Photography and the Optical Unconscious
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen and Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, both also published by Duke University Press.
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of Mandela's Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming and Human Rights in Camera.
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen and Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, both also published by Duke University Press.
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of Mandela's Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming and Human Rights in Camera.
Mignon Nixon appraises a wide variety of representations of the psychoanalytic situation in her essay “On the Couch,” first published in the journal October in 2005. The essay both gathers and interrogates a suite of visual projects that have sought to make the clinical scene visible in film, photography, and conceptual art. In so doing, Nixon draws a link between the psychoanalytic and the visual frame. By focusing on the couch, Nixon offers a reconsideration of the notion of transference for both psychoanalytic theory and aesthetics.
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