"Photography By Other Means" lecture by Kaja Silverman, Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film,
University of California, Berkeley

SACHS FORUM EVENT
Thurs. 2/28/07, 5:30pm @ Institute of Contemporary Art

Renowned cultural critic Kaja Silverman will explore the work of Gerhard Richter, who does not view the photographs with which he works as "cultural constructions," as we have become habituated to doing. They constitute, rather, "solicitations from the past, blasted out of the continuum of time;" they "drop" on his "doormat," like "nature." In her talk, Kaja Silverman will explore how Richter responded to two such solicitations: one embodied by a group of concentration camp photographs, and the other instantiated by a series of photographs documenting the arrest, imprisonment and deaths of three members of the German terrorist group, the RAF. Richter found the concentration camp photographs—which he published side by side with some pornographic photographs in the Atlas—to be “unpaintable.” Although for eleven years he feared that the same might be true of the RAF photographs, he ultimately succeeded in painting them.

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