"Photographic Imagination”: International Conference

Art History Department, The Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University

In collaboration with The Shpilman Institute for Photography, Yale University, and The Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History & Society in University of Haifa.

Conference Organizers:
Margaret Olin, Yale University
Amos Morris-Reich, Haifa University
Vered Maimon, Tel Aviv University

The “Photographic Imagination” conference reconsiders the relations between photography and knowledge by focusing on concepts of and roles played by the imagination in the history of photography. While throughout the twentieth-century much critical and theoretical discussion of photography has focused on issues of representation, “objectivity,” and “truth,” that is, on the relationship between the photographic image and its “real” represented object or referent, this conference seeks to generate different questions by addressing photographic images not as “true” or “false,” but as acts or events whose performative aspects are as important as their representational ones. Chief among these are the complex and ceaselessly shifting relations that exist between photographs, their producers and recipients, and involve irreducible processes of imaginative investments and projections. These processes at the basis of the relationship between photography and the imagination are the focus of a multi-disciplinary conference employing interconnected lines of inquiry and interlacing historical, philosophical, cultural and political perspectives.

Program:

MONDAY, May 26
Fastlicht Auditorium, Mexico Building

18:15 | Greetings

Zvika Serper, Dean of the Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts,
Tel Aviv University

Assaf Pinkus, Chair of the Department of Art History, Tel Aviv University

Vered Maimon, Director of the Photography Studies Program, Tel Aviv University

18:30 | Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Adam Broomberg

19:30 | Reception


TUESDAY, May 27
Kikoine Building 01

9: 30 | Greetings
Amos Morris-Reich, University of Haifa

9:45-12:00 | Session I: The Conception of Photography
Chair: Orly Shevi, Tel Aviv University

Approaching Photographs: On the Idea of Infinite Photography
Steffen Siegel, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena

Photography, Seeing-As, and the Transfiguration of the Imagination
Hagi Kenaan, Tel Aviv University

Picturesque Imaginings: Talbot and the Representation of Nature
Vered Maimon, Tel Aviv University

12:00-13:00 | Lunch Break

13:15-15:30 | Session II: Inventories and Imagination
Chair: Snait Gissis, Tel Aviv University

Remembrance of Things Past: Testimonial and Imagination
Peter Geimer, Freie Universität Berlin

Instruments and Ends: Photography and Imagination in Nazi “Race Science”
Amos Morris-Reich, University of Haifa

Mendel Grossman and the Ghetto in the Ghetto
Carol Zemel, York University

15:30-16:00 | Coffee Break

16:00-18:15 | Session III: Imagining Photographic Practices
Chair: Vered Maimon, Tel Aviv University

Realism and the Photographic Imagination
Robert Hariman, Northwestern University

Witnessing, Bystanding, Onlooking, Participating
Margaret Olin, Yale University

Shooting in the Dark: Photography at the End of Apartheid
Sharon Sliwinski, University of Western Ontario


WEDNESDAY, May 28
Kikoine Building 01

9:30-11:00 | Session IV: Fictional Identities
Chair: Paul Frosh, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Photographic Imaginations of Authorship: Karl May’s Picture Cards
Britta Lange, Humboldt University of Berlin

Contingency, Unverified
Chris Pinney, University College London

11:00-11:30 | Coffee break

11:30-13:00 | Session V: Psychoanalysis and Photography in Exchange
Chair: Shaul Setter, Tel Aviv University

Photography’s Visual Third: Listening to the Resonances of Pensive Images
Meir Wigoder, Sapir College and Tel Aviv University

The Erotic Imagination in Freud’s Vienna
Mary Bergstein, Rhode Island School of Design

13:00-14:30 | Lunch Break

14:30-16:30 | Round Table Discussion
Room 212, Mexico Building