Is Seeing Believing?

Join David Levi Strauss for this online talk, where we will examine our belief in the image. In his new book Photography and Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Strauss writes, “Visual images become more like testimony than like perception... Belief in images has become the test case for the social. If we do not find a way to believe what we see in images, we lose the ability to act socially.”

Using texts by John Berger, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes as a framework, Strauss will reflect on the influence of the photographic image throughout history to the present.

Strauss will be joined in conversation by the photographer and curator Duncan Wooldridge.

Monday, December 7, 2020
Online | 7 PM GMT/2 PM EST⁣
RSVP here

David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (2003/2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (1999). To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Dilar Dirik, Michael Taussig, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2016. Strauss was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003, and received the Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007. He is chair of the graduate program in art writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.