"Gorging on Images": Feb 11

Gorging on Images: The Archive in Contemporary Photography
A Lecture by Sven Spieker

Monday, February ll, 2008 at 7:45 pm
NYU Silver Center, Room 300,
100 Washington Square East (entrance on Waverly Place)

Organized by Professors Ulrich Baer and Shelley Rice, as part of the seminar Archive, Image, Text: The Myth and Reality of What Archives Hold, sponsored by the Departments of Photography, German, Art History, English and Comparative Literature.

The archive in contemporary photography—from Gerhard Richter to Susan Hiller and Tacita Dean—oscillates between the pathos of total inclusiveness and the specter of radical dispersion and discontinuity. In this lecture Spieker will trace this double orientation: first to the 19th-century (photo) archive with its rhetoric of preservation and identification, and second to what has been referred to as the early 20th century’s turn towards archival forms of organization as a result of the waning of the aesthetic of shock during the 1920s (photomontage). Using two seminal essays in the history of photography— Alexander Rodchenko’s ““Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot” (1928) and Sigfried Kracauer’s“Photography” (1927)—he will demonstrate that this archival turn, whose impact on contemporary photographic practice is considerable, was not without its own internal fissures and contradictions. Whereas Rodchenko appeals to a monumental, totalizing archive of photographs with a transcendent referent (the founder of the Soviet Union, Lenin), Kracauer, who views photography as a form of counter-memory, proposes an archive of radical dispersion. By way of a conclusion he will highlight the different ways in which the fractured “archival turn” of the early 20th century lingers in contemporary photographic practice.

http://arthistory.as.nyu.edu/object/ah.gorgingonimages.html