Margaret Iversen

Margaret Iversen

Margaret Iversen is Professor of Art History at the University of Essex. Her present research concerns photography and contemporary art. With Diarmuid Costello of the Philosophy Department, University of Warwick she directed of the AHRC project, Aesthetics after Photography (2007-2010). Other publications include a monograph on the artist Mary Kelly and an essay on the American painter Edward Hopper which appears in the catalogue of the 2004 Tate Modern exhibition of his work. She is currently writing a book on photography and art since the Sixties.

Photography, Trace and Trauma
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
16:00-18:00 at Senate House 264
Sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics

There is an important strand of photography theory and practice that associates the medium with trauma. The automaticity of the process, the wide open camera lens and the light sensitivity of film that records contingent details unnoticed by the operator, all contribute to making photography a physical analogy of the subject of trauma. My lecture is concerned with the history of critical writing that has emphasized this aspect of the medium. It also aims to set the relevant photography in the context of art in other media, especially those sculptural forms that can readily be understood as presenting or simulating a trace or residue of a traumatic event.

Details of Margaret Iversen’s publications are available here, on her departmental website.