In this talk Professor Michelle Henning will reread and contextualise Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay (1935-36) and his claims about how film and photography allowed humanity to “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Benjamin was reflecting on a specific imperial war — when the Italian fascists pioneered new, brutal tactics of chemical warfare (ecocide / domicide) in the 1935-36 invasion of Ethiopia. Through the connections between photography and poison gas, the destruction of aura appears as racialized atmospheric violence.
The event is hosted by Photoecologies Study Group a new space for exploring the critical intersections of photographic practice, theory and philosophy. Scholars and artists from a range of backgrounds are invited to share their current research, approaching photomedia as an environmental, elemental and energetic assemblage.
Initiated by the journal Philosophy of Photography, the study group aims to:
- Create a space for researchers to share and discuss new and exploratory work related to photographic ecologies
- Develop alternative philosophical and critical perspectives on photography and ecology, past, present and future
- Foster interdisciplinarity, cross-pollination and hybrid frameworks of analysis
- Disentangle the complicity of photography with violent and extractive systems of capitalism and colonialism
The sessions will take place online. Each session will include a speaker (30-40 mins), a response (10 mins) and a group discussion (40 mins).
Photoecologies Study Group is organised by Alex Fletcher, Noa Levin and Rowan Lear.
Photography, Poison Gas and Aura
Michelle Henning, hosted by Photoecologies Study Group
Online, 25 February 2025, 1700-1830 (GMT)
Detail and registration here
Michelle Henning is Chair in Photography and Media at the University of Liverpool and a writer and artist. Her next book A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog and Empire, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2025.
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