Description
The promise of mechanical and digital visual technologies is often assumed to originate in their ability to render the invisible visible, hence contributing to the wider de-mystification constitutive of modernity. This Seminar will approach a key technology in this respect, photography, from an angle that seeks to explore the extent to which it (and by extension other similar technologies) is also involved in a far more nuanced and complex epistemological and ontological operation of transforming the invisible into the "unseen", in the sense of deepened marking of human consciousness by the felt consequential and unsettling presence of something out of view. Recent literature on photographic techniques and practices, ranging from visual studies, history, anthropology, and science and technology studies have illuminated ways in which the symbolic and epistemic efficacy of photography derives not simply from its power of revealing what is hidden in the world, but equally from configuring a series of phenomena, events or forms as lying "at the edge of sight" (Smith 2013). Hence, at the same time as it stabilizes vision by showing what was hitherto imperceptible, photography also amplifies the experience of "imperceptibility" itself, by revealing human interaction with the world to be structured around irreducible visual blind spots. The Seminar will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines who are in various ways exploring this dialectic of the simultaneous stabilization of vision and expansion of the unseen, and who are documenting how photography's generative suspension between invisibility and the unseen shapes different "fields of vision" in the contemporary world. Focused on aesthetic, affective, semantic, evidential, and political aspects of the topic and their entanglements, the Seminar will foster critical, interdisciplinary approaches and dialogue on a key theoretical area of photography studies today.Unlocking Le Corbusier's Photographic Eye
19 October 2016, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building. NB Different time today
Tim Benton (Open University) -At Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
Anthropology, Fieldwork and Photography: "Seeing through" the Collections at...
02 November 2016, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building.
Anita Herle (Cambridge)- at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
Unseen therefore Untold: Notes from the Architectural Press Archive
09 November 2016, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building. NB Different date*
Marco Iuliano (Liverpool)- at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
Intimacy and the Participatory 'Plongée': Henri Gaden, West Africa, 1894-1939
16 November 2016, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building
Roy Dilley (St Andrews)- at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
Photographs, Monuments and Making of 'Public Histories': Britain, 1850-1930
30 November 2016, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building
Elizabeth Edwards FBA -at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
Portraits, Characters and Persons
18 January 2017, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building.
Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge)- at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
9% of the Lunar Surface between Visibility and Invisibility, and Stereoscopic Lunar Photography
15 February 2017, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building.
Carmen Pérez González (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) -at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
Realisms and Indexicalities of Photographic Propositions
01 March 2017, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building.
Chris Ball (Notre Dame/CRASSH)-at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
More than Corpses, less than Ghosts. The Hidden and the Invisible in early Ethnographic Photography
15 March 2017, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building
Gregory Delaplace (Université Paris Ouest)-at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
The Human Figure in the Photography of Inter-War Modernism
24 May 2017, Seminar Room SG2, Alison Richard Building *NB Different Date
Valeria Carullo (Royal Institute of British Architects) at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen
From the 'Trust Me' to the 'Show Me' Era
31 May 2017, Seminar Room SG2, Alison Richard Building
Dimitrios Bouras (Photojournalist ) at Photography between Invisibility and the Unseen.
| Period | 1 Oct 2016 → 15 Jun 2017 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Seminar |
| Location | Cambridge, United KingdomShow on map |