Publication date: 27.05.2015

Photography and Memory lecture by Radu Stern

Régis Debray included photography among the technologies of memory. If it is obvious that, in a sense, any photography is an act of memory, the lecture will briefly present the history of the complex relations between photography and memory in the photographic theory and analyze some case studies to show the specificity of the memory of photography, which is not a “photographic memory”.

Radu Stern, born 1951, is an art historian and curator with multiple interests. After teaching during ten years art history at the University of Lausanne, he was eleven years Deputy-Director responsible of the Applied Arts School of Vevey, Switzerland, where he founded in 1997 the Higher Education Program in Photography. From 2004 to the end of 2013 he was Director of Education at the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, one of the leading photography museuns of the world. In 2004, Stern was a master for the Joop Swart Masterclass organized by the World Press Photo in Amsterdam. Radu Stern is currently an independent curator and researcher. He regularly lectures and does portfolio readings in universities, art schools, and photography festivals in Switzerland and abroad. Among his latest publications: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art 1850–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004); The Ubiquity of the Image (with Christian Caujolle and Joan Fontcuberta, Barcelona: KRTU, 2009); From Dada to Surrealism. Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania (Amsterdam: The JHM, 2011).