Friday, April 14, 12 pm PST
Virtual Event
$15 Non-Members; $10 Members
Additional donations of $10, $25, $50, $100 or are appreciated.
Join us for conversations with notable scholars about powerful and profound image-making that have impacted our world and changed our lives.
Revitalizing the social history of art, John Tagg’s writing on the histories of photography transformed the understanding of the field’s emergence, function and presence in Britain and the US, inspiring generations of artists, writers and scholars. In honor of his recent retirement and the launch of the exhibition Rhetorics of Documentary at Binghamton University, join him in conversation with art historian and the exhibition’s curator, Tom McDonough and LACP’s Executive Director, Rotem Rozental.
Topics explored:
• Instrumental photography in the use of governmental systems.
• Photographic archives.
• Is there such a thing as documentary photography?
• The Burden of Representation and the political consequences of photography.
John Tagg looks at forms of photographic practice that were not previously part of the History of Photography and writes about photography not as a self-contained medium but as a complex apparatus whose social effects and effects of meaning are multiple and diverse. His interests extend to the ways in which we construct histories of cultural technologies and visual regimes and to the range of theoretical debates that, since the 1970s, have transformed the business of art history. Born in the North-East of England, Tagg now lives and works in Upstate New York where he is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Art History and Bartle Professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His publications, which have been translated into more than seventeen languages, include The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988), Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (1992) and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (2009).
Tom McDonough is an art historian and writer based in upstate New York. He is widely known for his writings on the Situationist International and on a broad range of contemporary art and artists. He serves as a contributing editor at the photographic quarterly OSMOS, and has recently contributed two essays to Christopher Williams’s publication Stage Play (2021). He is currently Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
The event will be moderated by Rotem Rozental, Ph.D., LACP’s Executive Director.
