Keynote
Speakers:
Mieke
Bal, Professor
of Theory of Literature, Universiteit van Amsterdam; Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large,
Cornell University
Light-Writing:
Portraiture in a Post-Traumatic World
Much
has been written about photography in relation to the Holocaust. In particular,
Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory has largely been developed through photographs.
I am interested in exploring the question of the portrait, not as memory of the
disappeared but as both a record and an appeal, both recognition and validation,
of subjects who are themselves traumatized. I will confront figurative portraits
with works that retain the trace as basis of meaningfulness but are not really
figurative; faces with the erased face.
Eduardo
Cadava, Associate
Professor of English, Princeton University
Palm
Reading: Fazal Sheikh’s Handbook of Death
Fazal
Sheikh spent the winter of 1997 along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border photographing
Afghan refugees, working in secret, in the middle of the night, and under the
light of a small lamp. He recorded innumerable images of the refugees, of the
devastated landscapes, the wounded bodies, and so on. In
particular, though, I’ve been interested in a series of images of hands, just
hands, holding small photographs of dead sons, brothers, and fathers.
I wish to read these images in terms of what they can tell us about the
relation between life and death, movement and stasis, the erasure and preservation
of human traces, and memory and forgetting – all of which belong to the motifs
and issues we most generally associate with the photograph in general.
I wish to read these images in order to think about what it means to read
a photograph, and this because these are, among other things, photographs of photographs.
David
Farrell Krell,
Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University
Aristotle’s
treatise on time in the Physics offers an account of exaiphnes,
“the sudden.” In that account, Aristotle elaborates an “existential” and “ecstatic”
vocabulary for time. We may speculate that Heidegger’s analysis of “ecstatic temporality”
in Being and Time—one of the most original analyses of time in
Western letters since Aristotle—owes a great deal to Aristotle’s account of suddenness.
Time is essentially sudden removal, a rapture that is a rupture. Hölderlin, in
his “Notes” on Sophoclean tragedy, takes the impact of Greek tragedy to be such
sudden removal, interruption, and “transport.” Jacob Bernays, in turn, describes
Aristotelian catharsis as ecstatic removal. My question is whether photography,
with its shudder speed, serves as a modern-day technological equivalent to ancient
Greek tragedy. Does it not seize us, shatter our equanimity, and then restore
an uncanny calm with its images? Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida have shown
photography to be an instant of mortality, of the sudden removal experienced in
each moment of authentic time. Is shutter speed shudder speed? Does the photograph
invariably sweep us away, as Hölderlin would say, to the “eccentric sphere of
the dead”?
Fred
Wah, Professor
Emeritus, Department of English, University of Calgary
Is
A Door A Word?
I
will offer a ramble that wants to recover the compounding cipher in image-text
as an opportunity for recognition and surprise, a contact zone for the fragment,
a roast potato for a tender button. Picture this, the words say. The methodless
improvisation of looking both ways for trans. The version in conversion. The fiction
in depiction. A passage of in-betweeness, photo-hyphen-text is played as the liminal,
the referential, and the punctuative, a little music at the heart of looking.
Presenter
Abstracts (in alphabetical order):
Timothy
Dow Adams, Department
of English, West Virginia University
“Heightened
by Life” vs. “Paralyzed by Fact”: Reinforcing Memory through Photography in W.G.
Sebald’s The Emigrants
Sebald’s
novel takes the form of four biographies in which the photographs undercut the
traditional value of documentary but reinforce accurate memory.
Focusing on the minutiae of the horror he is documenting, Sebald suggests
that piles of impersonal shoes in the context of a memorialized Holocaust do not
express depth of atrocity so much as an intimate awareness of a single shoe out
of any context, the horror unspoken, and for that, all the more affecting.
Pamela
Banting, Department
of English, University of Calgary
Shooting
Bears: Ethics and Etiquette in Charlie Russell's Photographs of the Spirit Bears
of the Western Rainforest and the Grizzlies of Kamchatka
In
my paper I propose to examine Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns’s use of photographs
as sites for the development of a transformational ethics and etiquette for bear-human
relationships.
Karen
Beckman, Department
of English and Film Studies, University of Rochester
Cut:
Photography, Memory, and the Resistance to Film in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s
Amores Perros
Amores
Perros explores
the gendered relationship between stasis and movement, photography and film. Why,
I ask, does still photography play such an important role in the diegesis? What
explains Iñárritu’s desire to make a film that resembles Nan Goldin’s photographs?
To what extent are contemporary discussions of medium specificity founded upon
gendered paradigms of difference? As the film resists the
U.S. road movie’s fantasy of unrestricted mobility (across borders, between bodies),
it introduces a static element, repeatedly marked as feminine, through a car crash,
a leg amputation and a series of photographs, that invites us to ponder how memory,
violence, gender and visual technology intertwine.
Pam
Berridge,
PhD Candidate, Fine Art, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
I
am so Afraid of Forgetting – the Victorian Culture of Death
The
paper explores the Victorian preoccupation with death. The Victorians celebrated
the culture of death, using photographs and artifacts to keep the dead alive in
their memories. Their fear was that dying is not only about losing one’s future
but also about losing one’s past. These photographs and artifacts, both original
and recreated, are considered as signifiers of previous lives and experiences
which possess a shade of the person or object photographed.
Caroline
Blinder,
English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London
“The
Transparent Eyeball”: Walker Evans and Transcendentalism
This
paper examines the idea of a vernacular ethos in Walker Evans’s American
Photographs (1936). Through Emerson, the accurate representation of the material
world and surrounding landscape forms the framework for a belief in the visionary
ability of the artist, not unlike Evans’s ethical reading of photography as visionary
as well as democratizing. Re-enacted in Evans’s photographs, the “transparent
eyeball” identifies a modernist aesthetic not dissimilar to the photographic apparatus
itself.
Arnd
Bohm, Department
of English, Carleton University
Fictional
and Non-Fictional Photographs in Novels
Photography
and narration inter-connect in various ways: ekphrasis; the photographer as a
character; the transformation of narrative techniques through photography; photo-novels
and stories told in narrative cycles. Virginia Woolf's Orlando
(1928), Jack Finney's Time and Again (1970), and W.G. Sebald's
The Emigrants (1992) convert photographs – that began as loyal,
non-fictional representations – into fictions.
Marlene
Briggs, Department
of English, University of British Columbia
In
dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Marianne Hirsch, this paper analyzes the shifting
status of the Great War photograph from 1918 to the present through selected examples
of British and Canadian literature. My speculative discussion considers how the
dynamic work of belated mourning may invest the sepia portrait of the civilian
soldier with a compelling aura. Recent fascination with this historical
trauma coincides with its imminent disappearance from living memory.
Natalia
Brizuela, Department
of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Berkeley
Between
Empire and Republic; or, on Photographic Melancholy in Brazilian Modernity
This
paper will trace the passage from Empire to Republic in Brazil through the place
that photography occupied in both political moments. It
will propose that photography was there, caught at the crossroads of the violent
storm of progress, looking to the past melancholically, and being the material
incarnation of the future. It is thus an inquiry into the
relationship between photography and modernity in the context of the Brazilian
passage from Empire to Republic. The paper will, through photography, look at
the place of melancholy in the passage towards progress and modernity.
Elspeth
Brown, Department
of History, University of Toronto
Racializing
the Virile Body: Eadweard Muybridge's Locomotion Studies, 1883-1887
This
paper situates Muybridge’s project in the context of nineteenth-century race science
and argues that the project is about (in part) the consolidation of a white masculinity
grounded in narratives of evolutionary race progress. My arguments are based on
archival research into both the scientists and models involved with Muybridge’s
project. I seek to understand the U Penn work as an historically situated racial
project central to the formation of both gender and racial categories in the late-nineteenth
century U.S.
Margot
Leigh Butler,
School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
"I'm
in there! I'm one of the women in that picture!"
Photographs
of women who are missing or have been murdered are theorized through two “figurations
of implicatedness”: Mieke Bal’s focalizer (a figure of vision) and Michel Foucault’s
parrhesiastes (a figure of frank, courageous speech). These photos are from two
contexts: an artists’ project called “NHI - No Humans Involved” (San Diego 1992)
where women from many communities implicated themselves by donating their photographs
to stand in for “missing” images of 45 murdered women; and a presentation of “NHI”
on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where many women are missing and murdered.
Yves-Antoine
Clemmen, Department
of Foreign Languages/French, Stetson University
Amélie
Nothomb: The Corpus and the Photographs
This
paper explores the rapport of the Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb to her own photographic
image and the relationship between her texts and her image. Nothomb is heavily
present in the media and her image interferes in the readings of her texts.
The omnipresence of her photographed image promotes a theatrical persona
that is literally an extension of her writing. Her photographic
images bridge fiction and reality in the realm of the paradox.
Paola
Cortés-Rocca,
PhD Candidate, Spanish, Princeton University
Ghost
in the Machine: Pictures of Specters at the End of the Century
“Spirit
photography” consists of photographs in which the sitter appears near to the shadowy
image of a dead beloved. Despite being fraudulent, these images highlight the
new photographic temporality and blur the difference between a living person and
a corpse. By arguing that “life after death is a fact,” some photographs¾especially
those of people who perished in wartime¾both
reaffirm the early promise of immortality made by photography and present the
technological catastrophes of the twentieth century.
J.
Keri Cronin, PhD
Candidate, Art History, Queen’s University
Picturing
the “Contested Terrain”: Imagery, Ecology and Photography
in Jasper National Park
Environmental
historian William Cronon has argued that “nature will always be contested terrain.”
Building upon this notion, I consider the role of photographic images in shaping
and sustaining ideas of wilderness in one of Canada’s best-known tourist destinations,
Jasper National Park. This paper discusses ways in which photographs of Jasper
have historically been used to promote very specific values and conceptions of
nature and considers resulting ecological implications of this photographic history.
Richard
Crownshaw, Department
of English, Manchester Metropolitan University
Reconsidering
Postmemory: Literature, Photography and Memory in the Work of Rachel Seiffert
and W.G. Sebald
This
paper examines W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) and Rachel Seiffert’s
The Dark Room (2000), and their use of photography, to differentiate
types of intergenerational Holocaust trauma. In doing so, this paper reconsiders
theories of postmemory, which, in their universalization of transmitted trauma,
lose sight of the specificity of acts of post-Holocaust remembrance and of the
identities formed through remembrance, as well as of the ethical implications
of those acts and identifications.
Brenda
Daly, Department
of English, Iowa State University
“Out
of the Camera”: The Altered Photograph in Janice Williamson’s Crybaby!
The
cover photo on Janice Williamson's memoir Crybaby! has been altered
to prompt readers to solve a puzzle: why does the author suffer from post-traumatic
symptoms such as nightmares and self-mutilation? Williamson cannot prove that
she was sexually abused at age three; nevertheless, to heal her traumatized body,
Williamson alters family photographs in order to resist the “familial gaze” (Hirsch)
while also refusing to mistake images for (body) memory (Berger).
The
Appearance of Space: Spatial Inversions in Rulfo's Writing and Photography
Instead
of using Juan Rulfo’s writing and photographs as a way to "prove" photography’s
criticism and its relationship to time and death, this paper will focus on Rulfo’s
"excess of the outside" and the cognitive inversions produced through the staging
of inverted spaces and the ultimate collapse of interiors. As Bachelard has taught
us, space and its geometry contain implicit meanings and philosophical connotations;
I will try to reinsert "the spatial" as an initial point of criticism in Rulfo’s
work.
Catherine
De Lorenzo and
Deborah van der Plaat, Faculty of the Built Environment, University
of New South Wales
More
Than Meets the Eye: Photographic Records of Humboldtian Imaginings
This
paper will argue that the Humboldtian intersection of poetry, painting, the cultivation
of exotic plants, and photography was, in nineteenth-century Australia, intentionally
replicated in the community of European-born artists in Melbourne. An example
of this is the garden and semi-rural retreat of photographer John William Lindt
(1845-1926), whose garden and photographs were motivated by a vision and celebration
of the exotic designed to reveal the “grand sublimity” of nature imagined by von
Humboldt.
This
paper will explore ways in which photography’s unique relation to time and space
opens the way for an ahistorical and non-linear temporality, one which exceeds
what we commonly understand as history. As a means of exploring this potential,
we will address a number of photographic portraits evoked in the context of literary
and critical texts. In discussing these examples our objective will be to apprehend
that timeless sphere to which Benjamin’s “tiny spark of accident” is said to open
the way as a means of understanding what Giorgio Agamben means by the end of history.
Petra
Dreiser, PhD Candidate,
American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Germany
Where
Time and Space Are Thicker: Photography’s Invisible Archives in John Edgar Wideman’s
Two Cities
This
paper considers a collection of multiple-exposure, and hence undecipherable, photographs
at the center of Wideman’s novel as an archive of sorts, whose very makeup—invisibility
derived from hypervisibility and arrested movement— reflects and critically comments
on the problematic framework of black visual representation in dominant U.S. culture.
In part drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’s ponderings on the veil, the paper ultimately
explores the powerful potential of (in)sight not yoked to definite representation.
Elizabeth
Epperly, Department
of English, University of Prince Edward Island
Exposing
Technique: L.M. Montgomery's Landscape Photographs and Descriptions
The
late-Victorian Romanticism that informed Montgomery’s perceptions of nature is
reflected in the composition of her photographs and texts. Physical patterns featured
in her black-and-white photographs also order the colours, uses of personification,
and similes in the descriptions. Comparing her photographs with key descriptions
in Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), I suggest how
Montgomery used a photographer’s techniques to create the central patterns in
written descriptions, especially landscapes.
Carol
Freeman, PhD Candidate,
Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania
Figuring
Extinction: Photographs and the Politics of Representing the Thylacine in Natural
History Works 1900-1936
Photographs
of a Tasmanian marsupial carnivore, extinct by 1936, overturn traditional zoological
representations of the species: they show animals in zoos, replete with motifs
of abjection, isolation, and yearning. Some images, however,
are “adjusted” and narratives of threat common in nineteenth-century engravings
are re-introduced. This paper explores claims of authority
and fidelity, the potential of the punctum,
image/text relations, the “retouched” photograph and coding for inevitable loss.
It asks— could photography have saved the thylacine?
Joel
Freeman,
PhD Candidate, German, University of California, Berkeley
Death
and the Ontology of the Still Image in Fritz Lang's M
This
paper examines the ontology of the still image in Fritz
Lang's M (1931). M offers unique inroads into
the nature of the photograph in relation to film by means of its constant use
of still shots and framed moments in time. It brings into focus
the absence-of-presence inherent in any attempt to represent death. Absence-of-presence
is a constitutive feature of the ontology of both the photograph and film. Analysis
of Lang's M makes the structure of this ontology available to
us.
Karen
Ruth Gardner,
PhD Candidate, Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University
Intimations
of Immortality: Theorizing Photographs of Children in Late-Victorian England
In
late-Victorian England, both the camera and the child were thought to have access
to a visual world that was not available to the adult eye. A Wordsworthian concept
of the child as “seer blessed” became the paradigm through which the novelty of
a photographic gaze could be understood. Analysing photographs by Lewis Carroll
and Julia Margaret Cameron, this paper explores how the presumed innocence of
the child’s and the camera’s gaze proved mutually self-reinforcing.
Paola
Ghinelli, PhD
Candidate, Francophone Literatures, University of Bologna
The
Image of an Absence: The Photograph in the Writings of Daniel Pennac
The
photograph is one of the leitmotivs of Daniel Pennac’s novels. It often represents
either a mode of knowledge for the characters, or a tribute to memory. The narrative
importance of stereotypes in this author’s work may be associated with the function
of photographs in his fictions. In particular, Roland Barthes’s theories on contemporary
myths allow us to think that the hyperrealism of the photographs Pennac describes
can be interpreted as an access to myth.
Tim
Gough,
Architect, London, UK
Given
Focus
This
paper argues for a conceptual nexus given by photographic focus. The conceptual
possibility of the photographic will be defined as that drawing of light which
presupposes the plane where this occurs; the concept of light divorced from any
ontological concerns about its nature; and the point. This gives a field across
which focus remains even. This giving of focus will be related to pre- and post-Renaissance
space-making; and to a concept of architectural space which is, precisely, out
of focus.
Jennifer
Green-Lewis,
Department of English, The George Washington University
Pictorial
Photography and the Invention of the Victorian Past
No
longer considered obscure examples of the misuse of the camera, the determinedly
anti-documentary photographs of Victorian pictorial photographers have become
increasingly available as visual accompaniment to our commodification of the nineteenth
century. This paper focuses on work by Henry Peach Robinson to explore the contribution
of pictorial photography to the creation of a generalized, pastoral, and specifically
English past.
Larry
D. Griffin, Department
of English, Dyersburg State Community College
Realism
and Photographic Images in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary (1857)
Gustave
Flaubert in his novel, Madame Bovary (1857)
successfully creates images – akin to Jean Baudrillard’s
simulacrum, Daniel Boorstin’s pseudo-events, and Kenneth’s Burke’s discourse theory
– to demonstrate that while any person in the present remains imprisoned by the
imagery of his or her past, such limitation determines, at least in part, one’s
future.
Asbjørn
Grønstad,
Department of English, Universitetet i Bergen
Anatomy
of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-up
Celebrated
for its magnificent portrayal of 1960s London, Antonioni’s Blow-Up
(1966) is also that rare film which engages in a metapictorial reflection on the
nature of filmicity and its photographic source. Drawing upon what one might call
Bazin’s and Barthes’s affectionist theories of photography, this paper attempts
to read Blow-Up as a text that not only theorizes film's relationship
with the photographic but also refracts what critics like Stewart and Usai see
as the medium's intrinsic affinity with processes of decay, death, and mourning.
Elena
Gualtieri,
Department of English Literature, University of Sussex
Photography
and the Translation of History in the Twentieth-Century Novel
Drawing
examples from Proust, Musil, Woolf, Duras, Ondaatje and Sebald, this paper outlines
a theory of the significance of photographs as liminal spaces where history is
in the process of being translated into fiction. The paper shows how the photograph
functions as an instrument of research through which both modernist and contemporary
novels set out to investigate the contested nature of historical knowledge in
and of the twentieth century.
Janice
Hart,
London College of Printing
The
Girl No One Knew: Photographs, Narratives, and Secrets in Modern Fiction
Photographs
are frequently used in fiction because their apparent indexicality confirms our
view of what the world is like and what the world of a story is like.
However, in The Photograph, Penelope Lively uses the unexpected
discovery of a photograph to confound everything her characters had previously
known about themselves and each other. I argue that photographs
provide a unique vehicle for creating tension between ostensible reality and the
narrative potential for secrecy, concealment, and revelation.
Katja
Haustein, PhD
Candidate, French, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
The
Photograph in the Drawer: Picturing the Self and the Other in Proust’s A
la recherche du temps perdue
This
paper investigates the impact of photography on the conception of self and other
in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdue. Reading the narratives
centred around the grandmother and Albertine in light of Lacan’s conception of
the gaze as well as Lévinas’s theory of otherness, I suggest the Proustian self
is located beyond a modern absolute notion of subjectivism and its postmodern
destruction. Exposed to an other who constantly withdraws, this self is unstable
and mobile, but, I shall argue, therefore all the more resistant.
Silke
Horstkotte, Department
of German, Universität Leipzig, Germany
Photo-Text
Relations in W.G. Sebald’s The
Rings of Saturn [Die Ringe des Saturn]
In
this paper, I explore the notion of a “new visuality” by considering what repercussions
the presence of (photographic) images has for the traditional linguistic/textual
media. Through a close reading of W.G. Sebald’s intermedial book The
Rings of Saturn, and drawing on recent theories of image-text relations (Bal,
Mitchell, Wagner), I demonstrate that the relation between the verbal and the
visual is not stable or static,
but rather constitutes an ongoing intermedial process.
Rachel
Hung, Department
of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan
The
Afterimage of Ethnicity: Seeing the That-Has-Not-Been in C.D. Hoy’s Photography
In
the production of First Son: Portraits by C.D. Hoy (1999), ideological
practices of intervention and manipulation of documenting an objective reality
complicate the aesthetic representations of the imagetexts. Enacting Eduardo Cadava’s
mode of receiving history—neither linear nor successive, but rather discontinuous,
Hoy’s work explores the possibility of what Walter Benjamin calls “dialectical
images” in which the flow of history of Canada’s First Nations is interrupted
and becomes messianic in a photographic presence.
John
Ibson, Department
of American Studies, California State University, Fullerton
Picturing
Men in World War II: Narratives of Liberation in Fiction,
Autobiography, and Vernacular Photography
This
paper compares and interprets images of American servicemen in vernacular photographs
taken during the Second World War and in literary evocations of servicemen’s wartime
relationships. Servicemen were, in distinctive ways, free
from twentieth-century masculinity’s constraints, especially taboos regarding
affection between men. The paper weighs the merits of essentialist and constructionist
models of sexuality, and assesses the usefulness of a binary approach to sexual
identity, even using photographic evidence to interrogate the very notion of sexual
orientation.
Karen
Jacobs, Department
of English, University of Colorado
Optical
Miniatures in Text and Image: Detail and Totality in Nabokov's Speak,
Memory and Sebald's The Emigrants
This
paper follows the dialectically entwined careers of the textual and photographic
detail from Vladimir Nabokov's photographically illustrated memoir, Speak,
Memory (1967), to W.G. Sebald's recent photofiction, The Emigrants
(1992), where the detail both migrates and, strange émigré, undergoes a metamorphosis
of meanings. The detail not only miniaturizes key aspects of the text, but also
raises questions – through its seductiveness, strangeness, and fundamental impenetrability
– about capacity to incarnate an otherwise lost totality.
Steven
Jacobs,
PhD Candidate, Ghent Urban Studies Team, Ghent University
Horror
Vacui or Amor Vacui: Photography and the Deserted
City
The
motif of the empty city turns up frequently in urban photography. In the beginning,
it is clearly the result of technical restrictions. In other cases, it is a matter
of an emptiness on the spot: the void created by modern urban planning or by the
destructive forces of nature or war. Finally, photography’s predilection for emptiness
can be the result of artistic interpretations: a reference to the clarity of the
classical architectural drawing or to feelings such as sublime terror, loneliness,
and alienation.
Louis
Kaplan, Department
of Fine Art, University of Toronto
Community
Exposed Photography: Theorizing Photography and Community via Jean-Luc Nancy
This
paper examines how the theories of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, as articulated
in The Inoperative Community (1986) and other writings, illuminate
the relationship between photography and community and offer innovative resources
for photo-theory. Being-in-common involves exposure to
the other (being posed in exteriority) and this idea can be applied to the photographic
process as well. The paper traces how this “expository”
approach differs from indexical theories of the photographic sign.
Irena
Kohn, PhD Candidate,
Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, OISE, University of Toronto
Showing
and Telling the Lodz Ghetto: The Struggle Toward an Ethical Translation of History
in Mendel Grossman’s Photographs and in Chava Rosenfarb’s novel The
Tree of Life
Of
the rich and varied documents referencing events of Lodz Ghetto, both the clandestine
photographs of Mendel Grossman and the astonishing three-part novel of ghetto
survivor Chava Rosenfarb constitute significant witness accounts of ghetto life.
This paper will argue that Grossman’s photographs and Rosenfarb’s novel
challenge conventional assumptions underpinning the fields of photography and
literature as potential sites of historical knowledge, thereby enlisting the secondary
witness to participate in ethical modes of “knowing” the past.
Patricia
Levin, Independent
Curator, Los Angeles and Jeanne Perreault, Department of English,
University of Calgary
Fabrications:
Archive and Identity
This
presentation will examine works by artists who use digital technologies to further
complicate the production of images, suggesting myriad possibilities of re/producing
memory by way of capture, storage, and generation. Do these new technologies,
as the new machines of the visible, produce new narratives of memory/history?
Or, have these technologies only foregrounded the already contested status of
the photograph as evidence or document?
Marlene
MacCallum, Department
of Fine Arts, Memorial University of Newfoundland
The
Photograph in an Artist's Book Works: Architectural Images and the Architecture
of the Book
This
illustrated presentation will examine the use of the photograph in the construction
and creation of my book works. I will take the audience through the architecture
of several book works. The basis of my work is the photographic construction of
illusory interiors that evoke a state of psychological and visual tension engendered
by paradoxical or contradictory perceptual/memory reactions. The works subvert
the conventions of the traditional book-form relating the reading experience to
the content.
Pamela
McCallum, Department
of English, University of Calgary
Cultural
Memories and Imagined Futures: The Art of Jane Ash Poitras
My
paper will focus on two paintings by Jane Ash Poitras: “Living in the Storm Too
Long,” a critical commentary on the Columbus quincentary and “The Contrary,” a
later painting which explores anthropological discourses about Indigenous peoples.
In particular, I am interested in how Poitras utilizes photographs from
the archives of anthropology. Her art redeploys these photographs in order not
only to critique the appropriation and construction of the images, but also to
return them to her people. Her technique challenges viewers
to re-envision the old photographs as cultural memories that can be resituated
to imagine different futures.
Jean-Pierre
Montier, Département
de Lettres, Université Rennes 2, France
Proust
révélé par Brassaï
Le
photographe Brassaï, en 1968, relisant A la Recherche du Temps perdu,
a la « révélation » du rôle central que joue la photographie dans l’oeuvre de
Marcel Proust. Ses notes (posthumes, publiées en 1996) proposent des vues fines,
esquissant une relecture de l'écriture proustienne: «Personne n'a vraiment compris
la signification de la photographie pour Proust », écrit-il. L’analyse des usages
et des phénomènes photographiques est de nature à renouveler la critique proustienne.
English
Translation: Proust as revealed by Brassaï
In
1968, whilst rereading A
la recherche du temps perdu (“Remembrance of things past”), the
photographer Brassaï had a “revelation”: the central role played by photography
in Marcel Proust's masterpiece. His notes, published posthumously in 1996, propose
subtle perspectives; they sketch a re-reading of Proust's writings: “No-one has
really understood the meaning of photography for Proust,” he writes. By the analysis
of photographic techniques and phenomena, it is possible to renew Proust criticism.
Christopher
Moylan,
Department of English, New York Institute of Technology
Image
as Things: Jonathan Callan’s Disfigured Photographs
Jonathan
Callan’s scratched and abraded photographs engage us in the physical properties
of what we ordinarily take to be a practically non-material representation and,
in doing so, reinscribe the almost magical ontology of the image in terms of the
alien and monstrous. Callan speaks of his work in terms of vandalism. I will frame
the discussion in Lacanian terms in relation to das Ding, or the
thing, an eruption from outside the symbolic order.
Douglas
Neale
and Elizabeth Musgrave, Department of Architecture, University
of Queensland, Australia
Architectural
Image and Idiom: Making Local
Using
photographic images of mid-twentieth century architecture from South-East Queensland,
this paper investigates the translation and regeneration of modern themes into
a local idiom that resonates with the poetic qualities of pre-existent forms of
inhabitation. By drawing together a relation between ideological
modes of representation and memory, it contributes to the discussion of the role
of the photograph in communicating meaning in architecture and provides insight
into the photograph's potential to “reveal” the idiomatic.
Mary
O’Connor, Department
of English, McMaster University
Nude
Friends and Advertising Body Parts: Women Photographing Women
Contemporary
female photographers have found various solutions to the problem of objectifying
and commodifying women’s bodies by ironizing the very structures of representation.
This paper will attend to the theoretical and political problems raised by women
photographing nude women in the 1920s, a period of photography’s full entry into
the matrix of advertising and commercialism. The New York photography of Margaret
Watkins shows a range of options from fetishistic body parts to images of domestic
intimacy.
Linda
Rader Overman,
Department of English, California State University, Northridge
Developing
Portraits with Layers of Time
Photographs
have defined and shaped my very existence. Due to my father’s passion for the
medium, I was left with visual traces of his life and mine in hundreds of black
and white 8x10 glossies. Collected and stored by my mother, these photographs
and the overwhelming nature of their existence compelled me to write about them,
and thus to examine the idea of “family” and to seek connections between the leftovers
of first and second generation remembrance.
Archival
Canada: The NFB's Still Photography Division and Constructions of Nationhood
This
paper examines the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division
(1941-1984) as an archive that both re-inscribed perceived photographic authority
and encoded notions of citizenship in terms of race, gender, and class.
I will draw from Allan Sekula’s call to read the photographic archive from
the position of those who have become its objects, and I will draw from the work
of Homi K. Bhabha as means to destabilize the Division’s photographic construction
of nationhood.
Nancy
Pedri,
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Photographic
Portrayals of Gender: The Representation of Gender in Photographic Portraiture
My
paper addresses one seemingly simple question: How do photographic portraits make
gender intelligible? I will bring together two major fields of study – gender
studies and photographic portraiture – in an attempt to draw some connections
between the origin and nature of gender and its concrete portrayals. I will explore
how photographic portraiture’s traditional recourse to the body’s indexicality
makes it an attractive site where the body / gender correspondence is challenged
and disrupted through the reworking of recognizable conventions of gender portrayal.
Magdalena
Perkowska-Álvarez,
Department of Romance Languages, Hunter College, CUNY
Visual
Poetics: On Uses of Photography in the Contemporary Latin American Novel
This
study examines the poetic function of photographs in three Latin American novels:
La llegada (J.L. González), Fuegia (E. Belgrano
Rawson), and Tinísima (E. Poniatowska). I show that photographs
disrupt an apparently smooth surface of text and unfold its complexity by providing
a point of view that contrasts with the perspective constructed through the narrative
(La llegada), by breaking down the temporality of
recounted events (Fuegia), and by constituting
a metafictional commentary challenging the novel's biographical discourse
(Tinísima).
Laurence
Petit, PhD Candidate,
English, University of Colorado at Boulder
Romance
of a Family or Inverted “Family Romance”: Familial Gaze and Narratorial Look in
Anita Brookner's Family
and Friends
Building
on the work of major critics in the field of text and image, this paper approaches
the Freudian concept of “family romance” through Marianne Hirsch’s distinction
between “familial gaze” and “familial look.” I examine how Family
and Friends, Anita Brookner's “family album” novel, presents a “romance of
a family” that can be read, ironically, as an inverted Freudian “family romance,”
the institutional “familial gaze” of the wedding-photographs being shattered by
an investigatory “narratorial look.”
Elaine
Pigeon, Department
of English, Concordia University
The
Photographs in Henry James’s The
Bostonians
Like
the photograph, Henry James’s The Bostonians provides a kind of
literary document of Boston in the 1870s. Within the frame of literary naturalism,
photography has a very particular relevance: it signals the importance of type,
be it sexual, class or racial. Most striking, perhaps, is what the photographs
of Verena Tarrent, the inspirational feminist speaker, come to signify. As her
reputation grows, Basil Ransom begins to see photographs of her displayed in the
store windows, signaling a transgression of traditional gender roles. This paper
will examine photography and its relationship to gender in James’s novel.
Helen
Robertson, Independent
scholar and artist, London, UK
The
Architecture of the Photograph
This
illustrated paper discusses Sugimoto’s exhibition “The Architecture of Time” at
the Kunsthaus Bregenz 2001 and Thomas Ruff’s series of photographs of Mies Van
Der Roh’s building. The stage, which was part of Sugimoto’s exhibition, is a key
concept within this paper. It represents a theatrical set-up, which is embodied
in the photographic medium. This is used as a metaphor to explore photography
as a conceptual model for the representation of representation itself.
Dan
Russek,
PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
Verbal/Visual
Braids: On the Photographic Medium in the Work of Julio Cortázar
The
paper attempts a comprehensive interpretation of the role photography plays in
the work of the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984). It develops the
idea of a verbal/visual braid in which two features of the photographic medium
are merged, namely, the testimonial or realist and the uncanny or demonic. Drawing
from the discourses of travel literature and journalism, and mediated by key concepts
in Cortázar’s avant-garde aesthetics – such as violence and madness – the paper
shows how photography becomes a decisive hinge around which his literary work
is articulated.
Kas
Saghafi, Centre
for the Humanties, Grinnell College
The
Truth – Of Photography: Derrida’s “Aletheia”
In
an essay entitled “Aletheia” devoted to the work of Japanese photographer Kishin
Shinoyama, Jacques Derrida explores the relation of photographic images to visibility
and invisibility, light and darkness, disclosure and concealment. My paper, a
commentary on Derrida’s untranslated essay, as well as thematizing the relationship
between technology and nature (techne and phusis),
desire and the gaze of the photograph, explains how Shinoyama’s photographs can
be said to be allegories of truth – aletheia – itself.
Marcy
Schwartz, Department
of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University
Writing
Against the City: Julio Cortázar’s Photographic Takes of India and Peru
Julio
Cortázar’s fascination with photography has produced collaborative volumes as
well as fiction in which the verbal and the visual are integrated for aesthetic
and political impact. I discuss two of Cortázar’s photographic
projects, Prosa del observatorio and Alto el Perú,
where the foreignizing gaze is juxtaposed with Paris. The
dialogue between the essays and photographs in each volume calls into question
the urban as an ontological category and the site of a compromised positionality.
Steven
Scott, Department
of English, Brock University
Clearing
the Smoke: Auster and Representation
In
Paul Auster’s short story “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story,” Auggie Wren sets up
a camera on a street corner in New York. Every day he takes a picture of the same
scene. I am interested in the use of the photograph in Auster’s work because the
representation of the photography collection in the story is a representation
of a representation, or, more accurately, a representation of an idea of a representation:
Auster problematizes representation.
Nikki
Sheppy, PhD Candidate,
English and derek beaulieu, MA Candidate, English, University
of Calgary
Evidence
of Absence in Crime Scene Photography and Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget
The
representation of the absent self in crime scene photographs and Fidget
is based on the formulation of a narrative founded on the “reconstructing [of]
prior actions.” Ralph Rugoff argues that crime scene photographs are an “anti-space”
where meaning is constructed through what is not represented. The documentation
of the site of trauma or that of an unanchored body “can not be narrativized,”
and thus can never “be restored to the world of meaning and comprehension.”
M.
Kathryn Shields,
Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Arlington
Stories
These Masks Could Tell: Literary References in the Photographs of Ralph Eugene
Meatyard
Ralph
Eugene Meatyard’s photographs may be seen as literary due to their narrative aspect
and the fact that the underlying story is often as compelling as the images themselves.
Direct and indirect parallels can also be made with specific short stories
and novels. Considering the satirical, macabre, and vernacular
elements present in several authors’ written fiction helps to inform and enrich
our understanding of the environments inhabited by the masked characters in Meatyard’s
photographs.
Eugénie
Shinkle, Department
of Design, Digital Media and Photography, University of Westminster, UK
Boredom,
Repetition, Inertia: The Banal in Contemporary Photography
This
paper explores the banal as an aesthetic and a structural paradigm in contemporary
photography. Banality is linked to notions of boredom and ennui, and examined
as an effect of late capitalism. Aesthetically, banality comprises a visual economy
of repetition that invites a kind of perceptual boredom in the viewer – a resistance
to emotional and critical engagement. Structurally, the banal is a specifically
photographic aesthetic – a self-conscious deliberation on the perceptual boredom
of the perspectival image itself.
Elena
Siemens, Department
of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta
From
the Archive: Representation of Death in Russian WW II Photography
This
presentation will consider the photo exhibit entitled Dedication
by the Moscow House of Photography. Held in May of 2000, in celebration of the
55th anniversary of the end of Second World War, the show gathered
photographs from Russia, France, US, Poland, Germany and Norway, and included
previously unknown (and shocking, at least to the Russian viewer) images from
the archives. The paper will focus on strategies of representing
the injured and the dead in Russia and the West, and in particular will analyze
images of the dead by two prominent war photographers, Dmitry Baltermants and
Yevgeny Khaldey. It will also address some of the unsettling issues connected
to the images of violence raised in Susan Sontag’s recent publication Regarding
the Pain of Others.
Amy
Smith, Department
of English, Hilbert College
The
Uneasy Alliance of Fiction and Photography in Carol Shields’s The
Stone Diaries
Carol
Shields’s novel The Stone Diaries, which includes a section of
photographs in which the people in the photographs are identified as characters
in the novel, provides the reader with an opportunity to consider the ways in
which the interaction of fiction and photography raises questions about identity
and existence, particularly within the context of the family.
Shawn
Michelle Smith,
Department of American Studies, Saint Louis University
Race
and the Optical Unconscious
This
paper assesses the racialized contours of the “optical unconscious” in photography
theory. Beginning with Walter Benjamin's initial definition
of the optical unconscious, I then assess Roland Barthes's articulation of the
punctum and studium as fundamental elements of
photographic meaning. Through a re-examination of the examples Barthes calls on
to define these terms, I suggest that his influential theory of photography is
permeated by a racialized optical unconscious.
Sue
Sorensen, Department
of English, University of Winnipeg
Against
Photography: Susan Sontag and the Violent Image
In
On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag employed a rhetoric of invasion,
alienation, consumption, and objectification in her discussion of visual language.
She also, however, proposed a tentative “ethics of seeing.” In recent works of
criticism she is more pessimistic about the human ability
to
direct the aggressive power of images. Can we formulate a plausible and less cynical
response than Sontag’s to the problem of our increasingly hardened attitude toward
visual atrocities?
Frances
Sprout, PhD Candidate,
English, University of Victoria, BC
Lost
Photographs/Photographed Losses: Fictional and Non-Fictional Responses to Parental
Loss
This
paper considers the function of photographs reproduced in two media – a PowerPoint
montage and a quilt, both subsequently lost to theft and burial, respectively
– in both the mourning and memorialization of my father; it does so supported
by theory derived while exploring the function of the fictional photograph in
Canadian novels whose protagonists narrativize their lives while mourning parental
death (e.g. Timothy Findley’s The Piano Man’s Daughter and Daphne
Marlatt’s Taken).
D.
Stringer,
Department of English, James Madison University
Carl
Van Vechten: Traumatic Portraits as Pedagogy of Race
Carl
Van Vechten’s portraits of African-Americans often demonstrate racial difference
as photographic shock. The viewer is invited, through a risky, camp mimicry of
racist stereotypes and fetishes, both to experience, and to observe, racial marking
as a traumatic interruption of the United States’s cultural history. I seek to
demonstrate Van Vechten’s pedagogic method, and to ask whether representations
of North American racial difference force us to re-evaluate trauma as a trope
in photographic criticism generally.
Andrew
Taylor,
Department of English, University of Ottawa
Sights
of Memory: Photography and the Construction of the Middle Ages
Many
think of the “age of the simulacra” as our age, one defined by a proliferation
of images generated by recent technologies, notably digitalization. This paper
explores the power of earlier technologies, including heliogravure reproduction
in the 1880s, to shape a vision of the past. The mechanical reproduction of pages
from illuminated manuscripts transformed them into snapshots, direct records of
a cohesive period of chivalric splendour. We still dream the Middle Ages through
these photographs.
Mary
Beth Tierney-Tello,
Department of Hispanic Studies, Wheaton College
Framing
Memory: Photographs and Text in Flores
en el desierto
This
paper analyzes how the photo essay Flores en el desierto (Chile,
1999) uses writing and photography to re-frame political trauma and family memory.
By incorporating old photographs of the disappeared within photographs of the
survivors, as well as by juxtaposing these photographs with written testimonies,
Flores en el desierto not only denounces political violence and
performs a ritual of mourning, but also rejects and contradicts representations
of a “new Chile” that would prefer to erase the memory of this painful and violent
past.
Øyvind
Vågnes, PhD Candidate,
English, Universitetet i Bergen
Here
is New York Again: Looking at Amateur Photographs of September 11
This
paper addresses how two collections of amateur photographs from the terror attacks
in Manhattan invite new ways of looking when transported to different sites and
occasions for visualization. The photographs were initially exhibited in galleries
in SoHo in response to the events of September 11. How is the communal event of
looking in a local gallery transformed when the photographs are collected in books,
presented on web-sites, and embark upon national/international tours to galleries?
Josephine
van Bennekom,
PhD Candidate, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Fictional
Adventures of Family Shots: How Writers Unravel a Desired Past
Family
photographs may represent a desired past for family members, but not necessarily
for others, particularly writers of fiction. This paper explores family photos
as useful sources for fiction, as a tool for writers to unravel the contradictions
between real life and wishful thinking.
Ian
Walker, School
of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales College, Newport
The
Photographic Portrait in André Breton’s Nadja
Published
in 1928, Nadja is still an ambiguous, provocative book, the text
and photographs interacting in a weave of presence and absence, fact and fiction.
There are several portraits in the book, including one of Breton, but there is
no photograph of Nadja herself. In the second edition of 1963, however, one was
added: Nadja’s eyes four times over. So there does exist
an image of her, but we may see only part of it.
Kanchanakesi
Warnapala, PhD
candidate, English, Michigan State University
Dismantling
the Gaze: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Sri Lankan Photographs
For
the most part, colonial photography has been viewed as European imaginings of
the “other,” and thus as having more to do with fantasy than reality. However,
Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of Sri Lankans do not easily fit into this
model: not simply derogatory representations, they both empower and dis-empower
the native. My paper traces these tensions to Cameron’s own position in the colonies,
as a woman as well as a photographer; and I take into consideration her own problematic
status in Victorian society as a woman born and bred in the colonies. My paper
asks how such tensions created an intimacy between Cameron and her subject, resulting
in a different mode of “seeing” the native.
Nancy
M. West, Department
of English, University of Missouri, Columbia
Tabloid
Culture and the Crime Scene Photograph
In
my paper, I examine the ways in which papers like the Daily News and the Mirror
taught viewers how to “read” a crime scene photograph. As the number of murders
committed in New York escalated from 423 in 1921 to 4,056 in 1933, tabloids emerged
as the first medium to provide a visual and narrative framework for crime scene
photography. This paper will reconstruct that framework by examining editorial
directives, tabloid publishing policies, and the photos of tabloid workers Simon
Nathan, Joel Landau, and Weegee.
Abstracts
for Panel on Photography
and War:
Jonathan
Long, Department
of German, University of Durham
Making
Meaning: Ernst Jünger's Photographic Book Records of World War One
Ernst
Jünger's Antlitz des Weltkrieges combines testimonies by WWI veterans
with photographs of trench warfare. Though conceived as a mnemonic aid, text-image
relationships in Jünger's text turn out to be far more fraught than this notion
would imply. Photographs of mechanized warfare inevitably depict injury and death,
but in the absence of military victory, these aspects of war appear utterly pointless.
Antlitz des Weltkrieges negotiates, on the page, the problem of
giving meaning to photographic images of war.
Andrea
Noble, Department
of Spanish, University of Durham
Death,
Photography, and Memory in the Mexican Revolution
This
paper, part of a wider project, aims to generate close and detailed readings of
individual and groups of photographic images from the Casasola photographic archive
of the Mexican revolution. It takes as its focus images that document the death
of key revolutionaries in the conflict: Emiliano Zapata, Franciso Villa, and Venustiano
Carranza, who all fell victim to political assassination. The paper analyzes the
relationship between photography and death in the context of post-revolutionary
discourses of cultural memory.
Edward
Welch, Department
of French, University of Durham
This
paper explores the important role played by French photojournalists in the mediation
of post-war conflict. It suggests that their pre-eminence in the field can be
linked to the specific cultural context from which they emerge, namely the French
tradition of the committed writer and intellectual theorized in the post-war years.
It focuses in particular on the work of Luc Delahaye, which seems at once to exemplify
and interrogate the tradition of photographer as politically committed man-of-action.
Abstract
for Panel on “Fred
Douglas’s Crossfade and Flutter: Memory, Melancholy,
and the Rhetoric of Photographic Excess.”
Speakers:
Fred
Douglas, Artist,
Vancouver, BC
W.F.
Garrett-Petts,
Department of English and Modern Languages, University College of the Cariboo
Donald
Lawrence, Department
of Visual and Performing Arts, University College of the Cariboo
Though
an active and influential member of Vancouver’s arts community since the 1960s,
Fred Douglas has worked against the grain of Vancouver’s photo-conceptual practice.
He has begun to speak out against what he sees as an exhausted, overly self-conscious,
overly settled, “over-coded” artistic practice. Two recent works, Crossfade
and Flutter, represent Douglas’s efforts to find an unsettled,
moving space for his pictures and stories, one that fades across vernacular forms
of personal and commercial expression. For Douglas, “The writing is . . . an un-containing
of things – a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion.” Finding and revitalizing
the “fluttering presence” languishing dormant in the everyday means confronting
the neglect or indifference or misreading that everyday objects suffer. This panel
presentation provides an occasion for a dialogue on the issues of memory, melancholia,
narrative, and photographic representation that Douglas’s work raises.