[Sci-tech-public] FW: Fri., April 15 Sensing the Unseen @ MIT - "The Obscure: Photographing"

[Amberly Steward]

Please join us this Friday, April 15 for a new session of Sensing the
Unseen, a seminar series to discuss current scholarship on the sensory and
media modes that people employ to access realms of existence and experience
outside the immediately visible.

 

All seminar meetings are free and open to the public - no registration is
required.  

 <http://web.mit.edu/unseen/species/obscure.html> 

 

The Obscure: <http://web.mit.edu/unseen/species/obscure.html>  Photographing
Friday, April 15, 2:30 - 5:00 PM  
@ MIT 56-114 (Whitaker Building #56 <http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=56> , Room
114)

Speakers: Karen Strassler (Queens College), Marianne Hirsch (Columbia
University)

Discussants: Emily Zeamer (MIT), Sandy Alexandre (MIT)

 

 

Karen Strassler The Aura of Power: Ratu Kidul's Photographic Appearances

 

Queen of the Javanese spirit world, commander of an invisible avenging army,
sexual predator, and lover of Central Java's traditional rulers, Ratu Kidul
is a potent figure in Javanese mythology who also has an active presence in
Indonesia's modern media and political culture. Neither eluding nor haunting
the technological apparatus, Ratu Kidul instead claims photography as her
privileged medium; her photographic appearances reveal the persistence of an
ideology of power's obscurity in an era dominated by dreams of transparency.

 

Karen Strassler is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College
of the City University of New York. Her book, Refracted Visions: Popular
Photography and National Modernity in Java (Duke UP 2010), examines how
everyday photographic practices have shaped the ways people in urban Java
come to see themselves as Indonesians. Her current research focuses on media
and political communication in the post-Suharto era, tracing the uncertain
nature of evidence and authority in the aftermath of authoritarianism and
the age of digital reproduction. 

 

Marianne Hirsch "You dont see me": The Subject of Class Photos

 

This paper will reflect on the unseen through a genre of vernacular
photography that has received little, if any, critical attention the school
photo. As group images taken by commercial photographers with few if any
artistic aspirations and little desire to deviate from formulaic
representations, class pictures can nevertheless expose some fundamental
aspects of photography: the relationship between photographer and
photographed subject that they stage, their temporalities and ideologies,
their framings and re-framings, their social and emotional lives and
afterlives, their multiple, sometimes contradictory, meanings.  The paper
will look both at archival school photos and at the work of several artists
who reframe and comment on school pictures in their work.

 

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Co- Director of the Center
for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. Most recently, together with
Leo Spitzer, she published Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in
Jewish Memory. Among other recent publications are Family Frames:
Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, The Familial Gaze, a special issue
of Signs on "Gender and Cultural Memory," and Teaching the Representation of
the Holocaust. Her book of essays "The Generation of Postmemory: Gender and
Visuality After the Holocaust" is forthcoming.

 

Please plan to join us after the seminar for an informal reception.

 

.
A Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures to be held at MIT in
2010-2011, Sensing the Unseen is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
and hosted by MIT Anthropology. Our website provides more details, including
upcoming seminars:  http://web.mit.edu/unseen/ 

Maps & directions to the Sensing the Unseen seminar can be found here:
http://web.mit.edu/unseen/directions.html
Sign up to receive email reminders about upcoming seminars:
https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/unseen_list

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