“Feeling Photography”: Program

Feeling Photography Conference Schedule, October 16-17, 2009
[October 1, 2009 draft]

All attendees must register for the conference, and registration is capped due to fire code regulations for the venue. As of October 1, the conference registration is full. Those who wish to be placed on a waitling list should email Nina Boric at nina.boric@utoronto.ca. The plenary events will be webcast simultaneously, for those interesting in viewing on-line. Unfortunately, the registration for this conference is now closed, as we have reached our capacity. Those interested in viewing a webcast of the plenary sessions are encouraged to do so by logging on to the following website, 30 minutes prior to the scheduled talk: http://hosting.epresence.tv/MUNK/1.aspx To review the program, in order to find the start times of the plenary sessions, please consult the program below.

All events below will take place at the University of Toronto campus, at the Munk Centre for International Studies, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto ON.

Friday, October 16th

8:00-9:00    Registration and Coffee
Lobby outside Campbell Conference Facility (CCF), Munk Centre for International Studies  (South House)

9:00-9:05    Welcome: Brian Corman, Dean, School of Graduate Studies and Vice-Provost Graduate Education, University of Toronto

9:05-9:10    Welcome: Prof. Elspeth Brown, Director, Centre for Studies of the United States, with thanks to Prof. Thy Phu, Prof. Matt Brower, Nina Boric, and David Sworn.

9:10-10:45    Plenary Session A: Prof. David L. Eng and Prof. Diana Taylor (CCF)
Prof. Eng will be introduced by Prof. Thy Phu, University of Western Ontario; Prof. Taylor will be introduced by Prof. Dot Tuer, Ontario College of Art and Design; discussion moderated by Prof. Laura Levin, York University

“The Feeling of Kinship: Racial Reparation in Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory.”
David L. Eng

Rea Tajiri’s 1991 video, History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, is a documentary about a young Japanese American woman whose family endures internment during World War II. As a “documentary of affect,” History and Memory offers an extended meditation on the nature of a “picture.” In particular, it explores the ways in which images might come to (re)negotiate a relationship between affect and language in order to underwriting new historical meaning and to “world” particular creatures and things in a manner discontinuous to the protocols of historicism. Much of poststructuralist thought assumes an antipathetic relationship between affect and language. However, History and Memory suggests a different account of this cleaving. It offers a critical vision in which affect and language might not be disjunctive but instead work collectively through “pictures” to transform our relations to history and, in turn, to “repair” structures of family and kinship.

David L. Eng is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2001).  In addition, he is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California Press, 2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple University Press, 1998), and with Judith Halberstam and Jose Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text (2005), “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Currently, he is at work on two new projects, an analysis of the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation and a study on the emergence of gay and lesbian life in China, “The Queer Space of China.”

“Trauma in the Archive”
Diana Taylor
Focusing on the photographs of the disappeared taken by Victor Basterra (himself a disappeared person who was put in charge of photographing the new groups of disappeared persons at ESMA–the National Naval Academic), Taylor investigates the traumatic dimensions of the archive. Basterra was able to hide the photographs among the precious photographic paper and smuggled them out when he was allowed to go buy more. These photographs served as evidentiary proof in the Trial of the Generals (1985). The trauma that Taylor discusses goes from the trauma experienced by the disappeared that is evident in the photographs to the photos as evidence of a traumatic history.

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU.  She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University of Kentucky, 1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Duke University Press, 1997), and most recently The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), which won the Outstanding Book from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association. She is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

10:45-11:00    Coffee Break: Campbell Conference Room Lobby, South House, Munk Centre

11:00-12:45    Panel Session 1

Munk 108N    Children and the Political Management of Affect
Chair: Lisa Cartwright, University of California, San Diego

Laura Briggs, University of Arizona
“Picturing the Sad-Eyed Child: Producing Orphans, Producing U.S. Foreign Policy”

Karen Dubinsky, Queen’s University
“Los Compañeritos in a Land of Monumental Children: The Iconography of Havana’s Circulos Infantiles”

Anita Helle, Oregon State University
“Reading “Daddy’s” Pictures: Confessional Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Photographic Subjectivity”

Discussant: Nicholas Sammond, University of Toronto

Trinity College Comb Room    Feeling Together: Publics and Counterpublics
Chair: Louis Kaplan, University of Toronto

Sally Booth, University of Guelph
“Wojnarowicz’s Grief: Photographs, AIDS and the Public Sphere”

Heather Diack, University of Toronto
“The Relative Affect of Douglas Huebler’s Photographic Portraits”

John Paul Ricco, University of Toronto
“Naked Sharing: On Felix Gonzales-Torres’ Bed”

Discussant: Sharon Sliwinski, University of Western Ontario

Munk 023N    Emotional Geographies
Chair: Christopher Pinney, University College London

Stephen Brooke, York University
“Landscape with Figures: National Identity and Emotion in the Post-war Photography of Bill Brandt”

Elisabeth Friedman, Illinois State University
“The Archive and the Afterimage: Shimon Attie’s The Writing on the Wall.”

Beth Ann Zinsli, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Havana Through the Lens: Exile, Memory and Dislocation in Abelardo’s Morell’s Camera Obscura Photographs”

Discussant: Joshua Schuster, University of Western Ontario

Munk 208N     Marketing Emotions: Loss, Fear and (Comic) Loathing
Chair: Shawn Michelle Smith, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Jessica Catherine Lieberman, Rochester Institute of Technology
“Kodak’s Death Campaign: Selling Loss Through Terror”

Tanya Sheehan, Rutgers University
“Smiles, Tears… Indelibly Recorded: The Politics of Emotion in the Photographic Studio of C. H. Gallup & Co.”

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, University of Toronto
“Reflecting on Fear:  Conflict in Image and Text” (part of “Facing Forward: Stuttgart“)

Discussant: Gaëlle Morel, photo historian and independent curator

12:45-2:30    Lunch (catered on site; Campbell Conference Room Lobby, South House, Munk Centre)

2:30-4:30    Panel Session 2

Munk 108N    Racial Affects
Chair: Thy Phu, University of Western Ontario

Elizabeth Abel, University of California, Berkeley
“Skin Tone: Race and the Political Affect of the Carnal Medium”

Leigh Raiford, University of California, Berkeley
“Marcus Garvey in Stereograph: Photography and Diasporic Affect”

Miriam Thaggert, University of Iowa
“The Photographic Referent:  Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia”

Kimberly Juanita Brown, Northeastern University
“Regarding the Pain of the Other: Kevin Carter and the Transference of Affect”

Discussant: Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

Munk 208N    Emotional States: Citizenship and Photography
Chair: David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania

Rebecca Adelman, University of Maryland-Baltimore County
“‘Life-Size Printed Posters of Your Hero’: Photography, Affection, and Citizenship in the FlatDaddy / FlatMommy Project”

Lily Cho, University of Western Ontario
“Between States: Feeling and Identity in Chinese Head Tax Certificates”

Carol Payne, Carleton University
“Affective Politics: Photography, Emotional Response and Inuit Agency”

Karen Strassler, Queens College, City University of New York
“Affective Effects: Touching and Being Touched by History in Reformasi Indonesia”

Discussant: Megan Boler, OISE/University of Toronto

Munk 023N    Instrumental Images: Bodies, Cities and Empires, 1903-1918
Chair: Sarah Miller, University of Chicago

Sarah Bassnett, University of Western Ontario
“Photographic Fantasies of the Modern City”

Michelle Lamunière, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard and Boston University
“Sentiment and Science: Social Reform Photography in Harvard University’s Social Museum”

Mark Rice, St.  John Fisher College
“Bodies of Shame: Dean Worcester’s Photographs of Filipinos”

Juliet Wagner, Harvard University
“Photography in Neurology and Psychiatry after Charcot: World War I Trauma Photography”

Discussant: Deepali Dewan, Royal Ontario Museum/University of Toronto

Trinity College Combo Room    Digital Affects
Chair: Mark Lipton, University of Guelph

Erin Finley, University of Toronto at Mississauga
“Polaroid Lolita: Investigating the Relationship Between Emotionality and the Recent Controversial Camera-Phone Self-Portraits of Adolescent Starlets”

Martin Hand and Ashley Scarlett, Queen’s University
“Distributed Digital Affects: Photo-Sharing, Tagging and the Lives of Others”

Daniel Palmer, Monash University
“Archiving Affect: Online Photography and Social Software”

Discussant: Kelly Wood, University of Western Ontario

4:30-4:45    Coffee Break (Campbell Conference Room Lobby, South House, Munk Centre)

4:45-6:00    Plenary Session B: Prof. Marianne Hirsch and Prof. Leo Spitzer (CCF)
Moderator and Introducer: Prof. Elizabeth Legge, Chair, Department of Art, University of Toronto

“School Pictures and Their Afterlives”
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

Taken by commercial photographers with few artistic aspirations and little desire to deviate from formulaic representations, class photographs have received little critical attention. The institutional gazes that shape them also seem to minimize their affective charge. And yet, they have become ubiquitous media of memory and memorialization — in art and literature, in journalism, on websites, in museums and at reunions. This paper looks at how contemporary artists have been able to mobilize the emotional life of class photos and to expose their evocative memorial and political power. Focusing particularly on Christian Boltanski and Marcelo Brodsky, two artists working in radically different geographical, historical, and political contexts, and in divergent aesthetic registers, we find that their use of school photos nevertheless enables them to stage surprisingly similar affective encounters with their art work.

Marianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Her recent publications include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Harvard University Press, 1997), The Familial Gaze (University Press of New England, 1999), a special issue of Signs on “Gender and Cultural Memory” (2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004). She is in the process of completing a book entitled The Generation of Postmemory: Gender, Visuality and the Holocaust.

Leo Spitzer is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College and Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University. His recent publications include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang, 1998); Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1990; Hill & Wang, 1999); and the co-edited Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (University Press of New England, 1999).  He has also written numerous articles on Holocaust and Jewish refugee memory and its generational transmission. He is currently editing a concentration camp memoir, A Doctor in the Lager, by Arthur Kessler.

Professor Hirsch and Professor Spitzer co-authored a book titled ”Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of
Czernowitz in Jewish Memory.”

6:00-7:00    Reception at Campbell Conference Room Lounge (South House)

[dinner on your own]

Saturday, October 17, 2009

8:30-9:00     Registration and Coffee
Lobby outside Campbell Conference Facility (CCF), Munk Centre for International Studies (South House)

9:00-10:45    Plenary Session C: Prof. Christopher Pinney and Prof. Shawn Michelle Smith (CCF)
Prof. Pinney will be introduced by Prof. Kajri Jain, University of Toronto; Prof. Smith will be introduced by Prof. Sarah Bassnett, University of Western Ontario; discussion will be moderated by Prof. Deepali Dewan, Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto.

“Coloring Time and Space: The Painted Photograph in India”
Christopher Pinney

Photography offered a potentially radically new aesthetic, characterized by what Benjamin referred to as its “dynamite of the tenth of a second” and what André Bazin described as its “screening” rather than “framing” of subject matter. Its screen-like border created a “cut-off-ness” that European and North American elite practitioners celebrated for its revolutionary optical potentiality. By contrast, Indian vernacular photographic practitioners sought to reassert value and hierarchy, notably through symmetry and the painting of the surface of the image-techniques facilitating restoration of a temporality and hierarchy abolished by what Virilio calls dromographic instantaneity. This paper explores the ways that heavily palimpsestic photo-paint images deploy paint on the surface of the images to slow time and restore its heterogeneity, as well as to revise spatiality. The co-presence of albumen and paint, linearity and a baroque aesthetic draw our attention to the stresses between the dromospheric potential of photography and attempts to control this within Indian painted photographs.

Christopher Pinney is an anthropologist and art historian. He is currently Visiting Crowe Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University and Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His research interests cover the art and visual culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on the history of photography and chromolithography in India.

“Photography Between Desire and Grief:  Roland Barthes and F. Holland Day”
Shawn Michelle Smith

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes endeavors to understand photography through feeling, hoping to retain and account for the photograph’s unique emotional effects.  He announces his “affective intentionality” as spectator, and refuses to dismiss the way photographs make him feel. This paper puts Barthes into conversation with the early 20th century American photographer F. Holland Day. It shows how both photographer and spectator privilege the wound in their work: Day’s theatrical photographs engage religious and mythological themes to pose the male body as an object of desire and destruction, while Barthes’s theoretical text deems the wound, or punctum, a privileged site of photographic meaning. Examining the ways in which they evoke the wound, this paper suggests that both Barthes and Day propose a theory of photography caught between desire and grief.

Shawn Michelle Smith is Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999), Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), and, with Dora Apel, Lynching Photographs (University of California Press, 2008).

10:45-11:00    Coffee Break
Lobby outside Campbell Conference Facility (CCF), (South House)

11:00-12:45    Panel Session 3

Munk 108N    Public Intimacies
Chair: Angelica Fenner, University of Toronto

John Ibson, California State University, Fullerton
“The Space between Men: Same-Sex Affection in 1950s Snapshots”

Karen Jacobs, University of Colorado at Boulder
“Sontag, Leibovitz, and the Ends of the Photographic Lens”

Catherine Zuromskis, University of New Mexico
“Imitation of Life: Intimacy and Superficiality in the Photographs of Annie Leibovitz”

Discussant: Sarah Parsons, York University

Munk 208N    Touching Photo
Chair: Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto

Brooke Belisle, University of California, Berkeley
“Lorna Simpson’s Felt Photographs”

Marko Karo, University of Art and Design Helsinki
“Touching Elements: Photography, Materiality, and the Sense of Touch”

Margaret Olin, Yale University
“Touching Photographs”

Discussant: Linda Steer, Brock University

Trinity Combo Room    Visual Witnessing: Photography and World War II
Chair: Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College

Claude Baillargeon, Oakland University
“Mimesis, Memorialization, and the Photographic Representation of Hibakusha”

Wendy Kozol, Oberlin College
“Battlefield Souvenirs and Moral Spectatorship”

Andres Zervigon, Rutgers University
“Struck by a Bullet! Fashioning the Haptic and the Offensive in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”

Discussant: Blake Fitzpatrick, Ryerson University

Munk 023N    Feeling First: Documentary and Left Internationalism
Chair: Marianne Hirsch

Sara Blair, University of Michigan
“Feeling First: El Libre Negro and the Uses of Documentary Imaging”

Franny Nudelman, Carleton University
“Far from Vietnam: Susan Sontag and the Documentary Imagination”

Rebecca Schreiber, University of New Mexico
“The Circulation of Empathy: Mexican Migrants and the Documentary Structure     of Feeling”

Discussant: Thierry Gervais, Ryerson University

12:45-2:30   Lunch: on your own. Please consult guide in your packet for nearby suggestions.

2:30-4:15    Panel Session 4

Munk 023N   Photography, Trauma, and the Ethics of Witnessing

Unfortunately, this panel has been cancelled/reconfigured.

Trinity Combo Room    Queer Affect(s)
Chair: Ann Cvetkovich, University of Texas, Austin

Nadja Millner- Larsen, New York University
“Affective Surplus: The Photographs of David Wojnarowicz and the Transmission    of Racial Sincerity”

Leena-Maija Rossi, University of Helsinki
“Home of a Domesticated Hero – With Feeling”

Dana Seitler, University of Toronto
“The Art of Sex: Touch and Texture in Tammy Rae Carland and Catherine Opie’s Queer Photography”

Discussant: Michael Cobb, University of Toronto

Munk 208N   Affective Economies
Chair: Val Williams, University of the Arts London

Marlis Schweitzer, York University
“Feeling Modern: Ira L. Hill, Irene Castle, and the Affective Economy of Glamour”

Eugénie Shinkle, University of Westminster
“Affect and Desire in Fashion Imagery”

Elizabeth Wissinger, City University of New York
“Fashion Modeling as Affective Technology: Bodies, Images, Publics”

Discussant: Sophie Hackett, Art Gallery of Ontario

Munk 108N     Facial Tics – Faciality
Chair: Thy Phu, University of Western Ontario

David Benin, University of California, San Diego
“Code Unknown: Facial Affect Coding, Photographic Evidence, and the Elision of the Affective Body”

Sean Hawkins, University of Toronto
“Emotional Subjectivity and Photography in the History of Primatology and Contemporary Animal Rights Culture”

Liz Magic Laser, The School of Visual Arts, New York
“A Cry: Disabling the Body, Enabling the Photograph”

Discussant: Matt Brower, University of Toronto

4:15-4:30    Coffee Break, Lobby CCF, South House

4:30-5:45    Plenary Session D: Prof. Lisa Cartwright and Prof. Ann Cvetkovich (CCF)
Prof. Cartwright introduced by Prof. Matthew Brower, University of Toronto; Prof. Cvetkovich introduced by Prof. Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto; discussion moderated by Prof. Elizabeth Abel, University of California, Berkeley.

“Compulsive Expression”
Lisa Cartwright

This paper addresses the mostly unresolved problem of how to express the intersubjective relationship between affect and expression or, specifically, the relationship among documented subjective expression and feeling; between photographic expression (the feeling of the photograph) and interpretive or expressive writing. Drawing on a range of texts and images, from André Green’s writings about affect and representation, Melanie Klein’s writings about projection, the photographs of Diane Arbus, Nancy Burson, Catherine Opie, and others, as well as film animators (Bob Sabiston), to images drawn from medicine and neurology, Cartwright  suggests that the problem of getting from expressed feeling ‘in’ a subject to representation to writing, is compulsively rehearsed, animating our continued engagement with interpretive and critical writing and aesthetics in relationship to body representations, even after criticism and aesthetics might seem to have run their course.

Lisa Cartwright is Professor of Communication and Science Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Critical Gender Studies, University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Marita Sturken, Oxford University Press, 2001), Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Duke University Press, 2008), and, most recently, Images of Waiting Children: The Visual Culture of Transnational Adoption (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

“Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice”
Ann Cvetkovich

In her recent exhibition, An Archive of Feelings, Tammy Rae Carland endows ordinary objects from domestic life with archival significance by photographing them. In Analogue, Zoe Leonard documents a disappearing way of life on New York’s Lower East Side and the effects of globalization and gentrification through a series of photographs of storefronts as still lives. This paper will consider the relation between these two projects, one focused on domestic objects, the other on public spaces, as ways of documenting the feelings associated with losses that are simultaneously intimate and historical. It will also explore how the intersections between objects and photographs, and the material and the ephemeral, inform these queer archival practices.

Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers University Press, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2003). She edited, with Ann Pellegrini, “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online. She is coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Inspired by Public Feelings groups in Chicago, Austin, and New York, she has just completed a book called Depression: A Public Feelings Project.

6-8 pm        down time, or drinks on your own

8 pm        Concluding Gala Dinner (pre-paid) – Massey College Dining Room.
Bring your ticket (from registration packet). Massey College is directly across Devonshire from  the Munk Centre; the dining room is upstairs.