Photography and the Optical Unconscious

Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski, editors

Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche.Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction / Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski  1 1. Photography's Weimar-Era Proliferatino and Walter Benjamin's Optical Unconscious / Andrés Mario Zervigón  32 2. "A Hiding Place in Waking Dreams": David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, and Walter Benjamin's "Little History of Photography" / Shawn Michelle Smith  48 3. Freud: The Photographic Apparatus / Sarah Kofman  75 4. "To Adopt": Freud, Photography, and the Optical Unconscious / Jonathan Fardy  81 5. The Politics of Contemplation / Zoe Leonard and Elisabeth Lebovici  93 6. Freud, Saturn, and the Power of Hypnosis / Mary Bergstein  104 7. On the Couch / Mignon Nixon  134 8. Vision's Unseen: On Sovereignty, Race, and the Optical Unconscious / Mark Reinhardt  174 9. Sligo Heads / Kristan Horton  223 10. Developing Historical Negatives: The Colonial Photographic Archive as Optical Unconscious / Gabrielle Moser  229 11. The Purloined Image / Laura Wexler  264 12. The Vancouver Carts: A Brief Mémoire / Kelly Wood  281 13. Vietnamese Photography and the Look of Revolution / Thy Phu  286 14. Shooting in the Dark: A Note on the Photographic Imagination / Sharon Sliwinski  321 15. Slow / Terri Kapsalis  339 Contributors  363 Index  367