History and Theory of Photography Research Centre Spring 2017

Free and open to all, at 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

Thursday 19 January 2017, 6:00-7:30pm

Room 120, 43 Gordon Square

Margaret Iversen

Profane Illuminations

Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus, 1955.

Walter Benjamin credited the Surrealist movement with ‘a true, creative overcoming of religious illumination’ by replacing it with a kind of ‘profane illumination’. This talk attends to two key moments in the art of producing technically mediated, profane illuminations. They are, first, the innovations of the Surrealist movement itself and, second, Leo Steinberg’s ‘Other Criteria’ with its conception of the picture plane as a receptive surface or, as he put it, ‘a consciousness immersed in the brain of the city’.

 

Thursday 2 February 2017, 6:00-7:30pm

Room B04, 43 Gordon Square

Marcia Pointon (Professor Emeritus, University of Manchester, and Research Fellow, Courtauld Institute of Art)

Robert Harris’s Photography at De Beer’s Kimberley Diamond Mine 1875-1890

 

Thursday 27 April 2017, 6:00-7:30

Room 106, 43 Gordon Square

Christina Riggs (University of East Anglia)

Photographing Tutankhamun: Photo-objects and the archival afterlives of colonial archaeology

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: Christina Riggs, History and Theory of Photography, Marcia Pointon, Margaret Iversen, photography