A virtual conference over two afternoons organized by CCA postdoctoral fellows Michelle Smiley and Alexander Bigman.
In The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, Part 1, Kaja Silverman distinguishes between two seemingly opposed theoretical approaches to photography: those that describe its relationship to the real as “evidentiary” and those that instead characterize this relationship as “disclosive.” The former refers to the photograph’s implications in instrumentality, rationalization, and visual mastery, where the latter understands the photograph as a relational and analogical process, capable of revealing deeper, potentially disruptive truths about human perception and social life. What might it mean to think through the imbrications and oppositions between evidence and disclosure at a moment marked by pervasive anxiety about disinformation, racial justice, and the politics of the archive? This conference invites an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists to inquire further into the opposed histories and potential imbrications of photography’s evidentiary and disclosive modes, drawing out the politics of visibility and concealment that these concepts address. We use this prompt as an opportunity not only to reframe long‑established discourses on the medium’s mutable and ever‑problematic relationship to knowledge and truth, but also to address the technology’s deep embeddedness in the patterns of thought, visualization, and social organization that inform present‑day struggles for justice and inclusivity.
Schedule notes:
Please note that the symposium takes place over two afternoons on non-consecutive days, April 7 and 9. Part One runs on Wednesday April 7 from 1:10-3:00 pm (EDT) and Part Two takes place on Friday April 9 from 1:10-4:30 pm.
Additionally, Part One includes pre-circulated papers which you can retrieve by registering at the link below.
The event is free and open to the public. Please register for one or both days at the following Zoom link:
Photography between Evidence and Disclosure
Sponsor
Center for Cultural Analysis
Note: please visit the mirror website for this event at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis
Muriel Hasbun, X post facto (6.7), archival pigment print, 2009/2013. Courtesy of the artist.
Schedule
Day One
Wednesday, April 7
Panel One: 1:10-3:00 pm EDT
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis & Nicholas Morzoeff
Abbreviated (10 – 15 minute) summaries of pre-circulated papers, followed by discussion/Q&A
Day Two
Friday, April 9
Panel Two: 1:10-3:00 pm EDT
Jennifer Raab, Karen Strassler, Erina Duganne
20-minute presentations, followed by discussion/Q&A
Day Two
Friday, April 9
Panel Three: 3:10-4:30 EDT
Kaja Silverman, Nancy Davenport
Conversation, followed by Q&A
Conveners
Alexander Bigman
BIO
Alexander Bigman is a historian of modern and contemporary art. His research focuses in particular upon the emergence, circa 1980, of postmodernism as an internationally circulating set of intertwined discourses, creative practices, and political positions. He is currently at work on a book project derived from his dissertation, “Picturing Fascism in Post-Conceptual Art, 1974 - 1984,” which examines how the history and aesthetics of interwar European fascism became newly salient objects of inquiry and representation for artists associated with the so-called “Pictures Generation,” a group defined by its use of imagery drawn from popular culture and its critical engagement with the dynamics of mass media. For artists who were born after World War II and established their careers at a moment marked by rightward political shift, such taboo imagery became a provocative, if often problematic, means of addressing such matters as the representability of history and the nature of cultural memory.
Michelle Smiley
BIO
Michelle Smiley is a scholar of 19th-century photography and visual culture whose research investigates the intersection of aesthetics and scientific practice in the antebellum United States. Her current book project, Daguerreian Democracy: Art, Science, and Politics in Antebellum American Photography, examines how the daguerreotype became an object of technological, scientific, and commercial innovation for antebellum scientists, artisans, and political thinkers. By chronicling the contributions of these often-overlooked actors, she explores how the daguerreotype was an object of transatlantic scientific experimentation, a key component of government projects of nation-building, as well as an object of fascination for theorists of democracy. Before coming to Rutgers, Michelle held the Wyeth Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C. She holds an A. B., M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College.
Talks, Presenters and Discussants
The Arena of Suspension: Carrie Mae Weems, Bryan Stevenson, and the “Ground” in the Stand Your Ground Law Era - Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
The Arena of Suspension: Carrie Mae Weems, Bryan Stevenson, and the “Ground” in the Stand Your Ground Law Era
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Harvard University
ABSTRACT
How are artists, and how are disciplines in the arts and humanities, responding to the hyper-visuality of racial injustices on American ground? This book project explores how visual artists including Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, Amy Sherald, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley, and new landmarks—such as the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza—have initiated a new set of “groundwork” tactics in the Stand Your Ground Era in the United States. Stand Your Ground laws, first established in 2005 and now in over thirty-three states, define the right to self-defense, to claim the ground on which one stands if there is a perception of “reasonable threat.” The law disproportionately affects black and brown lives today. These artworks prompt the question, What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenge to this upright position as a statement of sovereignty over one’s own life? How has the manifold meaning of the term “ground”—as both reason, fact, but also soil itself, opened up a mode of critical inquiry to address the injustices wrought at our feet? Just as the field of environment studies has begun to consider its nexus with racial inequity, this book approaches representations of the “ground” through the lens of racial formation in the United States, considering the “groundwork” that artists have created as both practical labor for civic society, and as a prompt for new, critical methodological inquiry in the arts and humanities at large.
BIO
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies. She is the founder of the Vision and Justice Project. Lewis has published essays on race, contemporary art, and culture, with forthcoming publications including a book on race, whiteness, and photography (Harvard University Press, 2022), Vision and Justice (Random House), and an anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021). Her recent article for Art Journal focuses on the groundwork of contemporary arts in the context of Stand Your Ground Laws (Winter 2020). In 2019, she became the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History to honor Lewis for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.”
An Antiracist Way of Seeing: Notting Hill and Critical Visuality - Nicholas Mirzoeff
An Antiracist Way of Seeing: Notting Hill and Critical Visuality
Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York University
ABSTRACT
It was Barbadian poet George Lamming who coined the term ‘way of seeing’ as an anticolonial practice his 1960 Pleasures of Exile. Reading at the newly-created Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1951, Lamming was greeted with loud applause that he took to be an index that his Blackness had been seen. When East End Jewish radical Emmanuel Litvinoff attacked T.S. Eliot’s anti-Jewish racism, the uproar indicated that the colonizers had seen the poet as a Jew. At this juncture, Lamming saw how the anticolonial ‘way of seeing’ operates: ‘First, they see me but then they see you (as me)’.
At a time of intense debates about realism and commitment in the arts and popular culture, Lamming’s antiracist and anticolonial ‘way of seeing’ remapped (the) colonial capital in terms of gentrification, white supremacy, decolonization and immigration. I follow this formation using the contemporary work of Stuart Hall (who intervened in Notting Hill as a school teacher); and the (white, British) photographer Roger Mayne’s pioneering studies of Notting Hill. Mayne’s photographs were intended as art, following his exhibits at MoMA and the ICA, and show formal influence from Lucian Freud. Just as Lamming saw how Litvinoff was seen, it is possible to discern the formation of a “way of seeing” in Mayne’s work that is somewhere between evidence and disclosure. Taken together, the work of Hall, Lamming and Mayne indicates how another formation of critical visual culture studies can be traced that begins with antiracism.
BIO
Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. In 2020-21 he is ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York.
Photography and the Crimes of War - Jennifer Raab
Photography and the Crimes of War
Jennifer Raab, Yale University
ABSTRACT
Whittled wooden spoons, crude baking dishes, artillery shells, and soup bones form a strange, altar-like arrangement. Taken right after the American Civil War, this photograph—known as Relics of Andersonville Prison—was produced by Mathew Brady’s studio in 1866 and pictures objects collected by Clara Barton (later the founder of the American Red Cross) from the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp. Through the trope of the relic, the image engages with the most pressing issues of the time: finding, naming, and burying the unprecedented number of dead, as well as indicting those responsible. The photograph becomes a political tool to argue for legislative change on behalf of the women and children left behind; a sacred site for mourning and remembrance made portable, reproducible, and collectively available by photographic technology; a means to visualize and racialize pain and sacrifice; and an act of witnessing indelibly shaped by the first use of photographs as legal evidence in a war crimes trial. Widely circulated in its time but little known today, Relics of Andersonville tells a story about violence, grief, advocacy, accusation, memory, and martyrdom. This talk will focus on the photograph’s particular relationship to a newly emerging, but still profoundly unstable, discourse of the evidentiary and of visual testimony.
BIO
Jennifer Raab is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University and a faculty affiliate of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine. Her first book, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (Yale University Press, 2015), examined the aesthetics of detail that fundamentally shaped nineteenth-century American landscape painting and that was inseparable from scientific discourses of the time. More broadly, it asked: What is a detail? What does it mean to see a work of art “in detail”? Her next book, Relics of War, under contract with Princeton University Press, examines the many lives of a single photograph taken just after the American Civil War. Recently, she co-authored a book and exhibition, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance (Yale University Press, 2018) and contributed the lead essay to East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2017). She has written on topics from history painting and the aesthetics of mapping, to the gendering of ornament in portraits of and by indigenous men, to alchemy in contemporary sculpture. Her work has appeared in Art Bulletin, Art History, American Art, and Journal of American Studiesand has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others. At Yale, she is one of the founding members of the Environmental Humanities Program.
Beyond Atrocity: Reparation and the Mournful Image - Karen Strassler
Beyond Atrocity: Reparation and the Mournful Image
Karen Strassler, City University of New York
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I look at a set of photographs that document violence against the ethnic Chinese minority during the Indonesian Revolution—and a set of artworks made in response to and with these images. Contrasting these photographs with the kinds of atrocity images by which human rights claims have typically been made (Sliwinski 2011; Batchen et al 2012; Hesford 2012), I argue that while the images of the revolution-era massacre perform evidentiary work, their evidentiary function is subsumed within a disclosure of care and mourning. I am interested in the different modes of attention and affective responses that are called forth by atrocity versus such mourning images. The former readily congeals into outrage and pity that reinforces a separation between viewer and viewed and between past and present and in so doing can perpetrate violence anew by spectacularizing death or rendering victims abject (Raiford 2020). The mournful image, I argue, instead issues a “summons to relationality” (Silverman 2015: 85), inviting the viewer into an ongoing, present-day and future-oriented work of care and repair. Rather than a liberal-humanist, generic empathy towards “human suffering,” moreover, these mourning images invite a familial form of affiliation that entails obligation as well as recognition. More broadly, this paper is part of an attempt to move beyond the questions of exposure and indexical evidence that have dominated our framings of the relationship between photography and violence. It is an effort to think about how images, in disclosing and sustaining forms of relation, might foster more reparative ways of seeing violence.
BIO
Karen Strassler is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY’s Queens College and the Graduate Center. Her research interests include photography, visual and media culture, violence and historical memory. She is the author of Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Duke UP, 2010), a study of the role of everyday photography in the making of Indonesian national identity. Her recent book, Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia (Duke UP, 2020), explores the political work of images in post-authoritarian Indonesia. She is currently working on a project on visuality, violence, and the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.
There was no record of her smile: Muriel Hasbun’s X post facto - Erina Duganne
There was no record of her smile: Muriel Hasbun’s X post facto
Erina Duganne, Texas State University
ABSTRACT
In 2009, seventeen years after the Chapultepec Peace Accords brought an end to El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, and twenty-nine years after she immigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen, Muriel Hasbun completed X post facto. Consisting of thirty-two photographs made from her father’s dental records in El Salvador, Hasbun has likened the process of culling over the one thousand x-rays in his archive to the work of a medical examiner or forensic anthropologist. But though Hasbun’s rote reading of these images, which objectively record teeth, cavities, and dental fixtures, was mechanical at first, their instrumentality quickly shifted from documentary to testimonial. In this paper, I take up both the documentary and testimonial functions of these x-rays. In so doing, I suggest how Hasbun’s X post facto operates as a form of counter forensics, to borrow Allan Sekula’s term. But whereas Sekula uses this neologism largely to enact “a process of political resistance and mourning,” my interest is in how Hasbun uses the evidentiary nature of the x-rays to make a different kind of political argument. I argue that she uses the forensic significance or instrumentality of the dental records not as oppositional tools but as means of building community and, more specifically, visual solidarity across national divides and linear temporalities.
BIO
Erina Duganne is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University. Her research and teaching focus on intersections between aesthetic experiences and activist practices as well as race and representation. Recent publications include Global Photography: A Critical History and Cold War Camera(forthcoming). Her co-curated exhibition, Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, opens at the Tufts University Art Galleries in January 2022.
Kaja Silverman in discussion with Nancy Davenport
Kaja Silverman in discussion with Nancy Davenport
Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2019. Credit: LNDW Studio
BIO
Kaja Silverman is Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor Emerita of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of nine books: The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (2015); Flesh of My Flesh (2009); James Coleman (2002); World Spectators (2000); Speaking About Godard (with Harun Farocki, 1998); The Threshold of the Visible World (1996); Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992); The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988); and The Subject of Semiotics (1983).
Silverman’s most recent book, The Miracle of Analogy, which was published by Stanford University Press in March, 2015, is the first installment in a three-volume reconceptualization of photography. Since this book is primarily concerned with photography as the agency through which the world reveals itself to us, it focuses on images in whose formation the photographer played only a nominal role: on the pre-optical camera obscura’s image-stream, and photographs made during the first three decades of chemical photography. And although Silverman discusses works by a number of contemporary photographers, they are all close in spirit to the photographs of the nineteenth century photographers who figure most prominently in Miracle: William Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins, and Julia Margaret Cameron.
The second volume,The Three-Personed Picture, is about the gradual emergence of a very different kind of image: one that is pictorial in nature. It is shaped both by the subjective intelligence of the photographer, and the objective intelligence of the world. It is also a “three-personed picture”–one requiring a sitter and a beholder, as well as an author. Through it, the saving power of photography finally became not just ontological, but socio-ontological.
The final volume in this trilogy, The Promise of Social Happiness, is focused on the re-emergence of pictorial photography in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, through two closely-related forms: photo-painting, and large-format photography.
Before joining the History of Art Department at Penn, Silverman taught for many years at Berkeley. She wrote Speaking About Godard—itself a book about couples—during this period with Harun Farocki, her life partner from 1992–1999. They also collaborated in many other ways during their years together, including co-teaching four seminars at the University of California, Berkeley.
Earlier in her career, she taught at the University of Rochester, Brown University, Simon Fraser University, Trinity College, and Yale University. Shortly after arriving at Penn, Silverman was awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation, which has provided the motivation and the funding for a wide range of events: academic lectures, public conversations with artists and curators, artist residencies, and two major conferences, the first in conjunction with an exhibition at the ICA, and the second in conjunction with an exhibition at the PMA. It also allowed her to curate an exhibition of Knut Åsdam’s work that included a commissioned piece, to co-curate a Victor Burgin exhibition with Homay King, and, most recently, to curate a solo show of Carrie Schneider’s work, all in collaboration with Aaron Levy and the Slought Foundation.
Nancy Davenport in Conversation with Kaja Silverman
Nancy Davenport in Conversation with Kaja Silverman
Nancy Davenport, Artist
BIO
Nancy Davenport’s work has been exhibited at a variety of venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, the Liverpool Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the Sao Paulo Biennial, the International Center of Photography in NY and the National Gallery of Canada. Her photographs have appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, October Magazine, Frieze Magazine, The New York Times, BLIND SPOT and “Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography” (Phaidon Press). She has been the recipient of several awards including the Rome Prize, the Mellon Foundation Humanities+Urbanism+Design (H+U+D) research award and the Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. Her recent book entitled “RENOVATION” was published by Cabinet Books, NY.