Current Events
DCAPS Workshop - Witnessing Dehumanisation: Acts of State and the Civil Contract of Photography
Wednesday 11 February, 2.15-5.15, Elvet Riverside 206
DCAPS is pleased to announce a workshop led by Ariella Azoulay, co-hosted with the IAS as part of its 'Being Human' theme. The workshop will focus on the curatorial and critical work of Professor Azoulay, who will provide a theoretical introduction to and present images from the photographic exhibition ‘Acts of State: 1967-2007', held at the Minshar Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in June 2007. This exhibition raises questions about the relationship between photography, spectatorship, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, providing new understandings of how photography can contribute to the development of a broader opposition to the occupation within Israeli society. The general aim of the workshop is to take the visual materials and introduction as a prompt for commentary and discussion in relation to what Professor Azoulay has recently termed the ‘civil contract' of photography, which she argues, must be thought of and understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history.
Ariella Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Culture and Interpretation, Bar Ilan University. She is the author of Once Upon A Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin and Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, winner of the 2002 Infinity Award for Writing presented by the International Center for Photography for excellence in the field of photography (MIT Press, 2001).
Seminar Series 2008/2009
The seminar series is open to members of the University and the general public. For more information, please contact photo.group@durham.ac.uk
11 December 2008
Dr Sabine Kriebel (University College, Cork), Elvet Riverside 1 ER152, 5.15pm
John Heartfield and the Photocultural Industry of the Weimar Republic
16 October 2008
Dr Ian Walker (University of Wales, Newport), Elvet Riverside 1 A56, 5.30pm
Bill Brandt Underground: Tracing the Shelter Photographs in the Archive
Of all the bodies of work by major figures in modernist photography, the archive of Bill Brandt remains one of the most elusive, much as it was when Brandt himself controlled it. But there were a few projects where Brandt was working to commission and his work was deposited in a public archive. Of these, the most intriguing are the set of photographs that Brandt made between November 4 and 11 1940, in the shelters where Londoners went to escape from the Blitz. These are now in the Imperial War Museum, but the prints on file there look very different from the images Brandt himself produced for his various publications. Moreover the siting of these 41 images by Brandt in among the other 38,102 photos from the Home Front also changes one's understanding of them. The questions raised here about authorship and authenticity are profound, particularly if one is able to follow the trail down into the basement of the Archive, where the original negatives are stored - these frail slivers of film which were exposed to the underground light almost 68 years ago.
12 March 2009
Dr Dorothy Rowe (University of Bristol), 'Weimar Women: Photography and Modernity'. Elvet Riverside 1 A56, 5.30pm
Third DCAPS international conference
The third DCAPS international conference will be held in Durham on 25-27 September 2009. The conference will explore the relationship between photography, humanism, human rights and humanitarianism. A call for papers, along with further details will be published in September 2008. For more information, contact Andrea Noble (andrea.noble@dur.ac.uk)