Nour Annan: “The golden age is out of joint”
Tue, Mar 21, 2023
6:30 PM–8:00 PM
The James Gallery
Free and Open to All. Proof of Covid vaccination or a negative test is required.
Register here.
Writer and Photographer Nour Annan discusses her ongoing project, “The golden age is out of joint”
“The golden age is out of joint” reexamines the photographic archive through the processes that produce its historical meaning. Departing from the mis-reading of Lebanon’s so-called golden age and the bourgeois nostalgia that continues to resuscitate it, this talk presents another reading of the popular archive, searching for the pasts and presents that are left out of frame. Building on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, a revelatory image that is activated by present readers gazing upon the past, this reading presents the photograph as a dialectical image in an alternate temporality of permanent catastrophe. Through repositioning the golden archive against the purported progress of capitalism, “The golden age is out of joint” asks if and how photographs of the past can fuel our radical imaginations of the future.