November 15th: Leslie Hewitt in Conversation with Omar Berrada

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Leslie Hewitt will discuss Postscript: Archives, Annotations, and the Unfolding of Time as Image and Agency with Omar Berrada.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, November 15th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. If you have a question during the event, please email it to Evan@192Books.com.

Leslie Hewitt — Postscript: Archives, Annotations, and the Unfolding of Time as Image and Agency, with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Deborah Willis. (Published by Dancing Foxes Press and the Pratt Photography Imprint, 2022)

Initiated in 2018, Pounds Per Image (PPI) is published annually through the Pratt Photography Imprint (PPI), led by Shannon Ebner, Chairperson of the Photography Department, School of Art, Pratt Institute. Each issue is a book signature; six issues will constitute a full book. By commissioning artists, writers, and other voices in the polyvocal field to produce original material about photography, PPI endeavors to make contributions to the discursive field beyond the walls of Pratt Institute.

PPI#3 originated in Fall 2019 with TEACHING PHOTOGRAPHS, a symposium co-organized by Shannon Ebner and Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Leslie Hewitt organized this issue as a “postscript” to the symposium, responding in and out of time with the fraught and divisive events of 2020 in the foreground, middle ground, and background of her field of vision. In PPI#3, Hewitt attempts to come to terms with both the teaching and the unlearning of photographs through an examination of reportage photography, portraiture, the Pictures Generation, and Conceptual art. Through a staging of and search for mediated sites of resistance, this process expands on how a public might collectively reconcile grief and images of trauma. In an effort to redress these issues through public dialogue, Hewitt organized two pivotal conversations over the course of 2020, one with artist, author, and scholar Deborah Willis; and the other with author, curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. By presenting a range of conceptual and historical strategies over the course of the issue, Hewitt finds ways to address images, moving with agency to reclaim power in spaces that attempt to arbitrate critique and exhibit care for the lives of people and the afterlives of their images.

LESLIE HEWITT is an associate professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. Her work, which utilizes photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations to address the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory and to contend with shifting notions of space and time, has been shown internationally at such venues as Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Power Plant, Toronto, Ontario; and Sculpture Center, New York. She has held residencies at the American Academy, Berlin; Konstepidemin, Göteborg, Sweden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.

OMAR BERRADA is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020) and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album: Cinémathèque de Tanger, about film in Tangier and Tangier on film (2012); The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016); and La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020). Berrada’s writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he and Leslie Hewitt co-organize the IDS Lecture Series.