Touching Feeling with C.P. Cavafy and Duane Michals (original) (raw)

Cranny-Francis, Anne (2011) 'The art of touch: a photo-essay'

Social Semiotics, Vol.21, No.4, 591-608, 2011

This photo-essay explores artworks and technology that deploy touch  either literally or virtually  in order to interrogate the nature of contemporary being and meaning. They do this by engaging viewers in a virtual deconstruction of their own embodied being  their positioning in space/time; their incorporation of values, beliefs and attitudes articulated by affective practices that engage them bodily; and their reconstitution within a technological assemblage that includes their own bodies and the technologies they use in everyday life. Keywords: touch; tactile; contact; body; embodiment; texture; affect; sound; space; connection; articulation; technology

Photography between Affective Turn and Affective Structure

Filozofski vestnik, 2020

The affective turn in photography theory takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s move from semiology to affective phenomenology in Camera Lucida. This article, however, considers the way affective phenomenology is itself grounded in the semiological structure of photography. It looks at how, before Camera Lucida was even written, Thierry de Duve had already discussed the affective implications of Barthes’s understanding of photography’s indexical nature. The article then proceeds to rethink the structural affectivity of photography beyond Barthes’s and de Duve’s emphasis on a direct relation between indexicality and loss. Reconsidering photography through Jacques Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime of art, the article rather puts emphasis on the indeterminacy of photography, which results from the way the camera captures and isolates a spatio-temporal fragment. Shifting the focus from indexicality to indeterminacy sheds a different light on the loss implied by the structure of photography, parallel to how Freud understood the difference between mourning and melancholy.

Judith Scott: Capturing the Texture of Sensation

TEXTILE, 2021

This paper considers a photograph by Leon A. Borensztein of the artist Judith Scott, taken in the Creative Growth Arts Center in California in 1997. It explores notions of affect and the mobilization of feeling on the part of the artist and artwork, photographer and viewer, with consideration of the way in which textile associations are central to the affective passage of transmission and encounter. A textile-skin interface between the haptic and the scopic is seen to characterize both the performative arena of the subject matter and the intricacy of the photograph’s surface. Scott’s textile-rich practices as an artist and her biographical circumstances are considered as intrinsic to the affective potency of the image. Didier Anzieu’s notion of the skin envelope further enriches analysis of the bond that is established within the performative arena of the image and the sensations that are embodied in the viewer’s response.

'Touching' the Viewer

Ann Hamilton’s installation ONEEVERYONE Dell Medical School, U. Texas at Austin Each of the photographic image shows the body of an individual; the person recognizable but more or less indistinct, the body blurred except for some aspect or part of it that stands out, emerging from the out-of-focus background as if delicately highlighted. This emergence out of the blur suggests an action by the individual, a movement of the part of their body in question towards us, a gesture that attracts or solicits our attention.