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Monday, March 15, 2027
7pm ET (NYC time)
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
A photograph promises immortality. It also proves that a moment is gone.
Since its invention, photography has been inseparable from death. Victorian families used portraits to keep the dead present; spirit photographers sold images of ghosts; writers and filmmakers imagined cameras that steal souls, expose hidden violence, or turn photographers into hunters. Even everyday photographic language — shoot, take, capture — carries an undertow of possession and harm.
In this visually rich lecture, photographer and scholar Joanna Madloch traces the haunted history of the medium from nineteenth-century postmortem portraiture and séances to literature, cinema, and contemporary art. We will see how images became instruments of mourning, evidence of the supernatural, objects of fraud and belief, and unsettling reminders that every photograph outlives the instant — and sometimes the person — it depicts.
Along the way, we will meet grieving families, ambitious mediums, skeptics, artists, and fictional photographers. Rather than treating their images as morbid curiosities, Madloch will uncover the human desires beneath them: to preserve a face, defeat absence, prove the invisible, control time, and look directly at what frightens us.
Why can a photograph of a stranger feel intimate? Why do old portraits seem to stare back? And why does horror return again and again to cameras, darkrooms, and the act of looking?
Accessible to newcomers and rewarding for photographers, artists, history lovers, and devotees of the macabre, the lecture will change the way you see the next photograph you take, and the shadows it leaves behind.
Joanna Madloch is a New Jersey–based photographer, writer, and scholar who holds a Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Silesia in Poland. She is the author of a monograph on Joseph Brodsky and of more than thirty scholarly articles. She studied photography at the International Center of Photography and the Penumbra Foundation, both in New York City, and she currently teaches at Montclair State University. Her book in progress examines the portrayal of photographers in fiction, interpreting the photographer as a modern incarnation of the Trickster archetype.
Monday, March 15, 2027
7pm ET (NYC time)
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
A photograph promises immortality. It also proves that a moment is gone.
Since its invention, photography has been inseparable from death. Victorian families used portraits to keep the dead present; spirit photographers sold images of ghosts; writers and filmmakers imagined cameras that steal souls, expose hidden violence, or turn photographers into hunters. Even everyday photographic language — shoot, take, capture — carries an undertow of possession and harm.
In this visually rich lecture, photographer and scholar Joanna Madloch traces the haunted history of the medium from nineteenth-century postmortem portraiture and séances to literature, cinema, and contemporary art. We will see how images became instruments of mourning, evidence of the supernatural, objects of fraud and belief, and unsettling reminders that every photograph outlives the instant — and sometimes the person — it depicts.
Along the way, we will meet grieving families, ambitious mediums, skeptics, artists, and fictional photographers. Rather than treating their images as morbid curiosities, Madloch will uncover the human desires beneath them: to preserve a face, defeat absence, prove the invisible, control time, and look directly at what frightens us.
Why can a photograph of a stranger feel intimate? Why do old portraits seem to stare back? And why does horror return again and again to cameras, darkrooms, and the act of looking?
Accessible to newcomers and rewarding for photographers, artists, history lovers, and devotees of the macabre, the lecture will change the way you see the next photograph you take, and the shadows it leaves behind.
Joanna Madloch is a New Jersey–based photographer, writer, and scholar who holds a Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Silesia in Poland. She is the author of a monograph on Joseph Brodsky and of more than thirty scholarly articles. She studied photography at the International Center of Photography and the Penumbra Foundation, both in New York City, and she currently teaches at Montclair State University. Her book in progress examines the portrayal of photographers in fiction, interpreting the photographer as a modern incarnation of the Trickster archetype.