Sociopolitical Challenges
Hannah Wilke and Problems with Pornography: Unraveling Preconceived Notions of Feminist Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Abigail Bos
Many critics focus on the fact that feminist artists often portray themselves as naked in their work. This causes critics to hail feminist art as pornographic, without recognizing these artists are using their work to reclaim their bodies. Critics also view other art forms as pornographic, which is equally problematic. In the article “Empathy, Pornography and Suffering,” Carolyn Dean discusses the problems that arise from critics arguing that depictions of the Holocaust are pornographic. There are also people who deem Hannah Wilke’s work to be pornographic since her works often depict the naked female form. Critics who consider depictions of the Holocaust, or feminist art as pornographic are able to defend their stance with many valid arguments; however, once the word pornographic is used, the conversation ends. Therefore, hailing anything as pornographic is problematic, as it prevents further conversation of the topic in question.
How New is the "New Photojournalism?"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Duarte Uliana
This paper, of epistemological nature, seeks to analyze the idea of “new photojournalism”, concept that promoted more freedom to the press photographers by allowing the creation of photographic narratives onto photo stories, with the readings of authors like Fred Ritchin (2013), who contributes with the concept of “new photojournalism”, and André Rouillé (2009), who contributes with the concept of “dialogical photography”, “scripting of the photo story” and “humanist and humanitarian photojournalism”, concepts that is believed to be close to the idea of “new photojournalism”. Besides that, it’s intended to be compared to the theory of micro-story, developed by Carlo Ginzburg (2017) in Italy and studied by the Brazilian researcher Boris Kossoy (2014). The micro-stories concept basis is, mainly, the focus on the invisible classes, the intensive investigation of the object and a reduction of the analysis scale, from general to particular; these characteristics are similar to the concept of “new photojournalism” that we are studying. Even though is made on the research a historic panorama, the main idea is to study the “new photojournalism” in contemporaneity and investigate if it is possible to think about these terms in the same way as in the middle of the XX century, when publications like Life Magazine (1936-1972) were published. As an object to the analysis, it’s going to be studied the report by the Brazilian photographer Adriana Zehbrauskas about the Zika virus in Brazil published in The New York Times.
