Juni 2023

*Die Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt.*

Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus, Syria, who emigrated to Sweden in 2008 and now lives in Berlin. He published four poetry collections in Arabic, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. Ghayath Almadhoun collaborated with other poets and artists, and his poetry has been part of the work of U.S. artist Jenny Holzer, German musician Blixa Bargeld, and others. His latest collection Adrenalin, published in English by Action Books 2017, was among the SPD Poetry Bestsellers in the U.S. and nominated for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. His selected poems Ein Raubtier namens Mittelmeer ("Predator called the Mediterranean") ranked top of the Litprom-Bestenliste 2018 of best books translated into German.

*Diese Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt.*

For a long time, Californian landscape photography and U.S. environmentalism have been inextricably related in the public imagination. The monumental vistas of Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and many others have suggested that aesthetically-pleasing prints would fuel environmental awareness. Yet, California’s long history of mineral extraction, railroad enterprise, and violent displacement of Indigenous populations — and their connection to the photographic medium — complicates these wishful representations. Did popular photography, such as the practices of the California Camera Club, leave an ecological imprint on the land that is tangible to this day? 2023 Thomas Mann Fellow Carolin Görgen explores these and other questions around the political ecologies of the Western camera. Interesting overlaps and synergies arise in connection with the work of the American Studies scholar Heike Paul, who was a 2022 Fellow at the Thomas Mann House. Paul, whose research deals intensively with film, offers fascinating insights into ideas of Western frontiers and myth-building: The American West has long been the site of Western films and melodramas: Melodramas of introspection, of encounter, conflict and triumph, unfold against a grandiose landscape reinforcing notions of good and evil and, above all, “Americanness.” Traditional cinematic melodramas of tormented manhood have recently given way to more complex and nuanced forms of identity politics in films such as Power of the Dog (2021) and television series such as Godless (2017). Do these revisionist new types of 'anti-Westerns' change how we politically and aesthetically perceive the American West as an affective landscape? Jordan Reznick, a photographer and art historian who focuses on the interrelations between photography, race, transgender studies, and settler colonialism, will join the conversation. In their work, Reznick’s trans feminist lens replaces the objective facticity of the photograph with the truth of affect and the honesty of the relationship between subject, photographer, and viewer. Reznick’s series of landscape photography, Seeing Settler Seeing (in progress), reinterprets survey photographs of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, in which water stolen from the Indigenous Owens Valley Paiute land flows to Los Angeles.

Against the backdrop of the Thomas Mann House annual topic on the relationship between arts and politics, the three speakers will engage in a conversation about past and present implications of visual cultures of the American West, drawing on their various disciplinary backgrounds. The conversation will be moderated by Erin Cooney.

Carolin Görgen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Sorbonne Université, Paris. After studying American Studies and Art History in the Netherlands, the US, and France, she obtained her PhD from the University Paris-Diderot and the Ecole du Louvre in 2018. Her research focuses on the photographic history of California and the American West. Her work has received support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Huntington Library, and the Amon Carter Museum. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Photographica. Among many other publications, Görgen is the author of the 2021 article “Californian Women Photographers in the U.S. Archival Landscape: Toward a More Inclusive History of American Photography.” She is a 2023 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Heike Paul is Professor of American Studies, with a focus on North American literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her research interests in the field of a culturally hermeneutically oriented American Studies deal, among other things, with cultural patterns of community formation in the United States. In 2018, she was awarded the Leibniz Prize. Paul is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and director of the Bavarian American Academy, in which she is deeply committed to transatlantic networking. Her publications include American Civil Sentimentalism (2021), The Myths That Made America (2014), and, most recently, the Lexicon of Global Melodrama (2022).

Jordan Reznick is a photo historian and photographer as well as a GRI/NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. They will join Grinnell College as an Assistant Professor of American Studies in the fall. Their current research project describes how Indigenous ecological science shaped nineteenth-century landscape photographs in California. Reznick’s publications include “Through the Guillotine Mirror: Claude Cahun’s Photographic Theory of Trans against the Void” in Art Journal (2022) and “Indigenous Space: Hodinöhsö:ni’ Sky World and the Territories of American Art” forthcoming in American Art (2023).

Erin Cooney is a visual artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her video, installation, and performance work investigates point of view and its role in determining the kind of worlds we experience and build. Erin is a Lecturer in UCLA’s Design Media Arts Department and is an Affiliated Faculty to UCLA’s Counterforce Lab, which uses art and design to engage with ecological crisis and its ties to environmental injustice. Erin received a BA in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, studied Graphic Design at Art Center College of Design, and received an MFA from UCLA in Design Media Arts.

*Diese Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt.*

Im vergangenen Jahrhundert haben kalifornische Fotograf:innen in unserer Vorstellung als umweltbewusste Akteur:innen existiert, deren majestätische Darstellungen der westlichen Landschaft dazu beigetragen haben, das fragile Ökosystem des Staates zu erhalten und zu schützen. Carolin Görgen untersucht in ihrem Vortrag die Arbeiten des größten Kameraclubs in den USA des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts - des California Camera Club mit Sitz in San Francisco - und hinterfragt die gängige Darstellung von Künstler:innen, die den Westen in einem scheinbar wohlwollenden Klima erforschten. Sie lenkt die Aufmerksamkeit auf die ökologischen Auswirkungen der fotografischen Praxis in Kalifornien um 1900, indem sie die Spannungen zwischen ästhetisch ansprechenden Landschaftsbildern und ihrem materiellen Nachleben nachzeichnet.

Anhand einer Vielzahl von fotografischen Objekten und Manuskripten, von denen sich viele in der Huntington Library befinden, wird sie untersuchen, wie die scheinbar bewahrende Agenda des Clubs mit der imperialistischen Expansion, der Enteignung der Ureinwohner und der oft gewalttätigen Umgestaltung des Landes verwoben war. Im Dialog mit neueren ökokritischen Forschungen wird die Frage gestellt, inwieweit das vorherrschende Verständnis der Fotograf:innen von der westlichen Umwelt direkt mit dem sozialen Gefüge des Clubs und den seit langem bestehenden Vorstellungen von der kalifornischen Fotografie als inhärent umweltbewusst verbunden war.

Die Veranstaltung ist öffentlich zugänglich. Eine Reservierung ist nicht erforderlich.

Carolin Görgen ist Associate Professor für Amerikanistik an der Sorbonne Université, Paris. Nach dem Studium der Amerikanistik und Kunstgeschichte in den Niederlanden, USA und Frankreich promovierte sie 2018 an der Universität Paris-Diderot und der Ecole du Louvre. Ihre Forschungen beschäftigen sich mit der Fotogeschichte Kaliforniens und des amerikanischen Westens. Ihre Arbeit wurde von der Terra Foundation for American Art, der Beinecke Library in Yale, der Huntington Library und dem Amon Carter Museum unterstützt. Darüber hinaus ist sie Redaktionsmitglied der Fachzeitschrift Photographica. Neben vielen anderen Publikationen ist Görgen Autorin des 2021 erschienenen Artikels "Californian Women Photographers in the U.S. Archival Landscape: Toward a More Inclusive History of American Photography". Sie ist 2023 Fellow am Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles.