Tuesday 22 April 2025, 1-2pm, Old Union Diner, 79 North Street
The domestic plays a key role in photographic histories and contemporary photographic art practice. In this talk, I examine the domestic as an unstable zone of gestures, traces, things, and objects, that is shaped by social and material relations within and beyond home spaces. By examining a diverse range of photographic art, including work by Elina Brotherus, Rinko Kawauchi, Zoe Leonard, and Dayanita Singh, I argue that photography is uniquely placed to recalibrate ways of thinking about the domestic zone and its connection to the self and self-representation. I’ll be discussing domestic time and the diaristic, domestic relationality and slow portraiture, and domestic matter and the still life to show how these photographic artists use everyday objects, spaces and experience to unsettle familiar genres.
Jane Simon teaches and researches photography studies and film studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She has an ongoing interest in the telling of life stories through photography, and expanded approaches to self-representation. Her recent book The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography focuses on how photography refigures understandings of autobiography, domestic space, and interiority. She recently co-edited a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on the topic of ‘Home’ and recent writing has been published in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Trans-Asia Photography Review, and Women’s History Review. Jane has been a visiting fellow at the Institute of Comparative Culture (Sophia University, Tokyo) and was a Visiting Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow at the European Centre for Photographic Research (University of Wales, Newport).
Jane is a Visiting Research affiliated to the School of Art History and the St Andrews Centre for Contemporary Art in April 2025
All welcome!