Tuesday 29 November 2016 – Lunchtime seminar with Sonya Robinson (Photography, SHU)

Title: The Refusal of the Image
Speaker: Sonya Robinson (Photography, SHU)

Sonya is an academic, artist and writer. She is currently Senior Lecturer MArt/BA (Hons) Photography, Sheffield Hallam University.

 

 

 

 

“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does
psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses“

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

 

In Understanding Trauma, A Psychoanalytic Approach Caroline Garland in the sub-section ‘Freud and Trauma’ refers to Freud’s proposition ‘psychical trauma – or more precisely the memory of the trauma – acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent which is still at work…’ (1998, p. 13) The defensive forces of repression initiate a programme of re-play in an attempt to abreact the trauma, to bring it impossibly into signification, into representation. As an adopted twin I am driven to rewrite a history without beginning, to endlessly make and re-make images in an attempt to find an image, an image from childhood, the first image. On this slate, this tabula rasa all images slide and disappear, it is flashback without image – a screen of invisibility comprehensible only as ‘affect’.

1.00PM – 2.00PM
TUESDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2016
CANTOR 9103

See here for details of other seminars in the series.

All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email C3RI Administrator to arrange entry.