On Looking Again

We are delighted to invite you to a presentation by our colleague about her multi-award winning monograph.

About the Presentation:
In this presentation, Sá Carvalho revisits her recent book, Traces of the Unseen, to examine the emergence of visual practices in the early twentieth century that sought to denounce the destruction wrought by the rubber extractive boom in the Amazonian region. Challenging the assumption that early photography was seen as a privileged tool for delivering unmediated knowledge, the book argues that photographic indexical realism was regarded as both powerful and unstable as a form of evidence. Photographs were combined with texts, framed, and assembled with other images, creating various unsettled pedagogies of the gaze that taught viewers how to look and what to see in traces of destruction. In this talk, she reflects on the process of revisiting these archives and rereading her own text to examine the relevance of a politics of looking— and of looking again—at early photographs of extractive destruction in the context of the long now of our environmental crisis.

About the Presenter:
Carolina Sá Carvalho works across visual studies, literature, and environmental humanities. She is the author of Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2023), which was short-listed for the Modern Language Association First Book Prize. The book also received the Roberto Reis First Book Award from the Brazilian Studies Association and Best Book Awards from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in its Environment, Amazonia, and Visual Culture Studies sections. Sá Carvalho is currently working on her second book, Mosquito Aesthetics and the Politics of Contagion in Brazil, a project at the intersections of media studies, animal studies, and environmental humanities. She serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Toronto.