Corinna Wagner - Inaugural Lecture - 27th November

In the last century, generations of post-war writers and photographers took to the road, on foot and in automobiles, in North America and elsewhere. On their travels, they documented instances of ordinariness, which now appear as something quite different: a visual and literary archive of slow violence. Contemporary photographers and writers, including myself, have taken to the road to revisit these sites to ‘trace the arc.’ In this lecture, we will explore before-and-after photographs and writing that make visible private ruin and public losses, including that of wild spaces. We will consider, too, how past imposes on present in the form of gothic returns, ‘ghost images’ and ‘zombie waste.’ What do dispatches from the road tell us about where we are now?