“Paris Photo Graff,” an Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop

Speaker Name: Andrew Zawacki
Speaker’s Website: https://www.english.uga.edu/directory/people/andrew-zawacki
University or Organization: University of Georgia

UGA Distinguished Research Professor of English, Creative Writing, and translation, Dr. Andrew Zawacki will present from his ongoing research project, “Paris Photo Graff,” in a workshop-roundtable format for discussion and feedback. The project is a prose-photography hybrid, that interlaces its author’s black and white images of wall scrawl from the French capital with episodic meditations on open-source literary communities and semi-hidden subcultures, the commercialization of street art, the hermeneutics of rumor and secrecy, authorial absence and self-presentation, the social relation of graffiti to political change, and the history of documenting graffiti with a camera. Begun in 2012, the project has advanced in an aleatory, rhizomatic way. Contextualized by the New York tagging scene of the late 1970s and drawing on the critical work of Lisa Robertson and Daniel Tiffany, Craig Castleman and early Baudrillard, this talk and photo screening will consider the poetics of contemporary Parisian graffiti as a paradoxical enactment of both subliminal exclusivity and vernacular inclusion. 

Dr. Zawacki has invited attendees to read this blog on the project prior to the workshop: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2019/04/a-whole-other-system-paris-photo-graff-continued . The event is hosted by The Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop, a Faculty Research Cluster sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts [http://willson.uga.edu/research-clusters/interdisciplinary-modernism]