calendario eventi  :: 

X

20/7/2004

Public Image

Gryphon Gallery, Melbourne

2004 Lecture Series
Presented by Centre for Contemporary Photography
and the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne

In 2004, CCP presents a bumper six sessions in its highly respected and annual series of lectures. In partnership with The Australian Centre, four keynote lectures and two panel sessions will be held at the University of Melbourne while CCP's new Fitzroy galleries are under construction.

'Public Image' explores photo-based media as a rhetorical public interface. Keynote lectures will be presented on themes ranging from surveillance to personal histories as public history to the role of celebrityhood in fashion photography. A forum on 'relational aesthetics' will examine the active role of the public in certain forms of experimental contemporary art, while another on war and photography will explore the line between official and unofficial reportage, inspired by recent image-wars over the conflict in Iraq. Drawing from the nineteenth century to the present, 'Public Image' asks how do photographs negotiate between private and public domains of experience? How does the Internet change the public role of 'witnessing'? How are ideas about the public and publicity collapsed in the photo-based media world we live in? And what is art's potential role in all of this?

July 21 @ 6.30pm
Kitty Hauser
Garment in the Dock: Photography, the FBI and a Pair of Denim Jeans

In the wake of a spate of white supremacist bombings and bank robberies in 1996, the Special Photographic Unit of the FBI carried out some research into the identification of denim trousers from bank surveillance film, suggesting that each pair of jeans has unique identifying characteristics caused by manufacturing and by wear. Bearing the traces of both maker and wearer, each pair of jeans can be seen, then – according to this research – as an index, almost like a fingerprint. The connection between worn clothing and an absent body is both intimate and poignant, as poetry and everyday experience shows. Denim, in particular, renders the body's imprint and habits in graphic form, as was recognized by James Agee and Walker Evans in their documentary work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The findings of the FBI went further than to assist in identifying a suspect; what was also revealed, inadvertently, was a new insight into the visibility of the history of a garment – and a heady intimation that identity and appearance might concur in the most unlikely of places.

Kitty Hauser is a writer and teacher who is Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and an Honorary Associate of Sydney University. Her research interests revolve around the relationship between photography and the activities of forensic scientists, historians, detectives and archaeologists. She has written about contemporary culture for publications including the New Left Review, The Burlington Magazine and the London Review of Books and is currently writing a book about the archaeologist and photographer O.G.S. Crawford, to be published by Granta.

July 21 •• Kitty Hauser
August 11 •• Relational Aesthetics Forum
September 1 •• William Yang
September 29 •• Abigail Solomon-Godeau
October 27 •• War and Photography Forum
November 17 •• Sylvia Harrison

All sessions on Wednesday nights at 6.30pm

All lectures in 2004 are FREE. Donations are welcome. Donations over $2 are tax deductible.

Inquires: Tel +61 3 8344 9045

Venue: Gryphon Gallery, 1888 Building, at the University of Melbourne (near the corner of Grattan and Swanston Streets) [except Abigail Solomon-Godeau on September 29, which will be held at the Prince Philip Theatre, Architecture and Planning Building at the University of Melbourne]

stampa

permanent link