Event Date: 11 September 2013
The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London, W1F 7LW
Death and the Contemporary: Death, Aesthetics and Representation
Me and Dad, August 25th, 2009, from The Dad Project, Briony Campbell
‘Death and the Contemporary’ is a series of site-specific events organised by Dr Georgina Colby and Anthony Luvera that will take place across London between October 2012 and September 2013. Panel discussions with keynote philosophers, writers, visual artists, and theorists will provide an exciting interdisciplinary forum in which to consider issues surrounding the representation of death in contemporary culture. Audience members will have the opportunity to engage and contribute to these stimulating conversations with leading figures across the disciplines.
Death, Aesthetics and Representation will take place at The Photographers’ Gallery on Wednesday 11 September 2013 7pm. Speakers include Roger Luckhurst, Audrey Linkman, Timothy Secret and Briony Campbell.
Introduction by Anthony Luvera and Dr Georgina Colby:
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Audrey Linkman is an independent photo-historian who previously worked at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Open University. Her research into nineteenth century commercial portrait photography developed from her work in the 1970s and 1980s when, with the collaboration of many other people, she grew from scratch an archive of some 80,000 photographs copied from the family collections of local people. In 1985 she co-founded the Documentary Photography Archive in Manchester commissioning contemporary photographers to document aspects of everyday life. Death related images featured prominently in the family album and Linkman’s most recent publication Photography and Death (Reaktion, 2011) traces their significance, role and meaning within the context of changing attitudes to death from the Victorian period to the present day.
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Briony Campbell is a photographer based in London. In 2009 Briony graduated from the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography with distinction at London College of Communication. That year she made The Dad Project; the story of losing her dad to cancer. The process of making this work, as well as the public response to it, became a formative chapter for her personally and professionally. The Dad Project has been exhibited, published and awarded internationally. Briony’s work has been featured in publications such as The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Financial Times, El Mundo, Die Zeit and British Journal of Photography.
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Timothy Secret is a lecturer in philosophy at University of Essex. His work on mourning and eulogy was recently recognised by the AHRC and BBC Radio 3 when he was awarded the title of New Generation Thinker 2012, since which time he has made numerous appearances on national radio and at public philosophy and art events around the country. His first book The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning will be published in the coming months.
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Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of The Trauma Question and several books on the Gothic. His BFI Classic on The Shining appears in October 2013.
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Panel discussion and audience questions:
