We have a great talk on campus this Friday!
Friday, 19th October 2012 4-5:30PM
Photography, Plugged and Unplugged
Dominic McIver Lopes
Haldeman 041, with reception to follow
From the moment of its invention, photography has been viewed as the contrary of drawing, with profound consequences for the epistemology and aesthetics of photography. When the invention of digital photography was seen to challenge the traditional view of photography, the response was to insist that digital photography breaks radically from analogue photography and to predict that it would acquire a distinct epistemic and aesthetic profile. In fact, however, this dialectic rests on a false picture of the nature of photography (and of drawing too). A new theory of photography that downplays the analogue-digital distinction makes better sense of how we have used and continue to use photographs as evidence and as materials for art. It also suggests how to think about the true impact of digital technology on the art of photography.
Sponsored by Digital Humanities, Studio Art, and Philosophy
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Dominic McIver Lopes
Distinguished University Scholar + Professor of Philosophy, UBC lopes.mentalpaint.net
Dominic Lopes is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He works mainly in aesthetics and is a member of the UBC aesthetics group. His research focuses on pictorial representation and perception; the aesthetic and epistemic value of pictures, including scientific images; theories of art and its value; the ontology of art; and computer art and new art forms. He is working on a pair of books entitled Beyond Art and Four Arts of Photography and has just co-edited (with Diarmuid Costello) a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on the media of photography.
Paloma Atencia-Linares recently interviewed him on the topic of “Pictures, Bytes and Values” for the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics.
Lopes is Vice-President of the American Society for Aesthetics (and will be president in 2013-15). He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the British Society of Aesthetics, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division, a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and co-editor (with Berys Gaut) of Wiley-Blackwell’s New Directions in Aesthetics book series. He served for three years as an Associate Dean in the UBC Faculty of Arts.
He has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center, Distinguished Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, and Leverhulme Visiting Research Professor in Aesthetics at the University of Warwick, in addition to holding visiting positions at Ritsumeikan University, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Miami. He has won two Indiana University Teaching Excellence Awards, a Philosophical Quarterly Essay Prize, the American Society for Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize, and a Killam Research Prize.