On Graham MacIndoe’s Missing Persons images These photographs test with severity and brilliance Barthes’ dictum that the photograph is the emblem of mortal time. Each image is a photograph of a photograph—showing the faces of missing persons for whom someone made a poster and posted...
On Citizen Ghosts: The Un-Americans For a while, when I was still teaching for the Studies in Women and Gender Program, a program at that time headed by anthropologist Kath Weston, I taught a course on women and ghosts. The premise of the course was to...
Mark Strandquist’s photography project, Some Other Places We’ve Missed, shown this June at the Bridge in Charlottesville, Virginia, plays on the conceit of loss as concrete topos or commonplace—loss as a place that can be shown. Some Other Places We’ve Missed is a series of...
This lecture was delivered in my Gender and Violence class, Sociology 2380, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Goldin Lecture (12/03/12) [caption id="attachment_63" align="alignright" width="1344"] Greer and Robert on the bed, NYC 1982 by Nan Goldin born 1953[/caption] Nan Goldin is an American photographer born in 1953. She...
Into houses narrow as closets, gleaners bear the wounds of the fields, remnants unwanted, and the girl also will come in with the gleaners, across fields rutted, scaled by thin ice. Gleaners do not turn from what’s ruined, they salvage her, against their scars they take her wounds, their hands singed with tobacco’s...