Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche. Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón

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United States, United States of America

Durham, 2017

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

Photography's Weimar-era proliferation and Walter Benjamin's optical unconscious / Andrés Mario Zervigón -- "A hiding place in waking dreams" : David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, and Walter Benjamin's "Little History of Photography" / Shawn Michelle Smith -- Freud : the photographic apparatus / Sarah Kofman -- "To adopt" : Freud, photography, and the optical unconscious / Jonathan Fardy -- The politics of contemplation / Zoe Leonard and Elisabeth Lebovici -- Freud, Saturn, and the power of hypnosis / Mary Bergstein -- On the couch / Mignon Nixon -- Vision's unseen : on sovereignty, race, and the optical unconscious / Mark Reinhardt -- Sligo heads / Kristan Horton -- Developing historical negatives : the colonial photographic archive as optical unconscious / Gabrielle Moser -- The purloined image / Laura Wexler -- The Vancouver carts : a brief mémoire / Kelly Wood -- Vietnamese photography and the look of revolution / Thy Phu -- Shooting in the dark : a note on the photographic imagination / Sharon Sliwinski -- Slow / Terri Kapsalis

This volume's contributors use Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency, thereby opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche.

2024-06-27