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Special
Issue Contents:
This special issue features selected papers and three keynote presentations
from Mosaic's March 2004 international interdisciplinary
conference, The Photograph. The issue, like the conference, is bound
to be another major international event. This is a color issue,
available December 2004.
Featured
papers from the following Photograph conference keynote speakers:
Mieke Bal, Light Writing: Portraiture
in a Post-Traumatic Age
An exploration of the photographic portrait, not as memory of the
disappeared, so much as both a record and an appeal, both recognition
and validation, or subjects who are themselves traumatized.
David
Farrell Krell, Shudder Speed: The Photograph
as Ecstasy and Tragedy
Does photography, with its shudder speed, serve as a modern-day
technological equivalent to ancient Greek tragedy? Is shutter speed
shudder speed? The question is explored in this essay by way of
Aristotle, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Jacob Bernays.
Fred
Wah, Is A Door A Word?
An attempt to recover the compounding cipher in image-text as an
opportunity for recognition and surprise, this is a liminal photo-hyphen-text
that plays a little music at the heart of looking.
Also
included in this special MOSAIC publication:
Caroline
Blinder, "The Transparent Eyeball": On Emerson
and Walker Evans
Taking Emerson's Nature (1836) as its starting point, this
essay argues that in Lincoln Kirstein and William Carlos Williams's
readings of Evans as a visionary artist of the vernacular, Emersonian
ideals were always part and parcel of the search for an intrinsically
American manifesto of photography.
Dan
Russek, Verbal/Visual
Braids: The Photographic Medium in the Work of Julio Cortázar
A comprehensive interpretation of the role photography plays in
the work of the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984),
this essay develops the idea of a verbal/visual braid that underscores
the revelatory power of the image and its testimonial use. The essay
centers on Cortázar's collage-like books La vuelta al dìa
en ochenta mundos (1967) and Ultimo Round (1969).
Janice
Hart, The Girl No One Knew: Photographs, Narratives
and Secrets in Modern Fiction
Photographs have frequently featured in fiction because their reputation
for indexicality confirms our view of what the world, and the world
of the novel, is like. In The Photograph, however, Penelope
Lively uses the unexpected discovery of a photograph to confound,
not confirm, everything her characters know about themselves and
each other.
Helen
Robertson, The Architecture of the Photograph
Through detailed analysis and discussion of photographic works
and works of architecture, this essay discusses conceptual structures
underpinning the photographic process. The essay explores Thomas
Ruff's series of photographs of Mies van der Rohe's buildings in
relation to a self-reflexive engagement with the photographic.
Richard
Crownshaw, Reconsidering Postmemory: Photography, the
Archive and Post-Holocost Memory in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz
By way of examining Sebald's use of photography in Austerlitz,
this essay scrutinizes the theory and practice of postmemory.
Elizabeth
Musgrave and Douglas Neale,
Architectural Image and Idiom: Making Local
Using
photographic images of mid-twentieth century architecture from South-East
Queensland, Australia, this essay investigates the translation and
regeneration of modern themes into a local idiom.
Eugénie
Shinkle, Boredom, Repetition, Inertia: The Aesthetics
of the Banal in Contemporary Photography
This essay explores the banal as an aesthetic category in contemporary
photography, situating banality in relation to notions of boredom
and ennui, and examining it as an effect of late capitalism. Visually
and structurally, the essay argues, banality comprises an economy
of repetition that invites 'perceptual boredom' in the viewer, a
resistance to emotional and critical engagement.
M.
Kathryn Shields, Stories These Masks Could Tell: Literary
References in the Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Meatyard's Ambrose Bierce and Lucybelle Crater
photographs may be seen as literary due to their narrative aspect
and the fact that the underlying stories are especially compelling.
Direct and indirect parallels with specific works of literature
reveal that the masks in these photographs signify a transformation
that embraces the tension between reality and representation.
Catherine
de Lorenzo and Deborah van der Plaat, "More than
meets the eye": Photographic Records of Humboldtian Imaginings
The Humboldtian intersection of poetry, painting, the cultivation
of exotic plants, and photography was, in nineteenth-century Australia,
intentionally replicated in certain photographs by the European-born
Australian, John William Lindt (1845-1926). The essay challenges
current photo-historiography by introducing an Humboldtian reading
of the photograph.
Patricia
Levin and Jeanne Perreault, The Camera Made Me Do It:
Nicole Jolicoeur and Troubling Archives
This essay looks at the extended archive that a contemporary Montreal
artist uses and abuses in her considerations of female subjectivity.
Nicole Jolicoeur incorporates questions about the material and materiality
of images in her reconstructions of nineteenth-century photographs
and in her series of self-portraits. The relation of the referent
(the photographed) first to the image and then to Jolicoeur's transformation
becomes a central aesthetic and ethical issue for her viewers as
it is for herself. Her processes and her creations offer an opportunity
to reconsider the cultural weight of an archive and the complexities
of intervening in those formidable sites.
Petra
Dreiser, Where Time and Space are Thicker: Photography's
(Invisible) Archives of African American Life in John Edgar Wildman's
Two Cities
A collection of multiple-exposure, and hence undecipherable,
photographs at the center of Wideman's novel constitute an archive
of sorts, the very makeup of which, invisibility derived from hypervisibility
and arrested movement, reflects and critically comments on the problematic
framework of black visual representation in dominant American culture.
Margot
Leigh Butler, The Hero of Heroines
"The Hero of Heroines" contextualizes, analyzes
and critiques Lincoln Clarkesà acclaimed book of photographs
of unnamed women pictured as heroin addicts on Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside, where many women are missing and murdered. Heroines
is discussed using the interdisciplinary concepts signs, genre,
documentary, types, 'choice', consent, figuration and implicatedness.
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