“The Lives of Images” Symposium Series

In late August 2021, Aperture and the International Center of Photography will convene a symposium to take up some key issues addressed in the first two volumes of The Lives of Images: An Aperture Reader Series, edited by artist and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. The Lives of Images explores the roles, histories, and contemporary uses of reproducible images in relation to specific grounding themes. To speak of the reproducible image in this moment is to address not only photographs, film, and videos, but screen prints and billboards; GIFs, memes, and emojis—a wide array of technically mediated scripto-visual forms that together constitute and remake both our visual landscape and image economies. The Lives of Images aims to gather together recent and contemporary scholarship that helps to animate and inform a rich dialogue on the role of the image in contemporary culture. Both the series and the symposium will engage theorists, scholars, and artists whose practices move fluidly between a focus on still and moving images. Symposium discussions will range across an array of uses of reproducible images that include, but regularly extend beyond, traditional fine art.

This symposium will be the first in a series, hosted by ICP in partnership with Aperture, of public group discussions via Zoom. A second symposium is planned for late November 2021. Each symposium will explore a specific set of contributions and themes arising from one of the first three volumes of the series: Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation (Vol. 1, September 2021); Analogy, Attunement, and Attention (Vol. 2, November 2021); and Archives, Histories, and Memory (Vol. 3, Spring 2022). In each session, Wolukau-Wanambwa and David Campany, managing director of programs at ICP, will serve as interlocutors for two invited guests whose work is either published or discussed in the series. The talks aim to delve in greater depth into these thinkers’ and artists’ contributions, and to provide a space for discussion as to their resonances in artistic practice and social life more broadly.

Vol. 1: Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation
August 31–September 2, 2021
1:00–2:30 p.m. EDT

Tuesday, August 31
Paul Pfeiffer and Jodi Dean on Image Circulation, Capital, and Racial Difference

Wednesday, September 1
Erika Balsom and Aria Dean on Reproducibility, Copyright, and Appropriation

Thursday, September 2
Lucas Blalock and Vivian Sobchack on Medium, Materiality, and Attention