Eduardo Cadava

Memory burns

Taking its point of departure from Anne Carson’s lovely description of photographs as “memory burns”—as images that sear memories and events onto their surface but that also burn and destroy them at the same time—this intensive five-day workshop will move between texts and photographs in order to think about the role and place of images within mnemonic processes but also within our everyday lives.

We will consider texts by the poet Charles Baudelaire, the photographer Felix Nadar, the novelist Marcel Proust, the cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, and the philosopher Jacques Derrida, and photographs by, among others, Susan Meiselas, Fazal Sheikh, Joan Fontcuberta, and Isaac Julien. We will be interested not only in explicit discussions of photography—of which there will be many—but also in the ways in which these texts again and again have recourse to the language of photography. For these writers and thinkers, photography provides an entire vocabulary for what Proust calls “the optics of the mind”: the flashes of insight and intuition, the light and shadows that enable and interrupt perception, the workings of memory as it tries to seize or fix an image, and in general the various ways in which we perceive or represent the world around us. We will also try to account for recurring motifs within this history. Why is it, for example, that many of these texts associate photography with meditations on the relations between death and memory? What is it about death and memory that enables us to think about photography? Why do figures of photography so often call forth hallucinations, ghosts, and phantoms? In what way is citation within a literary text a photographic event? Guided by these questions, we will throughout try to think about the relation between vision and language, images and history, and memory and forgetting—searching for a language that may enable us to think more deeply, and collectively, about what a photographic image is.

The workshop will provide us with a lexicon with which to think about the practice of photography—about what it means to see and think photographically, about what it means to create and read a photograph, and about how to imagine photographic projects. Participants are encouraged to bring to the workshop previous “finished” work, projects-in-progress, or ideas about future projects. We will explore the working practices and processes that match most closely each participant’s ideas and desires.