Photography, Trace, and Trauma

by Margaret Iversen

Overview

Photography is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma: the automatic nature of the process, wide-open camera lens, and light-sensitive film record chance details unnoticed by the photographer—similar to what happens when a traumatic event bypasses consciousness and lodges deeply in the unconscious mind. Photography, Trace, and Trauma takes a groundbreaking look at photographic art and works in other media that explore this important analogy.

Examining photography and film, molds, rubbings, and more, Margaret Iversen considers how these artistic processes can be understood as presenting or simulating a residue, trace, or “index” of a traumatic event. These approaches, which involve close physical contact or the short-circuiting of artistic agency, are favored by artists who wish to convey the disorienting effect and elusive character of trauma. Informing the work of a number of contemporary artists—including Tacita Dean, Jasper Johns, Mary Kelly, Gabriel Orozco, and Gerhard Richter—the concept of the trace is shown to be vital for any account of the aesthetics of trauma; it has left an indelible mark on the history of photography and art as a whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226370163
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/23/2017
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Margaret Iversen is professor emerita of art history at the University of Essex. She is the author of several books, including Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, and coauthor of Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1          Exposure
2          Indexicality: A Trauma of Signification
3          Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean
4          Rubbing, Casting, Making Strange
5          Index, Diagram, Graphic Trace
6          The “Unrepresentable”
7          Invisible Traces: Postscript on Thomas Demand

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a judicious, sensitive, and moving account of the indexical and contingent dimensions that come into art though photography. There is much here that will be new to readers interested in art history, fine art, and cultural studies. Convincing and illuminating, Photography, Trace, and Trauma is a beautifully written book, one that is eminently accessible without sacrificing the subtlety with which these complex and momentous questions are approached.

Michael Newman

Iversen is one of our foremost theoreticians of photography, whose pioneering work is grounded in a lucid, sophisticated engagement with philosophical, aesthetic, and psychoanalytical discourses. With Photography, Trace, and Trauma,Iversen turns her critical gaze toward the photographic trace and its psychic resonances. With trademark clarity and precision, she weaves an imaginative, rigorous route through the photographic imaginary of the late twentieth century, attending to both its analogue and digital forms. This remarkable book forces us, at a moment of profound technological change, to take the photographic seriously as both object and idea.

Jo Applin

"Original and suggestive in both theoretical approach and in the grouping of artists."

Oxford Art Journal

Few concepts in contemporary culture have become as fraught as ‘photography,’ ‘trace,’ and ‘trauma.’ This lucid and generous study clarifies why and how. Through the work of Zoe Leonard, Gerhard Richter, Mary Kelly, Thomas Demand, and others, Iversen reflects upon the art of recent times as it spirals around matters of evidence, impression, memory, and history. What emerges is a timely response to the limits of representation and the representation of limits.

David Campany

Elegant and thought-provoking, Photography, Trace, and Trauma takes an approach to the photographic that is simultaneously expansive and fine-grained. Through case studies across a range of media, Iversen develops a compelling aesthetics of trauma, according to which the artwork models an openness to being marked by time and contingency.

Tamara Trodd

"In this challenging analysis of the way photography can provide a trace of trauma, Iversen offers a revelatory exploration of how theory has introduced a complex method for interpreting the “messages” in imagery—imagery that is not limited to photography....Recommended."

Choice