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  PATRICIA KELLER

Romance Studies

Curriculum Vitae

  RESEARCH PROJECT

My book project, Photography’s Wound,focuses on variations of documentary photography as a genre and poses the following key question: in what ways does documenting crisis magnify and intensify risk, understood both in terms of photographic content and the interpretive experience of viewing? Weaving together notions of photographic temporality and affect with questions concerning the medium’s relationship to truth and representation, my research project juxtaposes Roland Barthes’s contention that photography wounds our sight with David Levi Strauss’s urgent call to reinvest the photographic image with that fragile, indeed vulnerable, component its most lacks today—“believability.” In his remarkable essay “Photography and Belief,” Strauss tells us that “the word belief derives from the Anglo-Saxon word geliefan, meaning ‘to hold dear’” and involves “the assent of the mind to a statement, or to the truth of a fact beyond observation, on the testimony of another.” That photography should go beyond the observable is crucial to understanding its potential political and philosophical import, as it reminds us that what it produces is not only a record or document but also, and perhaps most importantly, a condition for witnessing and believing so critical in an image-saturated technological age of ever-increasing doubt, suspicion, surveillance and terror.

In examining photography’s ability to both wound and bear witness, this project also addresses how specific images of disaster and aftermath—what I call the “photography of crisis”—move beyond merely cataloguing historical events by instigating belief and shaping consciousness. Departing from classical theories that have commonly characterized the medium as a form of arrest or freezing time, this project undertakes a theoretical analysis of the notion of “capture,” a term that accentuates photography’s ability to structure belief and call for action, its capacity to both expose and frame political awareness and responsibility. How might capture, conventionally understood in the photographic context as seizing, also constitute a structure of “holding dear,” of caring and cherishing? How could we think of the photographic image not as something that takes but rather in terms of giving—that is, relating to it in terms of what it gives or offers us to see? At stake in this investigation is a shift away from defining photography by its technological drive to conquer the world through appearances in favor of a more intimate understanding of the way it connects us to the world.
  BIO

Patty Keller is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of modern and contemporary Spanish cultural studies, with an emphasis on visual culture and the intersections between literary, filmic and photographic texts. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript titled Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting, which examines the relationship between ideology, spectrality, and visual culture in fascist and post-fascist Spain. Her work on Spanish photography and cinema includes scholarly articles published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Hispanic Research Journal and Hispanic Issues. She is beginning research for her second book project—Photography’s Wound—a study that explores structures of belief, the ethics of seeing, and figurations of the wound in contemporary Spanish photography. Her additional research interests are fascist technologies and spectacles, new wave cinemas, landscape theory, critical theory, film theory, and philosophical and political approaches to reading photography.

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