Lecture by Antonio Monegal: The Politics of Recycling War Photography into Art

Speaker(s): Antonio Monegal

Presented by the Iberian Studies Program and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

Photographs of war and of the disasters that come with or after war (refugees, famine, war crimes, genocides, ruins, etc) are among the most circulated in the international media and constitute one of the most reused archives, mainly because some of those images become the primary iconographic representation that identifies a specific historical event. There are multiple modes of circulation, but this lecture will focus exclusively on the transposition of war photography into art and the ethical, ideological, critical or propagandistic objectives that motivate it, as well as the effects generated by this displacement.

Antonio Monegal is professor of literary theory and comparative literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona since 1994. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1989, taught at Cornell University until his return to Spain, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Chicago. Among other publications, he is the author of Luis Buñuel de la literatura al cine (Anthropos, 1993) and En los límites de la diferencia: Poesía e imagen en las vanguardias hispánicas (Tecnos, 1998). He has edited  Literatura y pintura (Arco Libros, 2000), En Guerra (CCCB, 2004), Política y (po)ética de las imágenes de guerra (Paidós, 2007), and García Lorca’s Viaje a la luna (Pre-Textos, 1994) andEl público y El sueño de la vida (Alianza, 2000). His current research focuses on the politics of culture and on the representation of wars in literature and the visual arts. In 2004 he co-curated with Francesc Torres and José María Ridao an exhibition entitled “At War” at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.Between 2009 and 2013, he was the vicepresident of the Arts Council of Barcelona and presided over its Executive Committee.