The University of Wisconsin-Madison
VISUAL CULTURE CLUSTER
Judith Halberstam Guest Lecture
Ceremonies of Our Present: Photography and Subcultural Lives
Abstract: “Photographs furnish evidence,”
writes Susan Sontag in On Photography. She continues: “Something we hear
about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it”
(5). The photograph promises proof, visual evidence, veracity. It captures what
seems real even as the scene that it records fades from view; it offers, says
Sontag, “a neat slice of time” (117). The photographs and other
images that I want to look at today furnish evidence of lost subcultures even
as they verify that the queer subculture, and the eccentric bodies that composed
it, did exist and exist again now in new and different forms. Some of the artists
I consider here contemplate the transgender body as otherness itself, as representative
of a shadow world subtending and propping up the so-called real world; others
lavish regard upon what Del LaGrace Volcano calls the “sublime mutations”
of queerness and the twists and turns of the journey of queerness into and out
of visibility. Other artists create a visual language of ambiguity, instability,
inauthenticity and mutability in order to describe and invent postmodern forms
of subjectivity.
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