Professor Ariella Azoulay, professor of visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Cultural Interpretation, Bar-Ilan University, Israel is presenting a  lecture at Northwestern University (April 2) and Indiana University in Bloomington (April 6) titled, “The Necessity of Discussing Photographs That Were Not Taken.”  The lecture and related events listed below  are  free and open to the public at both Northwestern and Indiana Universities.

The lecture at Northwestern University takes place on Friday, April 2, 2010, 4-6 pm in the Annie May Swift Auditorium.

The lecture on  the Bloomington campus of Indiana University takes place on Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 5:30-7:30 pm in Student Building 150. On Monday, April 5, 2010, 7 pm,  there will be a screening of Professor Azoulay’s documentary film, “The Angel of History” in Fine arts 102.

Professor Azoulay’s lecture discusses the ontology of photography (and of the photograph) drawing a basic distinction between the event of photography and the photograph which is only one of its products.  The photographic examples will be drawn from the exhibition Constituent Violence 1947-1950 that Professor Azoulay curated in Israel in March-June 2009.  The exhibition provides a genealogy of the transformation of the Palestinian disaster into a “disaster from their point of view.”  Among her publications are Death’s Showcase (2001) and The Civil Contract of Photography (2008).

The lectures are sponsored at Northwestern University by the Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Center for Global Culture and Communication.  At Indiana University it is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Branigan Lecture Series.    For more information at Northwestern University contact Daniel Elam (jdelam@u.northwestern.edu) and at Indiana University Jon Simons (simonssj@indiana.edu) or Ivona Hedin (ihedin@indiana.edu).