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Bodhisattva with a Camera: Reimagining Subjectivities in Photography Portraiture

Zihan Yuan

Saturday, October 11 - 9:00AM to 9:15AM
Wayne State University

This Practice-as-Research project reimagines contemporary photographic portraiture theory and practice through early Mahāyāna Buddhist ideas. Informed by my interdisciplinary research in art history, Buddhist philosophy, and photographic theory, I propose a new ethical dimension of universal compassion and social responsibility in understanding and practicing photographic portraiture, supplementing and transcending the index/exteriority versus icon/interiority duality upheld by Western theorists such as Kendall Walton. By demonstrating my photographic experiments alongside philosophical discussions, I will illustrate how adopting the Bodhisattva ethos can help us shift gears from photography conceived as extraction to photography practiced as compassionate co-creation. I will then show how portraiture grounded in universal compassion can recalibrate the technological, pedagogical, and cultural machinery of image-making. This perspective reframes photographers and subjects (both human and non-human) within portraiture as undifferentiated ethical agents in causal networks, inviting us to imagine more equitable trajectories for photographic education and for the communities our images serve.

speaker

Zihan Yuan

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