Photography, Trace, and Trauma
Photography, Trace, and Trauma

Author: Margaret Iversen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 022637033X

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Photography is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma: the automatic nature of the process, wide-open camera lens, and light-sensitive film record chance details unnoticed by the photographer—similar to what happens when a traumatic event bypasses consciousness and lodges deeply in the unconscious mind. Photography, Trace, and Trauma takes a groundbreaking look at photographic art and works in other media that explore this important analogy. Examining photography and film, molds, rubbings, and more, Margaret Iversen considers how these artistic processes can be understood as presenting or simulating a residue, trace, or “index” of a traumatic event. These approaches, which involve close physical contact or the short-circuiting of artistic agency, are favored by artists who wish to convey the disorienting effect and elusive character of trauma. Informing the work of a number of contemporary artists—including Tacita Dean, Jasper Johns, Mary Kelly, Gabriel Orozco, and Gerhard Richter—the concept of the trace is shown to be vital for any account of the aesthetics of trauma; it has left an indelible mark on the history of photography and art as a whole.

Photography, Trace, and Trauma
Photography, Trace, and Trauma

Author: Margaret Iversen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 022637016X

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Exposure -- Indexicality: a trauma of signification -- Analogue: on Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean -- Rubbing, casting, making strange -- Index, diagram, graphic trace -- The "unrepresentable"--Invisible traces: postscript on Thomas Demand

Touching Photographs
Touching Photographs

Author: Margaret Olin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-05-21

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0226626466

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Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.

Traces of Trauma
Traces of Trauma

Author: Boreth Ly

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-11-30

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0824856090

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How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale. Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. Her book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French filmmaker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive. Boreth Ly’s poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. Her interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed, including photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, she shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

Inadvertent Images
Inadvertent Images

Author: Peter Geimer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 022647187X

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As an artistic medium, photography is uniquely subject to accidents, or disruptions, that can occur in the making of an artwork. Though rarely considered seriously, those accidents can offer fascinating insights about the nature of the medium and how it works. With Inadvertent Images, Peter Geimer explores all kinds of photographic irritation from throughout the history of the medium, as well as accidental images that occur through photo-like means, such as the image of Christ on the Shroud of Turin, brought into high resolution through photography. Geimer’s investigations complement the history of photographic images by cataloging a corresponding history of their symptoms, their precarious visibility, and the disruptions threatened by image noise. Interwoven with the familiar history of photography is a secret history of photographic artifacts, spots, and hazes that historians have typically dismissed as “spurious phenomena,” “parasites,” or “enemies of the photographer.” With such photographs, it is virtually impossible to tell where a “picture” has been disrupted—where the representation ends and the image noise begins. We must, Geimer argues, seek to keep both in sight: the technical making and the necessary unpredictability of what is made, the intentional and the accidental aspects, representation and its potential disruption.

The Generation of Postmemory
The Generation of Postmemory

Author: Marianne Hirsch

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0231156529

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Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.

Regarding the Pain of Others
Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1466853573

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A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Picturing Ourselves
Picturing Ourselves

Author: Linda Haverty Rugg

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0226731480

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Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.

Reparative Aesthetics
Reparative Aesthetics

Author: Susan Best

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-10-20

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1472525752

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By offering a new way of thinking about the role of politically engaged art, Susan Best opens up a new aesthetic field: reparative aesthetics. The book identifies an innovative aesthetic on the part of women photographers from the southern hemisphere, who against the dominant modes of criticality in political art, look at how cultural production can be reparative. The winner of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand best book award in 2017, Reparative Aesthetics contributes an entirely new theory to the interdisciplinary fields of aesthetics, affect studies, feminist theory, politics and photography. Conceptually innovative and fiercely original this book will move us beyond old political and cultural stalemates and into new terrain for analysis and reflection.

The Lazarus Project
The Lazarus Project

Author: Aleksandar Hemon

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2009-08-07

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0330478788

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‘Prose this powerful could wake the dead’ – Observer Crossing a century of Eastern European history, The Lazarus Project is a profound exploration of alienation and the immigrant experience from Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds. On 2 March 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the city’s Chief of Police. He was shot dead. After the shooting, it was claimed he was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. His sister, Olga, was left alone and bereft in a city seething with tension. A century later, two friends become obsessed with the truth about Lazarus and decide to travel to his birthplace. As the stories intertwine, a world emerges in which everything – and nothing – has changed . . . ‘This is easily Hemon’s best work to date, an intricately tessellated portrait of flight, emigration, and the meaning of home’ – Evening Standard