Event

Alix Beeston

Image Encounters and the Feminism of Photography

Is photography a feminist medium—or can it be? What modes of engagement and writing does a feminist account(ing) of the medium require? These are the overarching questions of a new book project, tentatively titled Image Encounters: Photography and the Feminist Art of Being Seen, which is composed of interlinked critical–creative microessays that contemplate specific images of women and girls from across photography’s histories. In this paper, Alix Beeston introduces this project and reflects on the methodological and personal challenges of embracing what she theorizes, namely the photograph as an object that entangles, a site of encounter: of self and other, viewer and viewed; of past and present, here and elsewhere; of thought and feeling, observation and imagination. In these image encounters, Beeston argues, there is a feminist energy which may turn seeing and being seen into a transgressive, liberatory art—and which also generates new conceptions of the scholar’s imbrication with the images they study as well as of the forms and aims of scholarly argumentation. 

Alix Beeston is a Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff University. Her work is interdisciplinary in scope and feminist in approach, focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century literature and visual culture, especially in the United States. She is the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford University Press, 2018, paperback 2023) and the coeditor, with Stefan Solomon, of Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, June 2023). She also founded the Visualities forum at Modernism/modernity Print Plus, which she now coedits with Pardis Dabashi. Her next book, a richly illustrated, critical–creative account of women in photography, is under contract with MIT Press.