Hear David Levi Strauss in this online conversation as we examine belief in the image. In his new book Photography and Belief, Strauss writes: “Visual images become more like testimony than like perception... Belief in images has become the test case for the social. If we do not find a way to believe what we see in images, we lose the ability to act socially.”

Focusing on the thoughts of John Berger, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, Strauss will reflect on the pre-photographic past and to contemporary moments to consider the influence of the camera on public opinion. How and why do we believe in the photographic image in the way we do?

Joining David Levi Strauss is photographer and curator Duncan Wooldridge. 

Details on how to access the event will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place. 

Biographies

David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (2003/2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (1999). To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Dilar Dirik, Michael Taussig and Peter Lamborn Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2016. Strauss was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003, and received the Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007. He is chair of the graduate program in art writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator, and the Course Director for Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Curatorial projects include Anti-Photography (2011), John Hilliard: Not Black and White (2014), and Moving The Image: Photography and its Actions (2019). He writes regularly for 1000 Words Magazine, and Foam, is the author of the forthcoming book Photography and the Future, published by SPBH Editions (May 2021).

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