Ethics of Perception
Vivian Maier's Female Gaze : Investigating Gender Roles through Photography
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nadja Köffler
The investigation of Vivian Maier’s photographs is an encounter with what she had come to see and had selected as a subject for her art. Over a time span of 30 years, Vivian Maier continuously portrayed herself reflected in surfaces and glass windows, “the world fragmented as seen through frames, doorways, and boxes, her shadows projected into others’ lives, onto sidewalks, and the back of strangers” (Avedon 2013: 8). Very often she portrayed herself with other women appearing within one frame – standing next to her, capturing her gaze, posing in their petticodes – forming a harsh contrast to the woman, which according to one of her former charges, Duffy Levant, looked like a “woman factory worker of the Soviet Union in the 50s” (Maloof & Siskel 2013). The constant appearance of women in Maier’s self-portraits reveal that Maier seemed to visually position herself to post-war gender roles and deconstructed them by using herself as a medium of comparison and contrast. The following paper presentation is going to have a close look on the special aesthetics of a selected part of her photographic self-portraits (N= 100) applying Ralf Bohnsack’s (2011) image analysis procedure combing it with Pilarczyk’s and Mietzner’s (2003) serial-iconographic analysis method. In this paper presentation, results of the analysis will be discussed and in a second step connected to gender roles, the socio-cultural background and Zeitgeist of post-war America.
In Time: Exploring Illusion and the Photograph as a Phenomenology of Perception
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Enrico Scotece
In this paper I use time as a pendulum between illusions and redolent depictions of our environment to seek and explore the idea of trace within the context of photographic practice as a phenomenology of perception. “In order to retain that which has come before me, I need to reach through a thin layer of time.” As Merleau-Ponty’s observation suggests, experiential perception allows us to explore sensorial visual-imaginations that lead us from one thought to another, and in effect from one photograph to another as a temporal yet sequential succession within time. My camera sits within a linear process of burning light that, as familiar as a photograph, bathes in and lays claim to time. Like a searchlight, this burning light confidently resolves itself so intimately upon a surface. My camera is a veritable time machine enacting “the transformation of matter and the movement of the mind as interrelated phenomena”- (Bruno). It speaks with the sun, exchanging a penetrative alchemic exuberance within a space of possibilities where exploration seems to roam freely. The subject is becoming surface. The latent image, a conversant pendulum that scribes a pervasive and lingering complexity between the adroit and the facile, reveals to us that illusions are a suggestive trace of the unfixed. Trace is not purely a response to an image or photograph, it is something that the photographer embeds within layers of time. It is something that we perceive as an illusion that acts as mediation between the image and time itself.
Evaluating Attitudes : Mark Rothko and the Ethical Criticism of Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christopher Trogan
The ethical criticism of art holds that the responses that a work prescribes to its audience are aesthetically relevant and that the aesthetic success of a work of art in part depends on whether those responses are "merited" and these "merits" include ethical ones. The ethicist thus holds that -- to the extent that a work of art expresses an ethical attitude -- this adds to the aesthetic value of the work. On the contrary, works that express unethical attitudes are - to that extent - aesthetically diminished. Putting aside the numerous criticisms of the ethical criticism of art in general, it is captivating to consider the expression of attitudes in images that are not explicitly representational. An extremely relevant case study is that of Mark Rothko: assuming that some of his early images appear life affirming and sociable, can these works still be ethically assessed even though they do not presuppose a determinant content? Likewise, as Rothko's images darken before his suicide, can these images also be ethically assessed? This paper will explore these very complicated, but important, questions.
