Kaja Silverman

Silverman is a visual and film theorist and the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of nine books, including The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part I (2015), Flesh of My Flesh (2009), Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) and Speaking about Godard (1998).

Her current writing and teaching are focused primarily on photography, time-based visual art and painting. Her most recent book, The Miracle of Analogy, is the first installation of a three-volume reconceptualization of photography. Reconceptualizing photographs made during the first three decades of chemical photography and their contemporary resonance, she positions photography as the agency through which the world reveals itself to us, in which the photographer played only a nominal role. The forthcoming second volume, A Three-Personed Picture, is about the gradual emergence of a very different kind of image: one that is pictorial in nature. This image has two very unusual features. First, it is shaped both by the aesthetic intelligence of the photographer, and that of the world. Second, it depends for its existence as much upon the sitter and the beholder as it does upon the author, and it links them to each other through a three-person chiasmus.

The recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim fellowship, she was recently awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation, which has enabled her to organize and fund a series of conferences, lectures, artist talks and residencies in Philadelphia. At Slought, these have included public conversations with Allan Sekula and Achille Borchardt-Hume, a series of site-specific installations by Knut Asdam, and retrospective of works by Victor Burgin. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Scholar Award from College Art Association.