File spoon-archives/spoon-announcements.archive/spoon-announcements_2001/spoon-announcements.0104, message 5


From: "Kimberly Lamm" <fus31-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: SPOON-ANN: Modernist Experimentation and Photographic (Anti)Portraiture
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 17:53:30 -0000


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Modernist Experimentation and Photographic (Anti) Portraiture

Call for papers for proposed panel at the Modernist Studies Association 
conference, Rice University, Houston (October 12-16, 2001).

	This prospective panel seeks papers that explore modernist photographic 
portraits, particularly those that are constructed self-reflexively, that 
experiment with the possibilities of the medium, and that begin to 
experiment with, distort, or eliminate representations of human likeness. 
Papers should situate images, figures, practices, and theories in both 
historic and discursive contexts, and should attempt to speculate about 
photography^Òs particular role within modernism and modernity.
	Since this panel is not organized around schools of modern photography 
(Bauhaus, Surrealism, Dadaism, American Pictorialism) but the photographic 
portrait as a genre, papers might examine images produced by the following 
figures: Ilse Bing, Alvin Langdon Coburn (his vortographs of Ezra Pound 
might be pertinent), Claude Cahun, F. Holland Day, Marcel Duchamp, Max 
Ernst, Florence Henri, Gertrude Kasebier, Andre Kertesz, Lee Miller, Dora 
Maar, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred 
Steiglitz, and Clarence White.(though this list is by no means exhaustive)
Papers might explore the following themes and questions:
	Photography is often theorized as an indexical practice (most prominently 
by Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss); do modernist portrait photographs 
provide any new evidence of a modernist conception of the subject^Òs physical 
actuality or nature?
	Since portraiture and biography generically intersect, what can these 
portraits tell us about modernist biographical and autobiographical practice 
and the construction of modernist identity? (or vice-versa) Can modernist 
portrait photographs contribute to theorizations of modernist life-writing?
What do modernist photographic portraits reveal about modernist conceptions 
of celebrity, community, family, and memory?
Since photography was described and theorized as a "The Pencil of Nature" by 
Henry Fox Talbot, the author of the first photographically illustrated book, 
what kind of light does the modernist portrait shed on coincident literary 
practices, particularly those that dissolve and distort the intact 
individual subject or render the subject passive? (Mediumistic or automatic 
writing for example)
What can modernist photographic portraits reveal about the fluidity and/or 
fixity of raced and gendered positions, the space of imaginative invention 
between the subject and the image, intersubjectivity, and modernist 
collaboraton?

Please send 300 word abstracts and a brief biographical statement to the 
following e-mail address by May 12th. (The panel proposal deadline is May 
30th) klamm-AT-u.washington.edu or fus31-AT-hotmail.com All submissions will be 
considered. Questions and inquiries welcome.






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