Art History Symposium

Registration and Coffee
8-9 a.m., SCAD Museum of Art

Session I: Forget Me Not

9-10:45 a.m.

• Kris Belden-Adams, Kansas City Art Institute, Reconsidering Roland Barthes: Tense Collision as Photographic Punctum
• Kate Palmer Albers, University of Arizona, Around this Nucleus a Large Empty Space: W.G. Sebald's Productive Ambiguity
• Laura Moure Cecchini, Duke University, Photographing the Invisible: The Futurist Photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Ghost Photography
• Vanessa Rocco, Pratt Institute, Mad Exhibitions

Session II: The Ill (Logics) of Trauma

11 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.

• Alison Fields, University of Oklahoma, Patrick Nagatani's Nuclear Enchantment: Photography and Generational Witnessing
• Katherine Lawless, University of Western Ontario, Traces of Madness: Christian Boltanski, Photography and the Politics of Trauma
• Gianna LoScerbo, Rutgers University, Remembering the Civil War Body: Photographs of Dr. Addinell Hewson's Earth Cure in Postbellum Philadelphia
• Sharon Sliwinski, University of Western Ontario, On the Photographer's Private Madness

Lunch

12:45 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.

Session III: I Am Photographed Therefore I Am: Portraiture and Subjectivity

2:15-4 p.m.

• Jonathan Fardy, University of Western Ontario, Becoming-Photographer: The Divine Madness of Julia Margaret Cameron
• Elizabeth Howie, Coastal Carolina University, Photography and Madness in the Work of Roger Ballen
• Monique Johnson, University of Michigan, Games of Madness and Masquerade: The Countess de Castiglione Facing the Lens  
• Shawn Michelle Smith, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Estrelle Osterhout Talks Back

Gallery Reception

5-7 p.m., Gutstein Gallery, 201 E. Broughton St.

The exhibition "Room In My Head: Staging Psychological Spaces" will be on view. Melissa Messina, curator.

Keynote Speaker Abelardo Morell

7-8:15 p.m., Trustees Theater, 216 E. Broughton St.
Award-winning photographer Abelardo Morell is featured in the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and he has received a Cintas grant, Guggenheim fellowship, Rappaport Prize and Alturas Foundation grant.

His publications include a photographic illustration of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "A Camera in a Room," "A Book of Books," and "Camera Obscura." For more, visit his website.

Registration and Coffee
8-9 a.m., SCAD Museum of Art

Session IV: Photographo-Mania: The Archive Beyond Borders

9-10:45 a.m.

Chris Burnett, University of Toledo, Soundless Glimpses: The Joseph Selle Collection of Street Vendor Photography

Gabrielle Moser, York University, Epistemic Anxieties in the Photographic Archive: The Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee's Slide Lecture Series

Penny Perkins, Sage Colleges, Why Jung Loves Hipstamatic: Dreams, Time and Memory in Digital Photo Applications that Simulate Retro Analog Lo-Fi Results

Aaron Slodounik, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, The Paradox of Deadpan: The Madness of Bernd and Hilla Becher

Session V: Poetry and Pathology

11-12:45 p.m.

Rory DuPlessis, University of Pretoria, Subaltern Readings: Photographs of Patients in the Asylum Records of the 19th Century, South Africa

Allison Moore, University of South Florida, A Visual Discourse of Madness in West Africa

Natasha Ruiz-Gomez, University of Essex, The Embellished Objective: The Art of Retouching at the Salpêtrière

Linda Steer, Brock University, Picturing Hysteria in "La Revolution surrealiste:" From Pathology to Ecstasy
 

Final Comments

12:45 p.m.

Biography

Kate Albers is assistant professor in the Art History Division at the University of Arizona, where she teaches history and theory of photography, museum studies, and contemporary art. She received her PhD in art history from Boston University in 2008. She has held curatorial positions in the photography departments at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has articles and reviews published and forthcoming in Afterimage, Art History, Photography & Culture, and Visual Resources. In 2009, she organized the exhibition "Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies," which looked at the intersection of photography, mapping, technology and landscape. She is writing a book titled "Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography."

Abstract

Around this Nucleus a Large Empty Space: W.G. Sebald's Productive Ambiguity

"You have a very real nucleus and around this nucleus a large empty space." The author W.G. Sebald's (1944 - 2001) metaphor for the process of constructing a narrative from a photograph evokes the sense of a photograph as being both moored to its origin in reality and simultaneously surrounded by possibility. It's "realness" is essential, but so is the fact of that "real" being detached from its surrounding. Sebald's affinity for Roland Barthes' camera lucida is well known, and the paradoxes Sebald evokes in his statement cast light on the connection.

Margaret Olin's analysis of Barthes' misidentification of punctum (in the form of his aunt's necklace) serves as a starting point to elaborate the significance of this misidentification more broadly (Olin, 2002). The disassociated punctum offers a way of thinking past the close indexical relationship a photograph has with its subject and toward the ever-evolving relationship a photograph has with its viewer, whoever that viewer might be. Photographic indexicality, then, becomes less important for conveying a particular real, than for conveying any real. It only matters that something is real, not what that real actually was.

In his novels, Sebald uses photographs precisely for the tantalizing uncertainty they convey, for their tenuous relationship to reality and their invariably ambiguous relationship to his narratives. The appearance in his novel "The Emigrants" (1992) of supposed family snapshots offers a site for pressing on the theoretical significance of reading other people's family photographs as our own. Ultimately, what Sebald suggests through his narrative and pictorial play is that, while we may be attached to our own pictures, others' photographs can do the job just as well - an observation that uncomfortably animates our most emotional attachments to the medium.

Biography

Dr. Kris Belden-Adams received her Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art history (with a specialization in the history of photography) from the City University of New York Graduate Center. She also has an M.A. in art history, theory and criticism with a concentration in contemporary art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her scholarly work on the history of photography and visual culture will appear in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012 and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism in winter 2011-12. She has been published in The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, and Cabinet. This essay is based on her doctoral dissertation, which explored photography's complex relationship to time and temporality.

Abstract

Reconsidering Roland Barthes: Tense Collision as Photographic Punctum

Many theorists have noted that photography has a distinctive manner of representing time. Roland Barthes wrote in his final book, "La Chambre Claire: Note Sur La Photographie," that the medium has a peculiar capacity to represent the past in the present, and thus to imply the passing of time in general. As a consequence, Barthes argued, all photographs speak of the inevitability of our own death in the future. This collision of past, present and future provided what Barthes called photography's "madness," its ability to offer "an image of the real, of something that was, that we can hold in our hands ... but that does not physically exist in our time and space." Moreover, he linked photography's peculiar temporality to its capacity for a certain kind of realism: "false on the level of perception, true on the level of time."

This paper will examine the variegated views of time noted in "La Chambre Claire" by Barthes in an analysis of a snapshot of his mother as a child in a "Winter Garden." This image, which Barthes claims possesses the essence of the medium, evokes multiple, superimposed temporalities. It also invites his amalgamations, projected memories and shifting narrative times. This intersection and comingling of temporalities in the mind of the viewer, Barthes suggests, comprises "the very essence, the noeme of photography," while also provocatively representing the "piercing," perplexing conundrum of time itself. Specifically, Barthes implicitly argues that the phenomenon of living in time after the invention of photography engages a reflexive sympathy for multiplicitous time/space nexuses that exceed our lived-time experience.

Biography

Formerly the director of the Visual Studies Workshop (2001-07), Chris Burnett is chairperson at the Center for the Visual Arts, University of Toledo. His photographs and digital works have been exhibited widely. In 2009, he received the inaugural SPE Award for Excellence in Historical, Critical and Theoretical Writing in honor of Jennifer Yamashiro.

Abstract

Soundless Glimpses: The Joseph Selle Collection of Street Vendor Photography

My presentation sifts through a massive collection of street photographs as the accumulated evidence of the photo-absurd. With this term, I point to a kind of photographic madness residing in the world: an absurdity that comes from what your head is inside of rather than what's inside your head (to paraphrase J. J. Gibson, with apologies). Through these street images, I further identify the madness of photography, and the photo-absurd, with soundlessness. The root meaning of "surd" is to be deaf, and with this condition comes an underlying sense of the absurd as an aggregation of images cut off from acoustic meaning, an image-world without voice. In the Selle collection, scores of people pass along the fragmentary streets of San Francisco in plain view, yet uncannily moving within a soundless void. My presentation attempts to supply a provisional soundtrack while covering these key areas:

• Give an overview of the Selle Collection and creative projects that have emerged from it: The Selle street vendor photographers operated in downtown San Francisco in the decades between 1940 and 1970. After the business closed, the archive of over a million negatives moved to the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. Since 2004, exhibitions and art projects have emerged that explore the contingency of photographic meaning, the stray quality of accident combined with historical details, the peculiar logic of multitudes mixed with particulars.
• Compare these archival photographs and their soundless absurdity, to the street photographs of Garry Winogrand and others: I once heard Winogrand exclaim that "all photographs are dumb," and I explore other such personal memories of Winogrand and his published theories relating to the photo-absurd. From the angle of my paper, Winogrand's notion that a "photograph can be anything" springs from the core muteness (mutability) of the photographic medium.

While sampling this extraordinary collection of street photographs, my presentation will project a composite picture of the photo-absurd as the suspended loss of sound in a mad parade of images.

Biography

Laura Moure Cecchini is a second year doctoral student in the Art, Art History and Visual Studies department at Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), where she studies 19th-and-20th-century Italian visual culture under the supervision of Dr. Mark Antliff. She studied Philosophy at the Università Cattolica, UNAM and Northwestern University. She is finishing coursework and working on her dissertation, which will explore the reiterations of the Baroque in Italian Modernist culture, from Decadentism to Lucio Fontana.

Abstract

Photographing the Invisible: The Futurist Photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Ghost Photography

Futurist Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890-1969) used the camera to make visible those aspects of reality that the naked eye cannot perceive, in particular the components of motion. Bragaglia's photodynamics, shot between 1911 and 1914, showed a person performing a passionate gesture. They aimed to make visible the essence of movement, not by immobilizing it, as in the snapshot, or fracturing it, as in chronophotography. On the contrary, the photodynamics show the complete trajectory of a movement, fusing together the successive instants of the gesture and making evident their coexistence.

As many avant-garde artists, Bragaglia had a deep interest in exoteric matters. He was interested in divination, astrology, and was well read in Occidental and Oriental mysticism. It is remarkable that simultaneously to his photodynamic experimentation he published two articles that studied contemporary photography of ghosts. While Bragaglia criticized their evident falsifications, he also carefully analyzed how they represented immaterial bodies and invisible substances.

I claim that Bragaglia's interest in ghost, paranormal and parascientific photography -an attempt to scientifically photograph immaterial realities - gave him the theoretical and visual tools that he will use to photograph movement. Indeed, ghost photography made visible a presence that was logically impossible, struggled to manifest what was necessarily invisible, and constructed a new aesthetic vocabulary.

This visual language-blurred images, lack of focus, dissolution of forms, interpenetration of objects and environment, doubling of figures, etc., helped Bragaglia develop the graphic strategies that convey the trajectory of movement in photodynamics. While Bragaglia was skeptical about the veracity of spirit photography, I argue that it was an ironic space where he could reflect on the relationship between photography and the real, and transcend the limitations both of scientific and of Pictorial photography.

Biography

Rory DuPlessis completed his B.A. in visual studies, and M.A. in philosophy at the University of Pretoria. From 2006-10 he was a part-time lecturer in the department of visual arts as well as at the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies, University of Pretoria. In addition, from 2008-11, he was appointed as the national coordinator for the Southern African Sexual Health Association (SASHA). Presently he is a fulltime lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, University of Pretoria, where he teaches visual culture studies. His research interests include the representations and discourses of gender, sexuality and mental health.

Abstract

Subaltern Readings: Photographs of Patients in the Asylum Records of the 19th Century, South Africa

The socio-historical profile of patients and psychiatric practices in the various asylums of South Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been the focus of a number of recent publications. All of these publications are largely based on archival material including asylum annual reports and case records. The information gained from such archival material is described as satisfactorily rich to allow for an accurate construction and account of life in the asylum. In this regard, case records are recognized as a significant source of information as they include: admission records, medical certificates that accompany the committal process, brief psychiatric histories, regular reports on patients throughout their stay in the asylum, and full medical records. Thus, they are a key resource in constructing a narrative of the institution and psychiatric practices.

However, what have been glaringly overlooked in the case records are the photographs of the patients. The photographs are crucial documents in allowing for the patients themselves to be accounted for - in contrast to the aforementioned historical accounts that lead to the silencing of patients in favor of the dominant institutional and/or psychiatric practices. Although many of the photographs in the case records depict posed portraiture, there are a number of photographs that are not posed. Such photographs hold the potential for the patient to speak, and be heard, through and beyond the structures of clinical theory and practice. These photographs are also in contrast to the posed portraiture that represents otherness (the insane as other) and is divergent to the uses of photography as a clinical tool: medical record keeping and diagnosis (for example, physiognomy). Thus, the proposed paper investigates the photographs in the asylum case records of 19th century South Africa as holding the potential to reveal subaltern aims - to expose the patients' opposition to the dominant historiography and diagnostic classifications of both psychiatry and the institution of the asylum.

Biography

Jonathan Fardy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario. He is writing his dissertation on the concept of "becoming photographer" in the 19th century, focusing on the lives and works of Robinson, Rejlander and Cameron.

Abstract

Becoming-Photographer: The Divine Madness of Julia Margaret Cameron

Laura Troubridge never forgot the day when, as a young child, she posed for her aunt, the famed 19th-century photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). On that day, as Laura remembers it, Aunt Julia appeared as a "terrifying figure" with "piercing eyes" and an "ungentle hand." She was "dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals from her photography and smelling of them too." In the course of Laura's recollection, Aunt Julia dissolves into the figure of a mad woman, possessed, taken over by the work of photography. This madness, I argue, is also a metamorphosis, the madness of becoming photographer; a profession and a passion that Cameron herself described as that of becoming a "priestess of the sun." In the inner sanctum or temple of the studio, a space not only physically, but psychically set apart from her home and the demands of feminine domesticity it imposed, Cameron effectuated the transubstantiation, as it were, of fleeting light rays into concrete images and through this practice enacted moments of self-liberation and social transcendence. Through photography, I argue, Cameron maddened the norms of feminine respectability.

Biography

Alison Fields is the Mary Lou Milner Carver professor of art of the American West and assistant professor of art history at the University of Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of New Mexico and her M.A. in American civilization from Brown University. At OU, she teaches courses in visual culture, museum studies, Western cinema, and understanding art, and is working on a book manuscript about the atomic bomb in cultural memory. Fields also serves as the managing editor of American Indian Quarterly.

Abstract

Patrick Nagatani's Nuclear Enchantment: Photography and Generational Witnessing

In his 1991 exhibit catalogue, "New Mexico's Nuclear Enchantment," Japanese-American artist Patrick Nagatani produced a photographic collage titled "Bradbury Science Museum, Los Alamos National Lab" that illustrates the complexities of cultural memory. The collage's dominant image is a photograph of a museum exhibit that emphasizes the principles of fission, fusion and radiation. Superimposed over the corner of this photograph, are the images of several pale, ghost-like Japanese children and a series of glass jars marked with Japanese characters. The jars reference sealed flasks of bodily remains on display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan, used to both shock viewers and document the dead. Nagatani's collage juxtaposes two very different forms of national and cultural remembering. By overlaying the image of the ghostly children and glass jars onto exhibit panels charting scientific data, the narrative of human loss is placed in contrast to that of technological achievement. In my paper, I show how Nagatani's bold, discordant, and ironic collages show the way distinct cultures lay claim to vastly different remembrances of nuclear war. Further, I consider Nagatani's positioning as a generational witness of war, whose family left Hiroshima during World War II, and who was born in the United States just days after the first atomic bombs were employed. I argue that his spatial and temporal distance from the bombings allowed him to imaginatively reconstruct the bombings and their legacies in a manner not readily accessible to first-hand witnesses. By overlaying photographs with painted color and images from his own hand-built sets, his form echoes the madness inherent in atomic bombings.

Biography

Elizabeth Howie is Assistant Professor of art history at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C. She specializes in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on the history and theory of photography. She received her Ph.D. from the art history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. Howie's work has been published in the edited volume Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Change: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Palgrave, 2010). Her essay on photography theorist Abigail Solomon-Godeau will be published in the forthcoming "Fifty Key Writers on Photography" (Routledge, 2012).

Abstract

Photography and Madness in the Work of Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen's photographs portray impoverished white South Africans as mad, posing with ridiculous props and exposing their own filth before his camera. Ballen's subjects are the plattelanders, socially and economically marginalized whites living on the fringes of Johannesburg in post-Apartheid South Africa. Photographed in squalid, dilapidated dwellings and wearing soiled and ragged clothes, their bodies and faces display signs of physical and mental impairment. Instead of using documentary-style images to arouse the viewer's empathy, however, Ballen presents his subjects in bizarre and at times degrading tableaux, which he openly admits to having manipulated, but in which he claims his subjects willingly participate. Roland Barthes has argued that culture has artificially tamed the mad photograph - domesticated its terrifying reminder of absence, loss and death. Ballen takes photography back to the berserk by breaking rules to reveal, and even flaunt, the madness of photography. Barthes did not like photographs that were obviously staged because he felt that too much control by the photographer prevented the possibility of punctum, but in this case, it is the horror of the staging that allows madness to break through. Distressingly, other yet frighteningly familiar -uncanny - with their families, homes, pets and keepsakes, the plattelanders as seen by Ballen are figures whose sanity has been corrupted by their failure to thrive in the modern world to the point that they cooperate in embodying that failure, that madness, breaking down the typical separation between photographer and documentary subject. His process, however unorthodox, controversial, or even mad, breaks through the cultural domestication against which Barthes warned, and thus provides a rich subject through which to explore photography's madness.

Biography

Monique Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the art history department at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examines the interface between women and photography in the 19th century from the perspective of self-representation. She holds an M.A. in the history of art from the University of Toronto.

Abstract

Games of Madness and Masquerade: The Countess de Castiglione Facing the Lens

Scarcely 30 years after the invention of photography, Virginia Oldoini, Countess Verasis de Castiglione (1837-1899), produced a photographic self-portrait in collaboration with French court photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, which she evocatively titled Scherzo di Follia or Game of Madness. This image represents a striking instance in an oeuvre of roughly 400 distinct photographic portraits, the production of which spanned nearly 50 years. The portrait depicts a close-up of the countess in three-quarter view from waist up. In her right hand she holds a small square black frame with an oval window that in turn frames her eye. As in a painted self-portrait, in which the sitter is pictured in medias res with paintbrush in hand, this image demonstrates an intimate engagement with the medium: her look through the frame mirrors Pierson's through the camera's lens and the viewer's eventual look through the photograph's own frame. Her poetic gesture of framing vision suggests a dialogue with a meta-discourse on photography itself. Scherzo di Follia has become iconic not only of Castiglione's oeuvre on the whole, but has also been immortalized as the cover image on a volume dedicated to the entire history of the medium.

Castiglione's practice has been variously linked to madness and psychological pathologies-narcissism, fetishism and hysteria, in particular-which are in and of themselves ontologically fundamental to theories of photography. This paper will expand upon and challenge existing readings of Castiglione's relationship to the medium of photography by analyzing the viability of the link between these pathologies and her photographic practice. While there is little doubt that Castiglione "suffered" from some if not all of these afflictions, instead of casting her as an unwitting victim who falls prey to photography's inherent objectification, I will argue that the studio portrait, a nascent genre at the time, offered Castiglione a creative means of resistance, a productive and personal device through which she could represent her subjectivity, even (perhaps essentially) if part of that subjecthood flirted with madness.

Biography

Kate Lawless is a Ph.D. candidate in her fourth year at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario, where she is also a part-time course instructor in the Women's Studies and Feminist Research department. Her dissertation research focuses on the politics of aesthetics and the relationship between photography and trauma in contemporary installation art.

Abstract

Traces of Madness: Christian Boltanski, Photography and the Politics of Trauma

Through an analysis of the work of conceptual artist Christian Boltanski, this paper argues that the role of the photograph in "post-Holocaust" installation art is not primarily one of memorialization or witnessing but, rather, of political intervention in the history of reason. Specifically, I argue that the political efficacy of the photographic installation is not based on its dissemination of an overtly political content, but on its structural relation to the "madness" of traumatic experience. In Spectral Evidence, Ulrich Baer identifies an essential homology between photography and trauma: both challenge the direct relationship between seeing and knowing by staging a conflict between disparate "distributions of the sensible." Moreover, both photography and trauma are structured by a temporal delay-a "belatedness of the image"-by which the meaning of a traumatic encounter can only be inscribed retrospectively.

Within what Foucault terms the "classical order of representation," the image is presumed to be a direct reflection of reality and the photograph becomes a form of evidence. From this perspective, the photographic image operates according to a "documentary logic," which endorses a history of reason and reduces the image's political engagement to its thematic content. Within the "logic of trauma," however, the politics of the photograph must be reconceived as a rupture in the direct relation between the image and its referent - a rupture that might be identified as a kind of structural madness in the form of a sensible "shock." Ultimately, drawing on Freud's theory of the image-as-symptom and Rancière's politics of aesthetics, I demonstrate the ways in which Boltanski's use of the photograph in the "working through" of a traumatic past institutes a politics of trauma, which stages a conflict between the unified narrative of history and its photographic remains.

Biography

Currently a second year Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, Gianna LoScerbo is specializing in documentary photography and film constructed between 1945 and 1955 in America. Research for her dissertation topic focuses on several American photographers who began to use film as a medium in the late 1940s and 1950s, and she is exploring their work in conjunction with a broad range of visual material from that era, including television, Life magazine and Hollywood cinema. Her other research interests include the intersection of photography and narrative, word and image, the role of the viewer in photography, film, and mass media, and trauma and the social body.

Abstract

Remembering the Civil War Body: Photographs of Dr. Addinell Hewson's Earth Cure in Postbellum Philadelphia

As the oldest and one of the most prestigious medical institutions in 19th-century America, the Pennsylvania Hospital stood at the forefront of medical developments in the years following the Civil War. In 1869, Dr. Addinell Hewson, a prominent figure at the hospital, experimented with earth compounds to heal post-operative wounds quickly and without infection. In his book, "Earth as Topical Application in Surgery," he outlined 93 clinical case studies and photographically documented dramatic results. This paper asks: How are we to understand the relationship between Dr. Hewson's treatment, hailed as a "magical" cure by the popular press, and the sociocultural effects of the Civil War? By situating Dr. Hewson's work within its sociocultural context, I argue that Dr. Hewson attempted to cope with memories of the war's mass devastation and promote cultural healing by constructing a photographic narrative of rehabilitation. The clinical photographs in Hewson's text, like so many others produced in postbellum Philadelphia, thus enacted a restructuring of reality, one that reaffirmed period notions of race, gender, class and nation.

Biography

Allison Moore is an assistant professor of art history at the University of South Florida. She is writing a book on the emergence of an art photography movement in Mali as a result of the founding of the Bamako Photography Biennale, or Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie. She is curating an exhibition of Malian photography with Laurel Bradley, the director of exhibitions at Carleton College's Perlman Teaching Museum, titled "Photographing the Social Body: Malian Portraiture from the Studio to the Street." She has published writings on contemporary African art and photography in Artforum, Afterimage and History of Photography.

Abstract

A Visual Discourse of Madness in West Africa

In "The Invention of Hysteria," Georges Didi-Huberman argues in a Foucauldian analysis that photographs of the insane contributed to the construction of hysteria as an illness in French society in the late 19th century. Thus one can ask: how do photographs of the insane contribute to societal relationships to madness in other cultures? Specifically, how is the discourse of madness constructed and documented through photography in West Africa, where the insane live freely among the rest of the population rather than being confined to asylums? In light of the lack of scholarly literature documenting Africans' own conceptualizations of psychosis, this paper argues that contemporary photographs of the insane by Dorris Haron Kasco in Ivory Coast and Alima Diop in Mali reveal and also participate in creating a West African definition of madness. The visual signs of illness - matted dreadlocks, torn clothing, and sometimes outright nudity - in Diop's and Kasco's photographs contribute to a dialogue about local definitions and understandings of psychosis. These color street shots, taken in uncontrolled circumstances for both subjects and photographers, differ greatly from the controlled and disciplined photographs of asylum inmates responding to psychotic experiments of the 19th-century Sâltpetrière. Through their very agency, Diop's and Kasco's photographs suggest a different relationship of society to notions of madness than a Western viewer might expect.

Biography

Gabrielle Moser is a writer, curator and Ph.D. candidate in the art history and visual culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she also teaches. Her writing appears on Artforum.com and in Canadian Art, Fillip, the Journal of Curatorial Studies, n.paradoxa, Photography & Culture and in the Gallery 44/Ryerson University volume Emergence: Contemporary Photography in Canada, edited by Sarah Parsons. She has curated exhibitions and screenings for Vtape, Gallery TPW and The Leona Drive Project and is working on an exhibition about the relationship between contemporary art and affective labor for Vancouver's Access Gallery. Her dissertation project investigates the circulation of photographic slide lectures produced for schoolchildren by Britain's Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee between 1902-45.

Abstract

Epistemic Anxieties in the Photographic Archive: The Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee's Slide Lecture Series

Colonial photographic archives are places where epistemic anxieties are ballasted by the manic production and collection of photographs. As Allan Sekula, John Tagg and Elizabeth Edwards have demonstrated, the state photographic archive is a site where photographs' multiple visual meanings are harnessed through the use of texts to create logical systems of knowledge and rational forms of "common sense." Yet, as a significant body of art history and visual culture scholarship asserts, the meanings photographs offer to viewers are excessive, ambiguous and contradictory; they cannot be pinned down through textual descriptions or archival classification systems.

Through a close reading of some of the 7,600 photographs produced by the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC), this paper investigates the anxieties and manias at play in the colonial photographic archive. As case study, my paper focuses on a scheme developed by a branch of the British government at the beginning of the 20th century that intended to teach children about what it meant to be an imperial citizen using a set of geography lectures illustrated by photographic lantern slides. As part of my broader dissertation project, the paper departs from Ann Laura Stoler's advice to read "along the archival grain" and attends to the non-events, contradictions and irrationalities in the archive that reveal the "epistemic anxieties" that structured the COVIC project.

By contrasting the logical narrative of empire that is articulated by the lecture texts with the incoherence reflected in the projected photographs, I suggest that the maddening contradictions of the photographic apparatus are an apt metaphor for the disorganized structure of the Empire. I contend that, as photography scholars, we need to take more seriously the irrationalities that the photographic archive exhibits in order to open up a space for resistant and irrational readings to emerge, which might challenge the authoritarian "sanity" of the colonial state.

Biography

Penny Perkins is an award-winning writer, photographer and educator. Her photography has been shown at dozens of galleries and juried exhibitions around the country, including the online "Share Your 5" Series at Hipstamatic World and the forthcoming "Adventures in HipstaLand" from Hipstamatic. In April 2011 she was the featured artist at ArtAndArtDeadlines.com. Perkins has trained in photography at the Visual Studies Workshop and The Center for Photography, among other places. Her novel "Bob Bridges: An Apocalyptic Fable" was published in 1999 by ChromeDeco Press and won her the "Best Author" award in 2000 from Metroland Magazine. Since 2006, she has been an assistant professor for communications at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY.

Abstract

Why Jung Loves Hipstamatic: Dreams, Time and Memory in Digital Photo Applications that Simulate Retro Analog Lo-Fi Results

In this paper (and accompanying visual presentation), I argue that the rise of digital photo applications, such as the hugely popular iPhone app Hipstamatic, is intimately connected to Jungian insights about the importance of dreams, time, memory and the collective unconscious.

I also advance the Jungian perspective that part of the "craziness" and "insanity" of modern life is related to the disconnection that we have from our own dream life-as well as our collective sense of time and memory. I suggest that the popularity of Hipstamatic and similar apps stems from their ability to reconnect us to a sense of the beauty and importance of dreams, primarily because of the prominence of dream-like imagery in their retro results.

In other words, the predominately dream-like quality of Hipstamatic images allows contemporary "iPhoneographers"- and their growing legions of fans - to reconnect to the collective unconscious and our own sense of the importance and artistry of dreams and dream-like imagery.

Additionally, the overwhelming commercial and critical success of the Hipstamatic app, in such a relatively short time, is a compelling reason to investigate its power to captivate professionals and hobbyists alike. The highest echelons of the digital revolution have trumpeted praise on the app: For example, in 2010, Apple named Hipstamatic as its iPhone "app of the year." This is a testament to the popularity of this application and its credibility in the industry.

Moreover, in terms of photo-mania, many fans of Hipstamatic (and similar mobile camera software) describe themselves as "addicted" to the application. Subsequently, I will also discuss what makes this app and its visual signature so compelling as to be artistically "addictive."

In general, this paper presents a unique Jungian approach as to why the images that the Hipstamatic app produces are so captivating and compelling to so many.

Biography

Vanessa Rocco is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute. She co-edited the volume "The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s," published by UMP in March 2011, as well as authoring two of its essays: the introduction "Imagining and Embodying New Womanhood," with Elizabeth Otto, and "Bad Girls: The New Woman in Weimar Film Stills." "The New Woman" was supported by a Pratt Faculty Development Award and has been the subject of numerous panels, including one as part of the Live/Art/History series at SCAD this past spring. Rocco is at work on a book about photography and exhibition culture in Weimar-era Germany.

Abstract

Mad Exhibitions

It seems that photography nearly drove Roland Barthes mad. In his preoccupation with death after his mother's passing, Barthes completed the short masterwork "Camera Lucida" in the spring of 1979. Less than six months before, he had given an interview on French radio regarding the opportunity to write about the medium… "what I really find fascinating about photographs … is something that probably has to do with death. Perhaps its an interest that is tinged with necrophilia to be honest, a fascination with what has died but is represented as wanting to be alive" (quoted in Geoffrey Batchen, 2009).

Conjuring the dead, communicating with the dead, fantasies of making love with the dead; photo historian Geoffrey Batchen has managed to delve deeply into these unnerving yet essential aspects of Barthes' - and indeed humankind's - obsession with photography. He has accomplished this through such books as "Photography Degree Zero," a varied and close reading of "Camera Lucida" through the eyes of numerous scholars. But he also has done so through a diverse array of exhibitions - exhibitions through which large audiences have confronted their own weird attachment to photographic nostalgia. This paper will undertake an investigation of Batchen's continued and productive engagement in mounting exhibitions, a strategy that he has used to hunt down and challenge the ghosts that Barthes defined and that haunt us all through the photographic image. I will focus on three exhibitions that visually intertwined photography, remembrance and death: Forget Me Not (Van Gogh Museum, 2004); Portraits of Grief (Graduate Center, CUNY, 2005); and Suspending Time: Life-Photography-Death (Izu Photo Museum, 2010). Through the analysis of installation shots, reviews and catalogues, I present exhibitions as one of the most absorbing modalities for grappling with these mad obsessions.

Biography

Natasha Ruiz-Gómez holds a Research Councils UK Fellowship in the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania; her doctoral thesis proposed a new reading of Auguste Rodin's sculpture based on an examination of the science of the time, and she is currently reforming this project into an exhibition proposal. Her publications include essays on Rodin's sculpture, on his collection of photographs, and on contemporary architecture. Her current book manuscript examines the intersections of art and medicine at the Salpêtrière Hospital under the leadership of Jean-Martin Charcot in the late 19th century.

Abstract

The Embellished Objective: The Art of Retouching at the Salpêtrière

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), the chief medical officer of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris, was the first to describe the stages of the hysterical attack, setting up a photography studio at the asylum in the late 1870s in order to document his discoveries. A largely unknown album of photographs of hysterics and epileptics taken at the Salpêtrière at the end of the 19th century, which has since languished in the archives of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, illuminates the liminal space between scientific documentation and art frequently occupied by photographs of the insane. In these images, no effort has been made to conceal the often substantial retouching of many of the photographs; on the contrary, the details of the manipulations are clearly documented on the verso of each image. Some photographs make multiple appearances in the album, cropped differently each time to emphasize or de-emphasize particular elements of the image. These photographs, although intended as objective, documentary evidence, have clearly been doctored for aesthetic purposes: the highlights of the folds in the patients' gowns receive particular emphasis, for instance, even though this clearly serves no medical or scientific purpose whatsoever. Through close analysis of individual images, this paper will consider the aesthetic language articulated by these photographs and the methods of manipulations they share with portrait photography. They thus belie not only the camera's most touted virtue - its purported truthfulness - but also Charcot's own declaration of objectivity, "all I am is a photographer. I describe what I see."

Biography

Sharon Sliwinski is an assistant professor in the faculty of information and media studies and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. She writes and teaches broadly in the areas of critical theory, visual culture and psychoanalysis. She is the author of "Human Rights in Camera" (Chicago, 2011) and has recently published articles in The Journal of Visual Culture, American Imago, Photography & Culture, and The New Centennial Review. She is working on a book called "Dream Matters," about the social and political significance of dream-life.

Abstract

On the Photographer's Private Madness

In his "Little History of Photography" Walter Benjamin reports that the first daguerreotypes caused a particular kind of madness in their viewers. According to his source, Max Dauthendey, early 19th-century spectators were unaccustomed to the early photographs' fidelity to nature. "We didn't trust ourselves at first to look long at the first pictures he developed. We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us." Benjamin's point here is that photography seemed to usher in a new awareness of the gaze, which is to say, an awareness of that special, disconcerting kind of look that belongs to the other.

The proposed paper will bring Benjamin's discussion into dialogue with Freud's analysis of Jensen's novel "Gradiva," the first psychoanalytic study of a work of literature. In the novel upon which Freud's paper is based, the protagonist, Norbert Hanold, is transfixed by a particular statue of a woman whom he names Gradiva. Utterly absorbed by the angle of the statue's raised foot, one day Hanold sees his Gradiva alive, walking through the streets of his German town. The mad vision causes the protagonist to flee; he travels to Pompeii on the pretext of study. In effort to grasp this particular madness that appears to belong to spectatorship, the proposed paper will take up Freud's study of Hanold's delusion in relation to Benjamin's description of spectators early encounter's with photography. The aim will be to carve out the category of madness that seems to be particular to the spectator, and moreover, to underscore Freud's fundamental insight that there can be no sharp distinction between normal and pathological thought. Or to put this differently, this paper will argue that aesthetic encounters offer particularly fertile ground for disturbances of thought.

Biography

Aaron Slodounik is a doctoral student in the art history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an instructor at Queensborough Community College and at Parsons, the New School for Design. His area of specialization is 19th-century French art and architecture, with a focus on the fin de siècle. Photography is an emphasis of Slodounik's research, having studied with Geoffrey Batchen and Anne McCauley. Recent inquiries span from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, on topics such as photosculpture, Steichen's Family of Man, and Atget's nudes.

Abstract

The Paradox of Deadpan: The Madness of Bernd and Hilla Becher

As defined by Charlotte Cotton, the deadpan aesthetic is a mode of photography that purports an objective vision. It is said to elide any trace of emotion on the part of the photographer, who approaches his or her subject with detachment, rather than evoking the sentimental. The photographer's "touch" is said to be effaced, leading the viewer to wonder, Cotton says, what took the image rather than who. German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began their collaboration in the late 1950's, have been presented as originators and an exemplar of the deadpan aesthetic. Using a systematic approach, the couple sought to document industrial architecture in a serial format with minimal subjectivity. It is the critical potential of this claim, made both by the artists and their apologists, which this paper seeks to explore. For Blake Stimson and Thierry de Duve, the work of the Bechers depicts a vision of architecture free of ideology, culture and identity. This paper explores the "madness" of these scholars' assertion and the paradox their claims present: is it truly possible to create a photographic image free of signification?

Biography

Shawn Michelle Smith is associate professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches courses on the history and theory of photography, gender and race in visual culture. She is the author of "American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture" (Princeton, 1999), "Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture" (Duke, 2004), co-author with Dora Apel of "Lynching Photographs" (California, 2007), and co-editor with Maurice Wallace of "Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity" (Duke, forthcoming 2012).

Abstract

Estrelle Osterhout Talks Back

In this paper, I consider one of the photographed subjects that most persistently haunts Roland Barthes as he endeavors to plumb the truth of photography in "Camera Lucida." I imagine the subjectivity of Estelle Osterhout, the African-American woman in the 1926 James Van Der Zee photograph that Barthes returns to again and again in his attempts to define the punctum. This is the subject that finally forces Barthes to recognize the madness of photography, to enter "crazily into the spectacle, into the image," taking the subject into his arms as one "gone mad for Pity's sake."

At the end of Camera Lucida, Barthes concludes that the photograph's "special character, its scandal, its madness" is precisely the incontrovertible evidence it provides of its subject's existence. As the photograph testifies, "that-has-been," it also provides a space for "the wakening of intractable reality." The photograph is "a mad image, chafed by reality," and it brings forth the uncanny presence of its subject.

However, for most of Barthes's discussion in "Camera Lucida," photographed subjects are objectified, devoid of subjectivity, dead. Barthes himself confesses that he does not like to be photographed, he cannot stand the process of objectification, which he experiences as a kind of small death, and he asserts himself as subject, as spectator, throughout his text.

Refusing the objectification that, for Barthes, generally defines the position of the subject photographed, I would like to imagine a place for Estelle Osterhout as a mad photographic subject - a subject that refuses to be objectified, that refuses to be silenced, that refuses to be "tame." In this paper, I will imagine Osterhout first as the subject of Van Der Zee's camera, and then as the subject of Barthes's persistent gaze. I will take the madness of photography seriously, and imagine Osterhout's presence in her photograph, in the photographer's studio, and in the spectator's gaze.

Biography

Linda Steer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and the Centre for Liberal Arts at Brock University. In addition to conducting research on the history of photography, she also occasionally writes art criticism. In 2009, with Dr. Thy Phu, she edited Affecting Photographies, a special issue of Photography & Culture. Her monograph, Found and Borrowed Photographs in French Surrealist Periodicals, 1924-1939, will be published by Ashgate Press's Studies in Surrealism Series in February 2013.

Abstract

Picturing Hysteria in "La Revolution surrealiste:" From Pathology to Ecstasy

"We are still living under the reign of logic." André Breton's proclamation, made in 1924, launched surrealism as a movement of freedom aimed at suppressing the forces of logic, rationalism and realism. To reach this freedom, Breton suggested that we seek out the "always beautiful" marvelous in its many forms. As examples, he pointed to "romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time." To this list Breton might have added "the hysteric"- this mysterious figure who, in her madness and denial of the real world, was a symbol of freedom from logic and rationalism, a symbol that was to capture the imagination of the surrealists. This paper looks at the surrealist appropriation and re- framing of Paul Régnard's scientific photographs of hysterics created in the 1870s, and the process by which they positioned these photographs as poetry rather than pathology.

In 1929, "La Révolution surréaliste" published Régnard's photographs to honor the 50th anniversary of hysteria. An analysis of the presentation of these photographs shows that the surrealists mimicked their psychiatric use. While there is a difference between the use of Régnard's photographs as evidence of disease and the surrealist use of the same photographs as evidence of the marvelous, the insistence on the evidentiary value of photographs is significant. Because the surrealists wanted to show that hysteria was a manifestation of surreality, the convergence of the two worlds of dream and reality, the unconscious and the conscious, they had to appropriate the photograph's function as evidence to further their own ends. This reveals surrealism's conservatism, a conservatism that retained some of the elements of the very institution of positivist science that it sought to destroy, reinforcing patriarchal attitudes about women and madness.