What We Talk about When We Talk about Photography
Until mid-April, the current blogger Aveek Sen will “open up the discussion on photography towards a realm of the promiscuous – a word I steal from the lexicon of sexuality to use in relation to the creative process. By the ‘creative process’, I do not mean simply the making and showing of photographs, but the entire web of relationships that connects looking, thinking, reading, listening, remembering and everyday life. I believe that photography is most richly nourished by its promiscuous liaisons with the other arts and with certain kinds of art/music-haunted experience. I will focus particularly on literature (especially fiction and poetry) and cinema, using specific works to build up a way of thinking about photography. Moving the discussion beyond the Barthes/Benjamin/Sontag trinity that dominates writing on photography, I want to use other works of art as starting points for reflection and debate, blurring the conventional distinction between theory and practice.”
Aveek Sen
Aveek Sen (*1965) is senior assistant editor (editorial pages) of The Telegraph, Calcutta. He studied English Literature at University College, Oxford, and was a lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. 2009 Infinity Award for writing on photography from the International Center of Photography, New York. He has written on the photographer Dayanita Singh (Dayanita Singh, 2011), and with her in House of Love (2011). He also writes on, and occasionally teaches, literature, the visual arts, cinema, music and development work involving children.