Visual Studies Commons^™

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …

Identidades Por Negociar: La Presentación De La Piel Humana En La Fotografía De René Peña., Ilka Kressner

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes several works by Cuban photographer René Peña from the point of view of his depiction of the human skin. Peña, one of Cuba’s most renowned photographers, with an impressive list of exhibits in Cuba, the US, and Europe, became known as an artist of sharp and formalistic black and white photographs, mostly focusing on the human body. Through his idiosyncratic staging and estranging juxtapositions on the photographic paper, Peña’s work is never solely artistic: it challenges for instance the binary opposition between black and white, the concept of fixed sexualities, or the process of aging.

In many …