Joanna Zylinska - "Photography after Extinction"
Channel: Center for 21st Century Studies
Date: 2015-05-07

Dr. Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London) at the Center for 21st Century Studies "After Extinction" Conference, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. May 1, 2015.

“Photography after Extinction”
In this talk I will consider what it would mean to envisage the world ‘after extinction’: not at a time when various species, including the one we are narcissistically most invested in – ourselves – have disappeared, but rather at a time when extinction has entered the conceptual and visual horizon of the majority of global citizens. Specifically, I will take the horizon of extinction as a reference point against which I will think the ontology of photography and its agency: what photography can do with and to the world, what it can cast light on, and what the role of this light (or, more broadly, light as such seen through the photographic lens) is in approaching questions of life and death on a planetary scale. Considering the history of photography as part of the broader nature-cultural history of our planet, I will trace parallels between photography and fossils, and read photography as a light-induced process of fossilisation occurring across different media. Seen from this perspective, photography will be presented as containing an actual material record of life (rather than just its memory trace). But I will also go back to photography’s original embracing of the natural light emanating from the sun to explore the extent to which photographic practice can tell us something about energy sources, and about our relation to the star that nourishes our planet. I will do this via an engagement with photographers who have consciously adopted the horizon of extinction as their workspace – from the nineteenth century geologist-photographer William Jerome Harrison through to contemporary artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto. I will also look at practices in which the work of the sun has been taken on as both a topic and a medium, including the post-digital practice of Penelope Umbrico. The talk will end with a brief presentation of my own artwork, The Anthropocene: A Local History Project.