Hand painted photograph of Bhupal Singh, Maharana of Udaipur. ROM 2004.36.1
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The schedule is US Eastern Time (EDT)
What are conceptions of photography that have existed outside the dominant paradigms of the West? A range of historians, curators and a photographer will address the query in an afternoon discussion. The participants have all pioneered new inquiries into photography’s identity in major cultural centers such as India, Turkey, South Africa, and the Middle-East, and within constituencies of the West who forged uses and understandings of photography that have only recently begun to receive critical attention, such as immigrant family photos in Canada. The format will consist of a short 10 minute presentation by each participant to introduce the primary problems and questions posed by a given body of photographs, and then a roundtable discussion among us all.
The event is free and open to the public, and part of the CCA’s seminar “What is Photography?” Please RSVP at admin@cca.rutgers.edu
Sponsor
Center for Cultural Analysis
Schedule
1:30: Introduction
1:40: Participant Interventions
2:40: Break
2:50: Roundtable
4:00: Discussion with audience
5:00: End
Participants
Manal Abu-Shaheen
Manal Abu-Shaheen
City College of New York
Manal Abu-Shaheen (b. 1982, Beirut) is a Lebanese-American photographer currently living and working in the Bronx, NY. Her recent solo exhibitions include 2d Skin, Soloway, Brooklyn, NY (2019), Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ (2018) and Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, PA (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury, NY (2019); The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea (2017); Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2016); and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2015). She is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019), NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography (2019), Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant (2017), Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant (2017), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency (2016), A.I.R Gallery Fellowship (2016), and Artist in the Marketplace Residency at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2015). Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A from Sarah Lawrence College and M.F.A in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches and manages the Visual Media Lab at The City College of New York.
Points of departure for discussion:
The photographs in my recent series consider connections between the imagery we see in contemporary Beirut and the city’s colonial past. I will examine how the idealized image of one culture interacts with the reality of another. Shot over 5 years, the photographs respond to changes in Beirut’s landscape leading up to the economic collapse and uprising in October 2019. The photographs explore the monumental scale of western advertising in relationship to the post-war developing urban setting. The congestion of billboards reveals the city’s occupation by images of a different place and people, a euro-centric cultural dominance that asserts the necessity of its presence for the achievement of progress. The project ponders the ways that dominant culture becomes internalized and transformed. In an arena outside of its origin, the dialogue around representation in western media takes on layers of new meaning, which become inextricably linked to the social history of a distant place.
Deepali Dewan
Deepali Dewan
Royal Ontario Museum
Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and is affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies. She is part of the new editorial team starting in 2021 for Trans Asian Photography, an open-access online peer-review journal for the interdisciplinary exploration of photography and Asia. She is the author of Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs (2012) and co-author of Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-century India (2013). She was guest editor of Issue 9.1 of the TAP Review, entitled Family Photographs (Fall 2018). Her research spans issues of vernacular photography, colonial visual culture and knowledge production, and global modernisms. She was guest editor of Issue 9.1 of the TAP Review, entitled Family Photographs (Fall 2018) and is a founding member of The Family Camera Network, a collaborative project that explores the relationship between photography and the idea of family through the lens of migration.
Points of departure for discussion:
My work on the history and practice of photography has been about thinking through how notions of the photograph as an indexical image get unsettled when looking at photo practice in South Asia. Seeing a photograph through the framework of indexicality is so pervasive and so normalized in the history and historiography of photography that it needs a seismic shift in vision to unmoor the photograph from its index and begin to see it differently. From the view of South Asia, the relationship between the photograph and the thing it represents is not stable or clear. I have examined photographer Raja Deen Dayal whose work “code-switched” depending on the intended audience in colonial India, where the same image could point to different referents and thus meanings. I have looked at the intersection between paint and photography in India where one did not replace the other but in fact impacted the internal logic of each. In other examples, the subject that impresses itself on the paper through light is not the thing the photograph refers to but instead something else that is from another time or place. And photographs that travel with diasporic communities, and often travel "back" when people can't, have layers of affective meaning beyond their representational dimension. What are the implications of this for how we understand the photograph and different ways of viewing and seeing?
Leslie Wilson
Leslie Wilson
Purchase College
Leslie Wilson is a Curatorial Fellow at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago through January 2021, and Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. International in scope, her research focuses on the global history of photography, modern and contemporary arts of Africa and the African diaspora, and modern and contemporary American art. Her current book project charts the development and popularization of color photography in South Africa, from its inception in the early twentieth century to contemporary practice. She has held curatorial internships at the Art Institute of Chicago, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and the St. Louis Art Museum and contributed writing to publications including Manual, FOAM Magazine, African Arts, caa.reviews. From 2015 – 2017, she held a predoctoral fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. She received a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and holds a BA in International Relations from Wellesley College.
Points of departure for discussion:
My current work focuses on the history of color photography in South Africa. For that book project, I aim to bring together photo practices often siloed in the context of South African art and visual culture into analyses of politics and race, or genres of production, such as photojournalism, art, fashion, and documentary. The book seeks to interrogate shifting attitudes to color photography, focusing on questions of color’s affective and ethical associations, and its appropriateness for representing “serious” subject matter. It also analyzes the roles color has played in shaping public appetites and in determining racial and social classifications. At a global level, I think that the functions of and relationship between monochrome and polychrome photography remains, on the whole, unsettled and undertheorized. My hope is that this project joins with a new wave of attention to photo technology on the continent, while also invigorating this area of study through the high stakes for representation in the context of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.
Jennifer Bajorek
Jennifer Bajorek
Hampshire College
Jennifer Bajorek is Dean of Humanities and Arts and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Hampshire College, USA. Since 2013, she has also been a Research Associate in the Research Centre in Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her latest book, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Duke University Press, 2020), theorizes the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately following and leading up to independence. Her new projects include a multidisciplinary exploration (sonic, visual, and written) of multiple photographic archives, including those of Fátúmbí (Pierre Verger), linking Brazil and Benin; an exhibition project exploring notions of dispersal and immanence in contemporary art (Another You Right Next to You); and new writing about visual and discursive representations of migrants and migration in contemporary France.
Points of departure for discussion:
My research on photography in Francophone west Africa has touched on numerous challenges posed, by histories of photography in the region, to dominant conceptions of the medium. A significant subset of these challenges take the form of challenges to decidedly Western notions of the image. A related subset of questions has touched on the relevance (or irrelevance) of notions of the portrait derived from painted portraiture in European traditions, from which photographic portraiture is often thought to inherit. All of these challenges are substantive and have the potential to decenter conceptions of the image, the portrait, the visible world, representation, etc., which, while culturally specific (and often Eurocentric) are widely assumed to be universal. A second subset of challenges that emerges from west African scene stems from the materiality of the photograph, thought ‘beyond’ the image. If we follow questions about the reproduction, remixing, duration, and archiving of photographs in the region, we become attuned to less familiar histories of photography, linking photography as much to orality, ephemerality, and non-linearity as to being or image capture and elevating different experiences of temporality, memory, duration, and loss. We also become attuned to notions of photographic plasticity, generativity, multiplicity, and imagination that suggest vast counter-histories and futures for photography—some of which I hope to sketch.
Deniz Türker
Deniz Türker
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Deniz Türker is a historian of Islamic art and architecture, who specializes in late-Ottoman visual and material cultures. Her first book project, which traces the architectural and landscape history of Yıldız, the last Ottoman palace in Istanbul, is a study of modern sovereignty’s self-fashioning through novel representational modes such as photography, prefabs, and artificial landscapes. This vast site’s centurial transformation (from the 1790s to 1910s) not only reconstituted women in the Ottoman court as formidable patrons, but also allowed non-courtly members, actively involved in its creation, to shape the period’s garden history. Her most recent project is centered on historical conceptions of Anatolia, especially this geography’s articulation in the transition from empire to republic, from an Ottoman Anatolia to a Turkish one. In it she investigates such representational continuities and ruptures through the formation of historical institutions as well as archaeological excavations, museological displays, ethnographic studies, and state-commissioned artists’ surveys. This project’s foundations rest in the 2018 exhibition I co-curated with Ahmet A. Ersoy (Boğaziçi University) and Bahattin Öztuncay (MEŞHER) at ANAMED (Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations) entitled Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (1886).
Points of departure for discussion:
The Hamidian Visual Archives (!878-1909): A User's Manual - Largely due to their archival accessibility and peculiarly staged aesthetic, scholarship on photography in the Ottoman lands has relied all too heavily on the stand-alone characteristics of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s multi-volume gift albums to the British Museum and the Library of Congress. Recent inter-archival research on the photographic practices of the Hamidian era, especially those produced under imperial orders, have begun to identify photography’s burgeoning agency in creating and validating historical narratives. Bridging related holdings of multiple repositories have also confirmed photography’s shared functions with other types of display media ranging from freehand drawing, painting, lithography, and printed books with illustrations to cartography. Centering on a co-curated exhibition, Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots, 1886, I will discuss the processes of image-making and the role of the visual archive in the imperial context. By mobilizing new archival finds, I will attempt to enact a production story for Hamidian album making. I will also briefly introduce the very spaces within Yıldız, Abdühamid’s palatine city, in which photography and other types of images were continually made, stored, displayed and repurposed (for public and private consumption).