Images in Focus
University of San Jorge
In the Shadow of the Other: The Gerhard Sisters' Photographs of Asian Women at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dena Gilby
Scholars of the St. Louis World’s Fair often remark on the tightly controlled visual manifestations of the ethnographic and country displays and “entertainments” on offer at the venue, particularly the photographs of Native Americans, such as those in the Gerhard Sisters’ Aboriginal Portraits. Despite the fact that Emma and Mamie Gerhard are credited as the first professional women photographers to open a studio in St. Louis, there is a lack of even the most basic information about the sisters’ lives and careers. A contextual examination of individual photographs in the Aboriginal Portraits portfolio make visible the epoch’s cultural conditions and reveal the ultimate “other” at the fair: Chinese and Japanese women and children upon whose likeness the sisters appear to have established their “sameness” to Euro-American white men. Moreover, the examination of specific works and comparison to Louisiana Purchase Exposition (LPE) souvenir stereocards and photographs by anonymous Louisiana Purchase Exposition photographers clarifies how the sisters’ images present a dual perspective: on the one hand the pictures reflect imperialist “othering” of non-whites; on the other hand, these photographs tangentially participate in the Gerhards sisters’ purported method of creating “character” portraits so that the consumers’ curiosity about the women portrayed is piqued; in this sense, the women step out of the shadows to confront those who have othered them.
In the Alleys of the Lost Self: A Decolonial Search for Image View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sanskriti Chattopadhyay
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Gabriel Garcia Marquez mentioned, ― “the interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.” Situated in this problem of perpetual representation as ‘other’ and ‘subaltern’ without a voice, this paper studies knowledge-creation through the narratives of image. Despite, living in overtly visual culture, the core of this visual world (which largely informs our sense of culture)– the image – is not subjected to changes of consciousness. Positing visual art as a parallel knowledge-producing system this paper questions whether the image can pave the way to initiate a conversation with those that coloniality and social hierarchy have rendered voiceless. Centralizing Ronaldo Vázquez’s Theory of Listening, a key column of decoloniality studies, this paper formulates an image from the embodied experience of the ‘other’. It will place itself in a triad of Bengali novelist Kamalkumar Majumdar’s novel Antarjali Jatra, its film adaptation by filmmaker Gautam Ghosh, and Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s 1992 article Acting Bits/ Identity Talk where she mentions the novel and the film as a case study. Each of these ‘texts’ in different ways relates to the questions of identity through ‘image’. Hence this triad may act as a meta-case study for this paper.
Art and Politics Unbound
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Trevor Harrison
Increasingly, art – especially political artistic expression – has left formal artistic spaces and entered into the unregulated public realm. Relying upon historical, empirical examples, this paper examines critically the manner in which artists have traditionally attempted to navigate their creative roles in the context of real political circumstances and ideologies, and the impetuses for recent public expressions of political art. The study draws from classical and feminist political economy, and include discussions of Millet, Picasso, Guston, Kollwitz, and Rego, among others.
