Annual Invitational Lecture: Patricia M. Keller
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A. D. White House, Guerlac Room, Tompkins
The Annual Invitational Lecture of the Society for the Humanities is designed to give a Cornell audience a chance to hear one of our distinguished Cornell humanities faculty members who may frequently speak at other universities, but whom we seldom have the privilege of hearing. This year's Society for the Humanities Invitational Lecture, "Orpheus’s Light Table: notes on photography and grief," will be delivered by Patricia M. Keller (Associate Professor, Romance Studies, College of Arts & Sciences). How are photographs never static, dead objects but always dynamic, ongoing relations? This lecture is a meditation on the relationship between photography and grief. Organized across three distinct yet interlinking sections, the meditation begins with the history of photography, tracing the medium’s indebtedness to, and entanglements with, the logic and language of shadows. From this genealogy, the meditation turns to the figure of Orpheus, whose descent into the underworld, or realm of shadows, in order to rescue his lost love, and his failure to do so by looking back, uniquely position him as photographer-in-grief. Here, Orpheus’s “failure” is reimagined as an act of love, a photographic survival tactic to illuminate, rather than reverse, the experience of loss. The physical object of the light table is also a phenomenological one, and is understood here as the necessary apparatus for illumination. In the third part of this talk, the light table becomes the mediating device through which Orpheus transforms from seeker-of-shadows into guardian-of-light—a metamorphosis that I connect to personal ruminations on the act of looking back, through and with the inherited photographs in my own family archive. Photography’s well-rehearsed connections to death and afterlife serve as starting points, but the terrain this talk explores is comprised of critical questions around photography’s relationship to mourning, survival and love.