"Poor Image and Meta-Medium: Hércule Florence and the Invention of Photography in Brazil"
4:45 PM on Monday, November 6th, 2023
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract:
This lecture investigates the solitary development of a photographic technique by the French-Brazilian inventor Hércule Florence in Brazil circa 1833. Rather than securing Florence’s primacy within an international chronology of the technology’s invention, the lecture argues that Florence’s situatedness was constitutive, rather than incidental, to his conceptualization of the medium. Unlike for many of his European counterparts, Florence’s photography was primarily a communicative, rather than pictorial solution: a meta-container for coding place-specific experience into informational units capable of transferal and distribution. In this, his “photography” paradoxically anticipates contemporary digital technologies more so than the analog medium of his own time.
Speaker Biography
Irene V. Small is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art & Criticism in the Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, where she is associated with the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and a member of the Executive Committees of the Programs in Latin American Studies and Media & Modernity. Her work engages a variety of geopolitical formations and transnational contexts, with particular attention to art practices in Latin America, notably Brazil. She is the author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism (forthcoming from Zone Books, 2024).
