Kaja Silverman, “The Miracle of Analogy”

The Cinema Studies Insitute at U of T recently organized four nights of lectures by art historian and critic Kaja Silverman on photography, film and (to a certain extent) affect. I only made it to the first lecture, called “The Miracle of Analogy,” but it filled the criteria of what constitutes my favourite kind of lecture: short, pithy, engaging and delivered by someone who not only seems genuinely interested in the topic, but who also seems like a normal human being with a sense of humour.

“The Miracle of Analogy” was formatted somewhat like a crash course in the history of the invention and development of photography, but problematized the now-commonly held assumption that the photographer takes on an active and controlling role when making images. Silverman pointed out that, in the 19th century especially, photography was considered “the pencil of nature”: a form of image making that happened because of the natural properties of light, and a process that the photographer had little to no control over, often seeing the results of their work only after the photo had been developed into a positive print.

Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 1, 1988
© Gerhard Richter/Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

She then, very smartly, tied this rhetoric of natural photo-making to more contemporary forms of art-making that call up this same trope. Either artists who work directly from photographic images, like Gerhard Richter, or who work more tangentially with photographs by making drawings based on the idea of creating a photograph. The idea of imbuing these photographic images with intensive forms of artistic labour was particularly interesting, as was her use of Jeff Wall’s idea of “liquid intelligence” – something outlined in his very confusing essay of the same name that argues there are two aspects to creating a photograph: dry, mechanical intelligence (framing the image, controlling the light, taking the photo), and liquid, creative intelligence (both using literal liquids in the development process and having the more slippery knowledge of when a photo is “finished” developing or is complete).

There was more to it than just this, but I think I’d butcher it if I continued to try and summarize it. In any case, it was a great lecture and I’m hoping someone has the other three in audio or video recordings so I can catch up on what I missed the following nights.

Tonight, Cait and I are off to The Massey Lectures, this year featuring Margaret Atwood’s analysis of the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of debt. We went last year, to see Alberto Manguel, and everyone in the audience fell asleep. Like 80% of people there. Fingers crossed that Peggy will be more entertaining.