Statement on Violence May 31, 2020 Like so many others, I have been grieved, and horrified, by the unjust killing of George Floyd. I stand with the protestors in their demands for reform, and for a fair and equitable society. I stand with Mr. Floyd and all victims...
Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse Feminist Studies Vol. 44, No. 2, Doctoral Degrees in W/G/S/F Studies: Taking Stock (2018), pp. 464-490 Read Full Article My scholarly training and publications are in the fields of critical theory, aesthetic theory, poetics, and cultural theory, but I am also the lead author...
On "Slow Forward," a Retrospective of the Work of Joan Rachaelsdaughter at UMF Art Gallery, 10 March to 10 April 2016 Joan Rachaelsdaughter’s work combines, in uncanny distillations, intimately tactile materiality and formally realized visual image. Her best work is placed as if mystically in that...
The Patience of Seeing: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Oceans and Movie Theaters Keeping his camera’s lens open for the duration of movies, or setting his camera on long exposures before various seas and oceans, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto created two series of images that empty and fill the visual...
On Mad Men’s Betty There is an immense and impenetrable friendliness to certain kinds of capitalist exchange. The love of family, lifelong friends, none of these comes close to the frictionless glissade of buying face-to-face that which could be gotten elsewhere cheaper, or that which...
Francesca Woodman: Melancholy Fashion In February, I visited Francesca Woodman’s show I’m Trying My Hand at Fashion (Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 W 57th, NYC), and have some thoughts, analytical and personal, on the show. Many of the photographs at Marian Goodman for this exhibit are shown...
James Nachtwey's Photographs and the problem of the Modern James Nachtwey’s photographs raise the question of who is responsible for holding trauma, and what is the place of the traumatized in culture? Another way to frame this question is to ask who is responsible for holding...
Rebecca Belmore and the Photograph of the Wound Barthes argues that the photograph, if it has power, wounds us, shooting a puncturing arrow into our psyches—very much like Cupid, only this Cupid is one of memory and mourning rather than desire. And yet memory, mourning, and...
Francesca Woodman’s Zen In Photography Degree Zero, Jay Prosser writes, with clarity and very persuasively, about the Buddhist strand in Barthes’ Camera Lucida, arguing that here, in his last book, Barthes the semiotician confronts or is forced to come up against the limits of words. In...
Francesca Woodman and the Polka Dot Oneiric The camera-produced image, the photograph, does not invite or permit the viewer’s act of imagination, argues Baudrillard: the hyperreal instead stays above the mortal and dreaming world, a kind of final, fatal Platonic form. Here Baudrillard extends, perhaps, Adorno’s...