The Queen Mary Visual Cultures Forum is delighted to welcome
Dominika Gasiorowski
speaking on:
‘Photographing the Unseen Mexico – Reflections on Photography and Marginality’
Tuesday, 13th November, 5pm – Bancroft Building, room 3.11
Summary:
This autumn, my first book entitled Photographing the Unseen Mexico: Maya Goded’s Socially Engaged Documentaries will be published by the Modern Humanities Research Association imprint Legenda (http://www.mhra.org.uk/news/maya-godeds-mexico). Based on nearly a decade of research, which included my PhD supervised by Prof Parvati Nair at QMUL and funded by the Westfield Trust Research Studentship, the book establishes Maya Goded as one of the leading lights in Latin American photography.
Born in Mexico City in 1967, Maya Goded (mayagoded.net) is an acclaimed photographer and documentary filmmaker. Throughout her career as a visual artist, she has maintained a focus on working with hidden and invisible communities and phenomena, most often documenting the lives of women. Among her subjects are Afro-descendant communities in Mexico, as well as prostitutes/sexworkers, women practicing witchcraft and traditional healing methods, and families bereaved through the epidemic of feminicides. In a country where visual culture is synonymous with national culture, Goded’s work shows the omissions and gaps in contemporary visual landscapes.
My encounter with Goded’s imagery and the subsequent research into her practice informed my thinking on visibility and representation as functions of power, mediated through photography. In this talk, I will present the main themes of the book, also showing some of the visual material included therein. The visual materials and the research they prompted will lead to a discussion on the role of photography in shedding a new light on the issues of marginality and power in the twenty-first century.
Dominika Gasiorowski is an Associate Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Queen Mary, University of London.
Recent publications:
‘Photographing Children in Mexico City’s Red-Light Districts’ in Bulletin of Latin American Research (early view): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/blar.12882
‘The Muxes of Juchitán: Representations of Non-binary Gender Identities in Contemporary Photography from Mexico’ in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 95(8), 2018, 895-914: https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/bhs.2018.52
The event is free and open to all. Please RVSP to assist administration:
Queen Mary Visual & Material Forum 
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