Panel: Weaving the Feminist Photograph: Identity, Inclusion, and Instatement
Participants: Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Elizabeth Ferrer
Moderator: Claire Raymond
This panel places women, in all the complex iterations and intentions of that word, in photography’s history and practice. How can and how do women remember, photographically, themselves and each other? Abigail Solomon-Godeau interrogates the relationship between the imputation of narcissism with which women who look at themselves are charged and the ability of women photographers to change the photographic canon, its history and its future. Elizabeth Ferrer, deploying critical theory and aesthetic practice, inserts Latinx women photographers into the photographic canon from which they have been largely erased. In these reinsertions, of self-seeing, of diasporic, Indigenous, and Latinx identities rising, moving beyond coloniality’s regimes, feminist photography becomes itself.
This program is presented thanks to generous support from The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation.
About the Speaker
Abigail Solomon-Godeau is Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara and, since 2010, lives and works in Paris. Her essays on photography, eighteenth and nineteenth century visual art, feminism, and contemporary art have been widely anthologized and translated.
Elizabeth Ferrer is Vice President, Contemporary Art at BRIC, a nonprofit arts and media organization based in Brooklyn. She is also a curator and writer specializing in Latino and Mexican art and photography. Ferrer has curated major exhibitions of modern and contemporary art for numerous venues in the United States and Mexico, and has written and lectured extensively on topics related to her fields of interest.
Claire Raymond is the author of several books on feminist aesthetics, poetics, and critical race theory, including Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography (2021), The Photographic Uncanny (2019), and Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics (2017). She is a visiting research collaborator at Princeton University, and incoming faculty at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts at the University of Maine.
