Corpsing the Image

Schwenger, Peter

doi:10.1086/448972

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The scholar and critic Peter Schwenger refers to this analytical maneuver as “corpsing the image” (Schwenger, 2000). But no great feat of cultural analysis or insight is required to comprehend that this image is of a dead thing.…”

Section: Photographs Of Dead Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Photoanthropocene: The decentered lens of colonial photography

Reisz

2024

Curator The Museum Journal

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Photography—what Barthes called “the living image of a dead thing”—is often overlooked in discussions of cultural heritage decolonization. This paper focuses on a historical photograph attributed to the Hong Kong commercial photographer Lai Fong 黎芳, also known as Afong, that documents the aftermath of the Tianjin massacre of 1870. A photographic print of the image is held in the Robert Hart collection, a little‐known collection of historical photographs accumulated by the Irishman Robert Hart during his half‐century as an administrator in China. Like many such collections—and like Tianjin itself in the late Qing period—the photography collection resists easy categorization, and sits uneasily between Europe and Asia, Chinese and foreign, imperial and anti‐imperial. This essay proposes a “photoanthropocene” perspective, drawing on theoretical writing by Mirzoeff, Zylinska, and others to locate colonial photography within the early anthropocene. The photoanthropocene offers new ways to understand, interpret, and decolonize colonial photography.

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Section: Photographs Of Dead Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Photoanthropocene: The decentered lens of colonial photography

Reisz

2024

Curator The Museum Journal

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“…FRT intensifies the ‘confusion’ engendered by the image of the corpse, the problem that ‘these shadows cannot be secured’ (Schwenger, 2000: 412). For FRT, the subject is presumed dead until it can convincingly prove its ‘liveness’, even as the ‘actual’ corpse presents a corollary problem, that it remains uncannily ‘lively’ in its decomposition and in its post-mortem gestures.…”

Section: The Problem Of the Corpsementioning

confidence: 99%

Disaster, facial recognition technology, and the problem of the corpse

O’Neill

2024

New Media & Society

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The overlapping disasters of the Australian 2019–2020 bushfire season and the COVID-19 pandemic, figured alongside the imaginary of projected future disasters, have provided a space of legitimation to experiment with controversial facial recognition technologies (FRTs). Drawing upon interviews conducted with senior Australian government administrators and researchers, I argue that FRTs are being used to respond to the trauma of disaster through its novel mediation and refiguration, tied to discourses of resilience which have been used to justify the expansion of FRT as a means for relief and the provision of aid. This legitimation, however, is challenged by the difficulty FRT encounters in capturing the face in its vital and its mortal malleability. What I term ‘the problem of the corpse’ serves to bring to light the ‘paranoid’ gaze of the biometric apparatus, disrupting the aim of using biometric infrastructure to produce a ‘new normal’ in the ongoing aftermath of disaster.

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“…Melancholia has appeared in art, film, and media studies with variety of purposes and interpretations. Research on melancholia has recently embraced examples in experimental film and video art (Marks 1997, EKPHRASIS, 1/2019 A MelAncholic explorAtion of huMAnity (the Solitude of MAn) 2000,2002), articulated melancholia as an emotion in the context of aesthetics (Brady and Haapala 2003) and investigated through the theories of representation and of the object (Schwenger 2000(Schwenger , 2006. What are other visual forms and creative practices that trigger discussion of melancholia?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crossing a Productive Melancholia in Artistic Work Based on Xerography

Muliaee¹

2019

Ekphrasis

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This paper suggests that xerography or copy art -also called "generative systems" -may incite melancholia. The theoretical framework for this analysis includes Svetlana Boym's concept of "broken-tech arts" (2001) and her conceptualization of ruins (2010), as well as Laura Marks' model of "haptic visuality" (2002). With the proliferation of copy machines, including Xerox, in the US in the 1960s, artists began producing new work through inventive use and creative manipulation of copiers. Copy machines allowed distinct effects, such as stretching and degeneration, and specifically resulted in the generation of haptic images: synthetic ruins that can trigger melancholia in an aesthetic experience. I posit that melancholia has the potential to inspire one to contemplate the ruined image and explore new meanings. Xerography work by Stevlana Boym, Sonia Sheridan, and Timm Ulrichs will be analyzed as relevant examples. This review contributes to melancholia studies by linking the field of xerography to the concept and experience of melancholia.

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Corpsing the Image

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Photoanthropocene: The decentered lens of colonial photography

Photoanthropocene: The decentered lens of colonial photography

Disaster, facial recognition technology, and the problem of the corpse

Crossing a Productive Melancholia in Artistic Work Based on Xerography

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