5:30pm. First JCI lecture of the 2014-2015 academic year.
In her talk, “Unstoppable Development,” Kaja Silverman will argue that photography began with the pinhole camera, which was more found than invented, morphed into the optical camera obscura, was reborn as chemical photography, and lives on in a digital form. It also moves through time, in search of other “kin,” some of which are visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical or literary. Finally, photography develops with us and in response to us; it assumes historically-legible forms, and when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.
Kaja Silverman is the Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of eight books, including Flesh of My Flesh, World Spectators, and The Threshold of the Visible World.
Her new book, The Miracle of Analogy, will be published by Stanford University Press in February 2015. It is the first volume in a 2-volume reconceptualization of photography.
Silverman taught at the University of California for many years before moving to Penn, and has also taught at a number of other institutions, among them Simon Fraser.
