Event overview
African prolepsis
Talk by Jennifer Bajorek (NYU) as part of the Visual Cultures Public Programme.
African prolepsis
This paper asks what it means for a photograph to be political and, by extension, whether, and how, a public can be photographed. The syntax of these questions grew from a phrase that was planted in my brain by El Hadj Adama Sylla, a photographer who worked in the north of Senegal in the late 1950s and 1960s: —“We took pictures of the state, and sometimes we did it because we were paid it to do it, and sometimes we did it for private reasons.” If it can be established that a photograph is not political purely on the basis of its content, genre, or theme, or because it was taken by what were deemed to be political reasons by the photographer, then the very idea of a political photograph—and by extension a political photography—is symptomatic of an expanded field of political experience. This paper is part of a larger project exploring the ways that certain photographs, and indeed photography, come to be caught up with narratives about independence and decolonization in francophone west.
Jennifer Bajorek writes and does research on literature, philosophy, and the history and theory of photography. Her publications include Counterfeit Capital (Stanford, 2009); essays in Aperture, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, and History of Photography; an edition and translation (with Eric Trudel and Charlotte Mandel) of the literary theory and political writings of Jean Paulhan (Illinois, 2008); and translations of texts by Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Sarah Kofman. In 2010, she was co-editor (with Vikki Bell) of a special section of Theory, Culture & Society on photography and the state, and she is finishing a book on photography and political imagination in Senegal and Benin. She also works, in a more activist vein, to create 21st-century institutions for photography in Africa. She teaches in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 May 2013 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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