The Face Of Our Wartime, Sharon Sliwinski
Dec 2014
The Face Of Our Wartime, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper considers a turn toward portraiture amongst contemporary photojournalists who have covered the War on Terror. A series of wartime faces is examined in order to consider the way prolonged conflict flattens our visual landscape.
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
Dec 2012
New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
What does fear look like? What can photography reveal of the unconscious dimensions of terror? Working with the largest photographic archive devoted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City, this chapter studies the visual inscription of terror in the bodily gestures of eyewitness, gestures that were captured by citizen photographers.
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility, Sharon Sliwinski
Dec 2011
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary’s false promise to awaken social conscience. By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the ‘painful labour’ of responding to the photographic other – an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator’s ability to respond. Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator’s traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation.
Icarus Returned: The Falling Man And The Survival Of Antiquity, Sharon Sliwinski
Dec 2010
Icarus Returned: The Falling Man And The Survival Of Antiquity, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This chapter examines the so-called "Falling Man" photograph: Richard Drew's infamous image of an anonymous man in free fall, following his jump from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Using Aby Warburg's iconographical method, I read this figure as a latter-day Icarus, putting Drew's photograph in dialogue with other representations of Icarus as a way to explore the image's unconscious force.
Autobiography And The Family Frame: Jaret Belliveau's “Dominion Street” At Gallery Tpw, Matthew Ryan Smith
May 2010
Autobiography And The Family Frame: Jaret Belliveau's “Dominion Street” At Gallery Tpw, Matthew Ryan Smith
Matthew Ryan Smith, Ph.D.
Documented over a period of five years, “Dominion Street” presents a visual narrative of love, loss, and life encapsulated within an East Coast milieu. Privy to the Belliveau family’s emotional and physical plights, the artist utilizes an autobiographic frame offering up strikingly informal glimpses of his family.
On Photographic Violence, Sharon Sliwinski
Dec 2008
On Photographic Violence, Sharon Sliwinski
Sharon Sliwinski
This paper explores the significance of photographic violence in relation to a single defaced image found during the Bosnian War. The single example of pictorial violence opens a set of questions interrogating the nature of human aggression: What is the status of violence carried out in effigy? Can this particular example of defacement open understanding into the other forms of violence that took place during the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia? How does the image come to be marked by affect but also serve as the medium of its transmission? And finally, why does photography lend itself so easily to …
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility
Dec 2003
A Painful Labor: Photography And Responsibility
Sharon Sliwinski
Despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary's false promise to awaken social conscience, this paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility. By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the ‘painful labour’ of responding to the photographic other – an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator's ability to respond. Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator's traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation.
Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, And The Effacement Of Labor, Sharon L. Corwin
Oct 2003
Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, And The Effacement Of Labor, Sharon L. Corwin
Sharon L. Corwin
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the pursuit of efficiency came to dominate instances of industrial and artistic production: the engineering consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth attempted to visualize a language of minimal waste, while Precisionist art achieved its own aesthetic of efficiency. This essay examines the Precisionist project alongside the discourses of the rationalized factory and suggests a relationship between the formal economy of Precisionism and the rhetoric of scientific management. For Precisionist art and the Gilbreths' time-motion studies, the representation of efficiency ultimately entailed the elision of artist and worker as producers of labor.
