding how these standardisations come about and are implemented motivates this photographic series. To set up an experimental methodology of discovery, the artist started to work with rational and irrational visual codes of reference; codes that mix terms like universal, generic and logic with marginal, luxurious and ambivalent. She added this mix of terms to the photographs to play with perception and to make the viewer look twice: not only in a visual way, but also on a deeper cultural level that seeks to extend our notions of what standardisation is.