With Rohit Goel
Ages 17+
In English

Delve into the controversies surrounding the role of photography in society. What is the significance of photography’s ‘shortest shadow’?

Since its origin in the nineteenth century, photography has carried a burden. Of all the arts, it casts the shortest shadow of reality, walking a tightrope between record and abstraction, imitation and change, repetition and difference. It is perhaps not surprising that the medium has provoked such diverse discussions. Susan Sontag characterises photography as a substitute form of satisfaction that desensitises us to reality, while David Campany defends ‘specific photographs’ as resources for deepening our sense of reality. Akram Zaatari, founder the Arab Image Foundation, seeks to let images ‘live’ as they take on new meanings over time, whereas Ariel Goldberg and Yazan Khalili call for the medium’s suspension in their manifesto, ‘We Stopped Taking Photos’, amidst the very real horrors of state violence and surveillance. 

 

In this discussion-based seminar, we will work through these seminal positions to reach a different argument: photography’s seeming ‘constraint’—its short shadow, edging in on what already exists—makes it a radical driver of modern art and thought. In this context, we will consider Francis Bacon’s refusal to paint ‘live’ models (direct reality), relying instead on photographs and other print materials as his sources; Walter Benjamin’s experience of ‘aura’ in Eugène Atget’s photographs of empty Parisian streets; Roland Barthes’s studium [historical and political meaning] and punctum [unintentional revelations] in the ‘family photograph’; G.G. de Clérambault’s 40,000 photographs of Moroccan drapery and the colonial fantasy they ‘ex-plane’; and Abbas Kiarostami’s singular cinema, a blending of narrative and documentary film.

What is it about the photograph’s ‘shortest shadow’ that drives this exceptional body of art and thought?

This course is free, and all materials are provided by Sharjah Art Foundation.

 

The Foundation is committed to making its programmes inclusive and accessible. You can arrange for any support needed through the registration form.

For more information, email learning@sharjahart.org, or call (06) 544 4113.

About Rohit Goel

Rohit Goel is Director/Professor at the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). His edited publications include Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph, 2023) and Lacan Contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury, 2019). He has taught theory and criticism at the University of Chicago; Sciences Po, Paris; and the American University of Beirut. A Fulbright IIE and CASA fellow, he pursued the study of Arabic in Syria and received Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon fellowships for PhD research on primary sources in Lebanon. He holds a BA from Harvard College and an MPhil from Cambridge, where he was Harvard’s Paul Williams Fellow at Emmanuel College.