The Developing Room’s 8th Annual Graduate Student Colloquium on the History and Theory of Photography
Rutgers University - New York University
Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Tru'o'ng, from “The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold,” 2016
Event date and venue:
Friday, April 26, 2024, 1:00–6:30pm
Jordan Center, Room 102, 19 University Place, New York University, New York, NY 10003
To attend, PEASE REGISTER at this link.
The Developing Room, a photography working group at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis, announces its eighth graduate colloquium in collaboration with the positions: asia critique journal and New York University.
With a special focus on Global Asias, this year’s colloquium is organized by three PhD students, from Comparative Literature and Art History at Rutgers and East Asian Studies at NYU. The presenters are doctoral students—at various stages and from diverse fields of study—whose research critically engages with photography in/as/and/against the archive around the issues of Asia and its diasporas.
The optical field of photography leaves open as much as it forecloses the possibility of interpretive reimagination and speculation. It is this opening, the utterance that draws attention to what the photograph does not show, that lies at the heart of our concerns. With its line of inquiry oriented toward the discourses on historiography, futurities, temporalities, and contingencies in relation to photography and its position in/as/and/against the archive around the issues of Asia and its diasporas, the “(Un)archived” colloquium turns to the archival absence and silence within, on the edge of, and/or in excess of the visual documents. In so doing, we seek to break with the ideology of empiricism and positivist demands of history, instead making room for what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “critical fabulation.” We call on our participants to consider, without limiting themselves to, the following questions:
- How do absences and silences register in photography?
- How do we attend to and articulate that which is invisible, yet present, in the photograph? How might we do this by turning to the archive?
- What are the instances where photography and the archive stand at odds with one another? What can we learn from such dissonances?
- How do certain photographs activate alternative ways of engaging with the archive?
- What kind of image emerges when we move away from the optical realm of photography? In other words, how does photography engage extra-visual senses?
- What is at stake when we embrace imagination and speculation as viable methods in the face of archival absences?
- How do artists, filmmakers, writers, and other cultural practitioners respond to such absences through photography?
- How do the material and archival conditions of certain photographs speak to or unsettle our notions of the (un)photographed?
Colloquium Panels
Panel 1: Treacherous Frames, Led by Yasmine Khayyat
Minh Huynh Vu, “In Flutter: Butterflies across Shutters of the War in Vietnam”
Suddhadeep Mukherjee, “Volatile Vignettes: Imagining the (Un)Archived Antahpur through Photographs”
Chi Yin Sim, “Methods of Memory”
Panel 2: Gaps and Margins, Led by Lily M Cho
Kaeun Park, “Conceptualizing Counter-Archives: Vernacular Photographs under Developmentalism in 1970s South Korea”
Kolleen Ku, “Surrogate Figures: Encountering Soichi Sunami in the Modernist Archive”
Kinaya Hassane, “Lighter Materials: Malala Andrialavidrazana’s Photographic Re-Imaginings of Afro-Asia”
opening
Jae Won Edward Chung, Rutgers University
Jae Won Edward Chung
Rutgers University
Jae Won Edward Chung is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is also an affiliate faculty of the Comparative Literature program. He specializes in modern and contemporary Korean literature and visual cultures. He has previously taught at the University of Colorado Boulder and Ewha University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Azalea, Apogee Journal, Boston Review, and Asymptote. He is currently completing a monograph on the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, and art of South Korea’s First Republic (1948-1960), entitled Aesthetics of Abandonment: Literary and Visual Culture of Early South Korea.
Respondents
Lily Cho, Western University
Lily Cho
Western University
Lily M Cho is Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President (International) at Western University. Her research focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial literature and theory, and Asian North American and Canadian literature. Her book, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-citizens (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) is a SSHRC-funded project that focuses on Chinese Canadian head tax certificates known as "C.I. 9's." These certificates mark one of the first uses of identification photography in Canada. Drawing from this archive, her research explores the relationship between citizenship, photography, and anticipation as a mode of agency.
Yasmine Khayyat, Rutgers University
Yasmine Khayyat
Rutgers University
Yasmine Khayyat is assistant professor of Arabic literature at Rutgers University. Her research interests include contemporary Arabic literature and poetry, cultural memory studies, and human/animal relationships in fiction. Her book War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon examines the figuration of the ruin as a site of resistance and potentiality in modern Lebanese novels, poetry, and sites of memory. She has articles published in the Journal of Arabic Literature and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, including “Memory Remains: Haunted by Home in Lebanese (Post)war Fiction” and “Pieces of Us: The Intimate as an Imperial Archive.”
Closing
Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona
fabio lanza
University of Arizona
Fabio Lanza is a professor and cultural historian of twentieth-century China at the University of Arizona, with a particular focus on political activism and urban space. His single-authored books include Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing and The End of Concern: Maoism, Activism, and Asian Studies, and he is currently working on a manuscript on revolutionizing the everyday in Beijing during the Great Leap Forward. In all his courses, by expanding the reading list beyond what are usually considered historical sources, he leads students to look at how history is continuously produced around us and to read everyday materials as potential “archives.”
Presenters
Kinaya Hassane, New York University
Lighter Materials: Malala Andrialavidrazana’s Photographic Re-Imaginings of Afro-Asia
Kinaya Hassane, New York University
abstract
Prior to embarking on her critically acclaimed series Figures, which would cement her status as preeminent contemporary African photographer, Malala Andrialavidrazana created a lesser-known series of works titled Echoes (from Indian Ocean) between 2011 and 2013. Comprised of photographs taken in the domestic interiors of Antananarivo, Durban, Mumbai, and Reunion Island, Echoes engages an elusive and atmospheric visual language that surfaces the historic and cultural connections between Africa and Asia. In this paper, I consider the ways that Andrialavidrazana, through her evocation of absence, offers a sidelong or “minor” conception of Afro-Asia that exists outside of the lofty, masculinist ambitions of the Non-Aligned Movement. Through her sparse photographic stagings, Andrialavidrazana turns away from the human figure to zero in on what she calls “the reverse side of scenery.” I also argue that the series strategically inverts the racialized, sexualized, and densely populated assemblages from the colonial archive of the Indian Ocean world.
bio
Malala Andrialavidrazana, Echoes (from Indian Ocean), 2011-13. UltraChrome pigment print on Hahnemüle Baryta paper.
Kinaya Hassane is a third-year doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research focuses on the histories of photography and migration in the African Indian Ocean world.
Kollen Ku, New York University
SURROGATE FIGURES: ENCOUNTERING SOICHI SUNAMI IN THE MODERNIST ARCHIVE
Kollen Ku, New York University
abstract
The photographer Soichi Sunami, who emigrated to the United States from Okayama, Japan in 1905, established his career in the heyday of American Pictorialist photography—exhibiting internationally and working in the circles of artists including John Sloan and Nickolas Murray. Yet despite his artistic accomplishments and technical mastery, Sunami is now most frequently encountered as a mere credit in the institutional archive through his documentation of modern art and dance performance. As the official archival photographer for the Museum of Modern Art from 1930 to 1968, Sunami documented the museum’s exhibitions and new acquisitions, forming a vital record of modernism’s establishment in the United States. His lyrical portraits of dancers including Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, and Agnes de Mille also capture the sensorial movement of modern dance in pictorial form. While Sunami’s prolific documentary work has long buttressed the academic study of modern art and its primary institutions, there remains a lacuna in scholarship on Sunami’s own biography and artistic production. Indeed, despite producing over 3000 archival photographs for MoMA, the museum holds no artistic works by Sunami in its permanent collection. In this paper, I interrogate Sunami’s conspicuous absence from the art historical record, and explore the affective possibilities of encountering Sunami within the institutional archive. I argue that the attentive, caretaking labor of Sunami’s documentary photographs act as a surrogate for Asiatic presence within modernist histories, and propose a case study for how to recuperate the ghostly traces of Asian diasporic production within modernist archives and narratives.
bio
Installation view of the exhibition "Japanese Calligraphy." June 22, 1954–September 19, 1954. Photograph by Soichi Sunami. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
Kolleen Ku is a PhD candidate in Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, working on global modern and contemporary art. Informed by decolonial approaches and transnational feminist and queer theory, her research explores the convergence of modernist abstraction and racialization in the work of East Asian diasporic artists across the twentieth-century.
Suddhadeep Mukherjee, Rutgers University
Volatile Vignettes: Imagining the (Un)Archived Antahpur through Photographs
Suddhadeep Mukherjee, Rutgers University
absract
The advent of photography during the times of colonial modernity in Bengal generated the possibility of archiving the home and the family in a distinct, yet fragmented, way. The home began to be refashioned with British aesthetics, in the process redefining relations within the family, predominantly the relations around conjugality and that between husband and wife. On looking into the archives, one encounters a vast collection of photographs of married couples, primarily taken in some studio much after the day of wedding. Scholars like Siddhartha Ghosh, Malavika Karlekar and Rochona Majumdar have developed a social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal by looking into the nuances of the image-texts, the tensions apparent in the relation between the groom and the (mostly, child) bride through facial expressions, bodily gestures, clothing, proximity between the subjects, posture, etc. I would like to extend their arguments, in my paper, by looking into what remains obfuscated and invisible in the photographs, by interrogating not just the photo-texts, but the politics of the studio, the methods developed to photograph the purdahnashin (veiled) women, comparatively reading them alongside women’s memoirs and autobiographies. While a certain style of staging the photograph aimed at advocating the idea of a companionate marriage, on closely reading the photographs (to invoke the Barthesian idea of ‘studium’) the woman begins to appear as a displaced female subject, pulled out of her private space, subalternized further in the process of photographing. The intention of the paper would be to trace this displacement by imagining the architectural as well as metaphorical complexities of the space inhabited by the women in the house—the antahpur—where the ‘witch machine’ or the camera was forbidden from invading. Drawing on Haraway’s idea of “speculative fabulation” and Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” the paper desires to tread along the grain of the archive and dwell on the vignettes of the photographs to locate and politicize the absences, and in so doing retell a history of colonial modernity, through imagining the eccentricities of the space of the antahpur, that otherwise remains obscured and (un)archived.
bio
Sushama with Husband, Prosanto Sen, 1904.
Suddhadeep Mukherjee is a second-year graduate student in the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He keeps interest in South Asian women’s writings, Dalit and indigenous studies, orality, indigeneity, archival theory, and translation.
Kaeun Park, University of Michigan
Conceptualizing Counter-Archives: Vernacular Photographs under Developmentalism in 1970s South Korea
Kaeun Park, University of Michigan
abstract
In 1971, the South Korean government launched the New Village Movement (Saemaul Undong), a core project that undergirded the state’s developmentalist drive throughout the 1970s. The project devoted significant material and administrative resources to developing rural regions across the country, leading to enormous infrastructural changes with the construction of roads, bridges, sewage systems, and houses. To showcase the progress of the campaign, numerous photographs depicting scenes from the campaign were produced and circulated through various government magazines, functioning as a means to produce model citizens of the country under developmentalism. My paper seeks to conceptualize “counter-archives” that could potentially undo the developmentalist narratives formed and strengthened by the state-driven photo archives and practices since the 1970s. Following Geoffrey Batchen’s idea of vernacular photographs, which refers to ordinary photographs abundant in the sphere of everyday life but have been largely ignored by the history of photography, I will investigate vernacular photographs taken by local participants in the New Village Movement, many of whom were not trained as photographers and yet earnestly documented their neighbors and surroundings during the campaign. These fragmented and ambiguous images resist clear classification, lurking uneasily amidst the rigidified order of photographic images in the state archive of New Village Movement. I contend that these images bear aesthetic and political qualities that warrant art historical analysis, particularly from the standpoint of decentering documentary photographic styles proliferated by the state and visualizing the active agency of photographed subjects.
bio
Park Chang-pyo’s New Village Movement Album, “A Narrow Road before It was Widened,” 1972.
Kaeun Park is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, working on her dissertation project on how the landscapes of South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s were visualized and constructed by various types of documentary photographs. She is also interested in topics closely related to photography such as archive, performance documentation, and documentary film among others.
Chi Yin Sim, King's College London
METHODS OF MEMORY
Chi Yin Sim, King’s College London
abstract
My multi-media performance lecture, scripted as a letter from me to my grandfather, takes in my long project "One Day We'll Understand", a multi-chapter research and art work that complicates the historiography of the “Malayan Emergency,” the anti-colonial war in the former British colony of Malaya (1948–60). Threading the geo-political and historical through the personal narrative, I attempt to open up new ways to think about this chapter of colonial history/ the end of the British empire and my interventions in the colonial archive and record of this war -- with implications for other conflicts like it. The reading is in my personal voice -- addressing my grandfather who was executed as a socialist involved in the anti-colonial movement -- but takes in the more theoretical challenges of how I use art to work between, against and beyond the archive, and to conjure the specters of colonialism and traces of resistance and generate a different form of knowledge and remembrance, and how that offers us possible paths of restitution and repair.
bio
Stills from “One Day We’ll Understand” performance, world premiere 30 August 2024, Esplanade Waterfront Theatre, Singapore. Courtesy the artist.
Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making.
Minh Huynh Vu, Yale University
In Flutter: Butterflies across Shutters of the War in Vietnam
Minh Huynh Vu, Yale University
abstract
This essay follows the butterfly as a metaphor of militarisms and migrations amidst the ongoing afterlife of the War in Vietnam. Contrary to the taxidermic mechanisms of war’s regime of visual representation, the butterfly is not a lifeless object simply framed and fastened down. It is instead a vital analytic of animacy fluttering across the archival record, registering the ongoing racialized and gendered aftermath of the War in Vietnam. Restaging four institutionalized images of the butterfly and her seeming capture across the chronology of empire—(1) Ron Haeberle’s documentation of the My Lai Massacre in 1968, (2) Nick Ut’s “napalm girl” in 1972 (3) Operation Frequent Wind in 1975, (4) Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s Miss Saigon in 1989—this essay also draws from contemporary literature and experimental art to examine how her “flutter” eludes and evades what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls the “imperial shutter” of the camera.
Whereas Roland Barthes defines “the Photograph as a motionless image” whose subjects are “anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies,” diasporic Vietnamese artists have troubled this taxonomy. Instead, the butterfly’s stillness signals its perspicacity and potentiality—as if “someone expert at holding [her] breath or playing dead” (lê thi diem thúy)—with her “wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight” (Ocean Vuong). By tracing the transits of these butterflies to map the overlapping matrices of militarism and migration, this comparative visual study works through the subjugating and subjunctive grammars of photography in the reconsideration of war beyond set periodizations, predispositions, and punctuations. In short, this essay is an experimental attempt—amidst many—to denaturalize the exceptionality and eventfulness of war. The butterflies here are still in motion, gathering momentum, in full-force migration, to a somewhere else we cannot see.
bio
“A Couple of Butterflies,” one of ten pairings in Peter Holst Henckel’s art installation, Couplings and Doublings (2013).
Minh Huynh Vu is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where they are also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Their research examines everyday militarisms through material cultures of discard, decay, and decomposition amidst the afterlives of empire across the Pacific.
Organizers
Vero Chai, Rutgers University
vero Chai
Rutgers University
Vero Chai is a third-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and editorial assistant of positions: asia critique. Her research concerns the interplay of film, literature, and photography in relation to the archive, with an emphasis on the Asian diasporas and their sonic, affective, and intersubjective articulations.
Julian Wong-Nelson, Rutgers University
Julian Wong-Nelson
Rutgers University
Julian Wong-Nelson is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Rutgers University-New Brunswick Art History program. Their research interests include Asian-diasporic performance, photography, and video, queer & trans* theory, and cinema studies.
Junho Peter Yoon, New York University
Junho Peter Yoon
New York University
Junho Peter Yoon is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the East Asian Studies Department at New York University. His research mainly focuses on the question of how to rethink ethics in the age of Anthropocene beyond the categorical confines of the human by contextualizing this inquiry through modern and contemporary Korean history, literature, and cinema.
Further reading from the positions archive, 1993 - present
Further reading from the positions archive, 1993 - present:
Miriam Silverberg, “Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story,” positions 1, no. 1 (1993): 24-76.
Marita Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment,” positions 5, no. 3 (1997): 687-707.
Jane C. Desmond, “Picturing Hawai’i: The ‘Ideal’ Native and the Origins of Tourism, 1880-1915,” positions 7, no. 2 (1999): 459-501.
Guo-Juin Hong, “Framing Time: New Women and the Cinematic Representation of Colonial Modernity in 1930s,” positions 15, no. 3 (2007): 553-79.
Christine M. E. Guth, “Charles Longfellow and Okakura Kakuzō: Cultural Cross-Dressing in the Colonial Context,” positions 8, no. 3 (2000): 605-36.
Bruce Suttmeier, “Seeing Past Destruction: Trauma and History in Kaikō Takeshi,” positions 15, no. 3 (2007): 457-86.
Sudarat Musikawong, “Art for October: Thai Cold War State Violence in Trauma Art,” positions 18, no. 1 (2010): 19-50.
Gyewon Kim, “Unpacking the Archive: Ichthyology, Photography, and the Archival Record in Japan and Korea,” positions 18, no. 1 (2010): 51-87.
William Schaefer, “Photography’s Places,” positions 18, no. 3 (2010): 557-70.
Andrew F. Jones, “Portable Monuments: Architectural Photography and the ‘Forms’ of Empire in Modern China,” positions 18, no. 3 (2010): 599-631.
Yomi Braester, “Photography at Tiananmen: Pictorial Frames, Spatial Borders, and Ideological Matrixes,” positions 18, no. 3 (2010): 633-70.
Nicole Huang, “Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China,” positions 18, no. 3 (2010): 671-93.
Kirsten Cather, “A Thousand Words: The Powers and Dangers of Text and Image,” positions 18, no. 3 (2010): 695-725.
Sarah Frederick, “Novels to See/Movies to Reed: Photographic Fiction in Japanese Women’s Magazines,” positions 18, no. 3 (2010): 727-69.
Tina Mai Chen, “Asian Boundaries, Documentary Regimes, and the Political Economy of the Personal,” positions 20, no. 1 (2012): 211-39.
Angela Zito, “Reading as Watching: What We See and What We Get,” positions 20, no. 1 (2012): 241-65.
Norman A. Spencer, “Ten Years of Queer Cinema in China,” positions 20, no. 1 (2012): 373-83.
Julie Thi Underhill, “Luminous Elegies: Chăm Family Documentary in Phước Lập, Vietnam,” positions 20, no. 3 (2012): 793-804.
Viet Le, “Pop Tarts (Photographic Portfolio),” positions 20, no. 3 (2012): 877-83.
Robert Oppenheim, “Writing Sŏkkuram: An Archaeology of Inscription Around 1911,” positions 21, no. 3 (2013): 547-77.
Jie Li, “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company, 1932-1940,” positions 22, no. 2 (2014): 329-69.
Kirsten Cather, “The Politics and Pleasures of Historiographic Porn,” positions 22, no. 4 (2014): 749-80.
Winnie Won Yin Wong, “Lantern Slide Moments and the Taught Subject, 1906 and 2006,” positions 23, no. 1 (2015): 91-114.
James L. Hevia, “Image/Text::Text/Image,” positions 23, no. 1 (2015): 115-19.
Bruce Cumings, “Violet Ashes: A Tribute to Chris Marker,” positions 23, no. 4 (2015): 729-42.
Jan Christian Bernabe, “Queer Reconfigurations: Bontoc Eulogy and Marlon Fuentes’s Archive Imperative,” positions 24, no. 4 (2016): 727-59.
Inhye Kang, “Visual Technologies of Imperial Anthropology: Tsuboi Shōgorō and Multiethnic Japanese Empire,” positions 24, no. 4 (2016): 761-87.
Ayelet Zohar, “Photography and Invisibility: Indexicality and Performativity Asia-Pacific War Memory in Tsukada Mamoru’s Identical Twins Series (2003) and Suzuki’s Norio’s Photos of Onoda Hiroo (1974),” positions 25, no. 2 (2017): 389-429.
Lara C. W. Blanchard, “Defining a Female Subjectivity: Gendered Gazes and Feminist Reinterpretations in the Art of Cui Xiuwen and Yu Hong,” positions 28, no. 1 (2020): 177-205.
Vincente L. Rafael, “Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear: Witnessing the Philippine Drug War,” positions 28, no. 4 (2020): 905-33.
Rajbir Singh Judge and Jasdeep Singh Brar, “Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation,” positions 29, no. 2 (2021): 319-46.
Sigrid Schmalzer, “Beyond Bias: Critical Analysis and Layered Reading of Mao-Era Sources,” positions 29, no. 4 (2021): 759-82.
Tong Lam, “The Dark Side of the Miracle: Spectacular and Precarious Accumulation in an Urban Village under Siege (A Photo Essay),” positions 30, no. 3 (2022): 523-47.
So-Rim Lee, “Between Plastic Surgery and the Photographic Representation: Ji Yeo Undoes the Elusive Narrative of Transformation,” positions 30, no. 4 (2022): 705-33.
Chialan Sharon Wang, “Native Soil of Postmemory and Affective Archives in Wu Min-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle,” positions 30, no. 4 (2022): 793-814.
Sudarat Musikawong and Malinee Khumsupa, “Archiving Facts and Documentary Films: Sites of Memorial Struggle for the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Thailand,” positions (2023).
Han Sang Kim, “Can the ‘Comfort Women’ Footage Speak? The Afterlives of Camera Images as Document and the Flow of Life,” positions (2023).
Sandeep Ray, “Frenemies on Film: Rescreening the Sino-Indian War of 1962,” positions (2023).
SPONSORS
Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University
Department of Art History, Rutgers University
Graduate History Association, Rutgers University
Global Asias Initiative, Rutgers University
Department of East Asian Studies, New York University
East Asian Studies Graduate Student Association, New York University
Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University
Art History Graduate Student Organization, Rutgers University
Korean Studies Gift Fund, Rutgers University