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
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of
Vision’s Unseen: On Sovereignty, Race, and the Optical Unconscious
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Published:May 2017
This chapter investigates Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, concentrating on photography but taking up a variety of representations and visual practices. Key examples range from the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan through daguerreotypes of enslaved persons to digital photography’s role in audience interactions with Kara Walker’s 2014 public installation, A Subtlety. The cases considered underscore how unconscious impulses or desires guide visual perception and how visual details that are not noted consciously may nevertheless register affectively. Making novel sense of Benjamin’s term, the chapter uses it to show how the visual construction of race and sovereignty are intertwined in ways involving not only what affect theorists call side perceptions but also the unconscious dynamics charted by Freud.
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