Workshop Programme: States of Seeing

University of Basel, Switzerland, June 6-7, 2019

Alte Universität, Seminar Room 201

Conveners: Dr Zeynep Gürsel, NOMIS Fellow, eikones & Dr Lorena Rizzo, Centre for African Studies

 

Thursday 6th of June 2019

 9.00-9.30          Welcome Remarks  Lorena Rizzo; Ralph Ubl, Director eikones

Session I: 

9.30.-10.30       Hans Ruin, Södertörn University

“Portraits, Deathmasks, and Photographs – Materializing Fugitive Life”

10.50-11.50      Olga Shevchenko, Williams College

“A Sea of Moving Faces: The Visual Politics of the Immortal Regiment Movement”

11.50-12.50      Lorena Rizzo, University of Basel

"Presence & Absence - photography and the aesthetics of historical return and disappearance"

Session II: 

14.00-15.00      Martina Baleva, University of Innsbruck

“Photography against the state. Visual techniques of revolution in 19th century Ottoman Empire”

15.00-16.00      Nicole Fleetwood, Rutgers University

“Interior Subjects: Portraits by Incarcerated Artists”

Session III: 

16.30-18.00      Paul Mellenthin, University of Basel

“Censorship and circulation: The disappearance of the Paris Commune 1871”

Jonas Wenger, University of Basel

“Images of industry. Work in Amir Khan Jalil al-dowleh Qajar’s royal photo album”

Ernest Sewordor, University of Basel

The problem is…even the photographer will fear to go there’: An historical appraisal of ‘missing’ photos about Ghana’s 1979 coup and their ‘recovery’ via social media’

Friday, 7th of June 2019

Session IV: 

9.30-10.30       Yvette Christianse, Barnard College

“The Indian Ocean and Photographs of Liberated Africans”

11.00-12.00      Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia

“The Militarization of Vision”

12.00-13.00      Rebecca Stein, Duke University

“The Illusive Archive: Military Seeing in the Smartphone Age” 

Session V: 

14.00-15.00      Zeynep Gürsel, Rutgers University

“Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State and the Making of Armenian Emigrants”

15.00-16.00      Karen Strassler, City University of New York

“States of Seeing/States of Unseeing: The Visuality of the “Chinese” in Indonesia” 

Session VI: 

16:30-18:00      Reflections by Patsy Spyer, the Graduate Institute, Geneva; Kadiatou Diallo, Centre for African Studies, University of Basel; James Merron, Centre for African Studies, University of Basel

Open discussion 

 

Rationale

Many scholars have invited us to think about how states see subjects.  Most famously among them Foucault and his highlighting of surveillance practices in spaces such as prisons, hospitals, schools and barracks.  Twenty years ago, James Scott detailed “seeing like a state,” albeit without particular attention to actual practices of visualization.  Allan Sekula and John Tagg eloquently drew attention to ways in which photography served as a generative medium for state surveillance but also reminded us that seeing is in some ways continuous with other forms of perceiving.

In titling this workshop, States of Seeing, we want to build upon these conversations but also to underscore the plurality of states as well as to think deeper about particular conditions of seeing whether by, through, in opposition to or despite the state.  Photography has been and continues to serve as a critical medium for states of seeing.  

Guiding questions

The workshop brought together a group of scholars to open up questions about everyday practices of states of seeing. Some of the questions we were interested in are:

-       How can we explore states of seeing without assuming a monolithic state or reinforcing hard and stable boundaries between state and society?

-       How do states see beyond mere surveillance?  Furthermore, how can we refine our understanding of surveillance itself?

-       How might we think about states of seeing that gets beyond the instrumental purposes assigned to representations?

-       What kinds of non-state actors need to be investigated in order to expand our understanding of how a state shapes and is shaped by practices of seeing?

-       Might state formation itself be dependent on states of seeing?  

-       Similarly, might institutionalization itself be an image-based practice?

Conceptual Clusters

The workshop was organized around four conceptual clusters intended to collectively sharpen our understanding of states of seeing rather than exhaust the topic:

·      Containment – Photography as an image form, technology and practice was and continues to be implicated in the state’s preoccupation with institutionalized containment (policing and imprisonment). Likewise, the photographic medium was often deployed by the state in its attempt to contain subjects of rule within stable categories of gender, race and class. However, the relationship between image and power remains problematic, and photography both sustains and undermines the representational spaces of containment. 

·      (Dis)placement – Photography constitutes what Foucault calls a practice of emplacement, i.e.it establishes relations between locations and determines principles of space perception. Thinking about photography as emplacement raises questions about the location of seeing. It also helps us investigate how practices of seeing and photographic (dis)placements determine circulation and mobility – of people, things and images.  

·      Death – Photographic states of seeing sway between visibility and disappearance, presence and absence, life and death. Thinking about death in terms of an ‘aesthetics of historical disappearance’ (Ruin) we can begin to explore how and to what end sight configures the emergence and disappearance of bodies.

 ·      Desire  Repressive modes of photography (Sekula) associated with containment, displacement and death, emerge alongside and sometimes in opposition to modes of seeing that are more generative of longing, desire and aspiration. It seems productive, therefore, to ask what modes of seeing are rendered desirable, how desire itself is visually generated, and how images construct aspirations and longings.