Taking distance from the phrase « the decisive moment », once used by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and subsequently much quoted but rarely contextualized, we will discuss the tension between deliberate choice and accident in several areas: episodes of the invention of photography photographic practices (capturing images, choosing a specific image from a series of many on a contact sheet) the circulation and cultural uses of one photographic image on a variety of supports and in a variety of contexts. This paper proposes an exploration of the ways in which photography can participate in a better understanding of the multiple - and sometimes contrasting - implications of the notion of « chance ». Her novel, Stela, published in the United States in 2015, has been presented at numerous venues and is on the program of the course “Literature & politics” at the School for Political Sciences in Lille.Ĭonférence : Is the moment decisive in photography?įriday 2 july 2021, 11h30 - 12h15 - Amphi Jean-Prouvé As a writer, Cristofovici has published fiction in English and contributed to international collaborative projects, among which an installation exhibited at the collateral shows of the Venice Biennale. Her work has been distinguished with grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and The British Academy, and she held research positions at The Center for Twentieth-Century Studies, University of Wisconsin and The Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle. Artists, Poets, Books (Victoria, Texas, 2015).
Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging (New York/Amsterdam, 2009), and co-editor of The Art of Collaboration. L’enfant et le cannibale (Paris, 1997) and Touching Surfaces. Her studies on American literature and on photography have appeared in volumes and journals in Europe and the United States, and she is the author of John Hawkes. Anca Cristofovici is a professor of American literature and arts at the University of Caen, where she directed the Center for Cultural Memory Studies (ERIBIA) for ten years.