Welcoming Remarks
David Freedberg (Columbia University)
Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia)

Introductory Remarks
Z.S. Strother (Columbia University)
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"African Photography: The Ethics of Looking and Collecting in the Age of Restitution"
Event date: Friday, November 11, 2022

Since the 1990s, exhibitions of African photographers such as Seydou Keïta have raised questions about the relationship of ownership to authorship, visibility to privacy. Concerns about the ethics of looking and collecting have grown more urgent with recent debates about the restitution of African cultural heritage.

This online symposium draws together scholars, artists, and curators who explore the ethics of working with photographs and methods to decolonize the medium, and its histories.

What rights do photographers have? In today's age of hypervisibility, can sitters claim their “right to opacity,” to use Édouard Glissant's term? What is the future of collecting and curating photographs that originate in family and colonial archives on the continent? Can viewers embody “the active struggle of looking with,” in Tina Campt’s words—rather than observe passively—and can this engender new ways of seeing?

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To see all videos from this event, click here:
   • African Photography: The Ethics of Lo...  

This event is part of The Italian Academy's International Observatory for Cultural Heritage [https://italianacademy.columbia.edu/c...].

Webpage for this event: https://italianacademy.columbia.edu/A...

Here above is the first of six videos of this full-day event.

Full program:

Welcoming Remarks
David Freedberg (Columbia University)
Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia)
Introductory Remarks
Z.S. Strother (Columbia University)

In Conversation / Artist's Talk
Lebohang Kganye (Witwatersrand University)
Steven Nelson (National Gallery of Art; UCLA)

Roundtable: Ethics of Collecting and Curating
Patricia Hayes (moderator, University of the Western Cape)
Osaisonor Godfrey Ekhator-Obogie (Institute for Benin Studies)
Candace Keller (Michigan State University)
Ingrid Masondo (Iziko South African National Gallery)

Ethics of Looking
John Peffer (Ramapo College of New Jersey), “Copyright, Privacy Rights, Human Rights and African Photography’s Distributed Personae”
Sandrine Colard (Rutgers University-Newark), “Another Substance of the Image: The (Auto-) Biographical Textures of African Photographs”
Giulia Paoletti (University of Virginia), “On Naming and Looking, Together”

Keynote Lecture
Temi Odumosu (University of Washington)
“Thick Description: On the possibilities for vibrant anti-colonial record-keeping”

Concluding Remarks
Steven Nelson (National Gallery of Art)

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Organizers: Z.S. Strother (Columbia University) and Giulia Paoletti (University of Virginia).

Co-sponsors: Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University; Department of Art, University of Virginia.