Focusing on critical theories and ideas that shape photographic practice, this workshop investigates the (relatively) recent turn to abstraction in photography. Since its invention in 1839, photography has been defined by its mimetic function: it cannot help but represent something else. It seems impossible for us to analyze or even “see” a photograph without seeing the thing or person it represents. By surveying works by contemporary artists that test the limits of figuration in photography, and reading texts that propose an alternate role for photography outside of representation, this workshop considers the idea of abstraction in contemporary photography. In so doing, it asks us to slow down and to re-examine the possibilities of analogue photography that we may have missed in our rush to digitization, and to think about the materiality of photography by evacuating the subject from the photograph’s representational function.Participants are encouraged to bring work in progress on this topic.
Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and independent curator based in Toronto. As a curator, she has organized exhibitions for Access Gallery, Gallery TPW, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries, Vtape and Gallery 44 (forthcoming in May 2019). Her writing appears in venues including Artforum, Art in America, Canadian Art, Fillip, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, Prefix Photo and the edited volumes Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Duke UP, 2017) and Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made (Routledge 2017). She is the author of the book, Projecting Citizenship: photography and belonging in the British Empire (Penn State UP, 2019). Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, Ryerson Image Centre, the University of British Columbia and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2017. A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, she holds a PhD from the art history and visual culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada and is an Assistant Professor in art history at OCAD University.
