Keynote: Returning the Gaze. Portraits to Self-Portraits
Speaker: Deborah Willis
This lecture presents a select group of women photographers of the African diaspora working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose works critically analyze and locate the Black female body in contemporary art and in historical images in order to frame new identities. Drawing from her work as a photographer and that of other women artists, Deborah Willis addresses the relationship of the camera to the self and asks how photography, in its capacity to return the gaze, allows us to understand and alter identity, instating social and aesthetic voice to diasporic women.
Women photographers have been forced to look at themselves, their intimate spaces and environments, and to consider multiple narratives of desire, complacency, pleasure, and loss. The self-portraiture genre encompasses several interweaving stories examining identity, representation, selfhood, memory, fear, and the environment. Various poses expose moments of vulnerability and a desire to seek the idealized self. The impressive range of images Willis examines overturns the notion of self-portraits as mirrored reflections of the body—they become more reflexive as each photographer engages with the issues of their time. They make an imagined existence legible, establish a ‘realized’ presence, and transform moments of the past.
About the Speaker
Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an artist, author, and curator, Willis’s art and pioneering research has focused on cultural histories envisioning the Black body, women, and gender.
