Presence, Prescience, and Re-Presentation in Photographic Afterlives
April 15, 2021, 3:00PM-4:30 PM Central
View on YouTube
A panel presentation featuring:
- Sophia Powers, University of Auckland, “Walls of Affect and Wonder: Gazing Beyond Pedagogy in Gauri Gill’s Photographic Archive”
- Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, University of Rhode Island, “The UNREMEMBERED: Indian Soldiers from the Second World War”
- Rashmi Viswanathan, University of Hartford, “Marg and the Graphic Turn”
- Alka Patel, University of California, Irvine, “The “Kandahar Album” Then and Now”
Photography’s indexicality ties it inexorably to the moment the image was captured. But how does the meaning of the work shift as it is re-presented across contexts and continents? Taking up Walter Benjamin’s famous invocation of photographic afterlives, this panel explores shifting conditions of photographic re-presentation within the South Asian (and diasporic) context. Our panelists consider shifting conditions of production, exhibitionary contexts as well as instances of photographic images being “recycled” in the creation of other works. How have photographs been used to frame their context, as opposed to context being used to frame the photograph? How have documentary images been translated into subjective explorations of affect and memory, or alternatively, images created within the fine art tradition been repurposed as documentary evidence? How have photographs been re-animated through conventions of theater and forms of participatory practice? This panel interrogates the stability of artistic authorship and illustrates some of the many ways that artists, curators, and collectors are “opening up” photographic practice in new projects of world-making. These papers trace oscillations between objectivism and subjectivism as photographs move through a range of commercial, familial, ritualistic and museological registers. Through the cross-examination of case studies, this panel excavates new archaeologies of the archive, and reframes the “archival impulse” in South Asian photographic practice across space and time.