Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche.
Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter One. Photography’s Weimar-Era Proliferation and Walter Benjamin’s Optical Unconscious
- Chapter Two. “A Hiding Place in Waking Dreams”: David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, and Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”
- Chapter Three. Freud: The Photographic Apparatus
- Chapter Four. “To Adopt”: Freud, Photography, and the Optical Unconscious
- Chapter Five. The Politics of Contemplation
- Chapter Six. Freud, Saturn, and the Power of Hypnosis
- Chapter Seven. On the Couch
- Chapter Eight. Vision’s Unseen: On Sovereignty, Race, and the Optical Unconscious
- Chapter Nine. Sligo Heads
- Chapter Ten. Developing Historical Negatives: The Colonial Photographic Archive as Optical Unconscious
- Chapter Eleven. The Purloined Image
- Chapter Twelve. The Vancouver Carts: A Brief Mémoire
- Chapter Thirteen. Vietnamese Photography and the Look of Revolution
- Chapter Fourteen. Shooting in the Dark: A Note on the Photographic Imagination
- Chapter Fifteen. Slow
- Contributors
- Index
- Color Plates
Texto
Audio
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