Triple Canopy is pleased to present Lines of Sight, a public reading of passages from fiction that describe photography explicitly, as a subject, or adopt photographic strategies of framing, staging, or manipulation. Readers will include Michele Abeles, Alejandro Cesarco, Nancy Davenport, Moyra Davey, Michael Famighetti, Daniel Gordon, and Dan Torop, introduced by Triple Canopy’s Hannah Whitaker.

Photography is often characterized by its suspension between sets of oppositional pairs: image and object, expression and documentation, icon and index, art and technology. A fictionalized photography frees the medium from the most contentious of these oppositions—fact and fiction. When encountered in fiction, a photograph may shift from this state of suspension to instrument of the author. "The Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image of a developed photograph that keeps looming larger" (Roberto Bolaño, 2666). How does photography participate in the act of mythologizing? How are photographic methods interpreted and employed in literature? "Many times, just before falling asleep, I’ve remembered my family, as if putting my eye to a small hole and blinking to light them up in the back yard of my house" (Felisberto Hernández, Just Before Falling Asleep). What kinds of characters are photographers? "When I told my husband I hated him, we hadn’t been married long at all. It was when he was taking my picture with his new camera" (Lorrie Moore, Anagrams).

Participants
  • Michele Abeles lives and works in New York. Her work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; White Columns, New York, MoMA PS1 as well as “ReMap3” in Athens. She received an MFA in photography from Yale University (2007) and a Rema Hort Mann Visual Arts grant (2010). In April of 2013 she will present her second solo exhibition at 47 Canal, New York.
  • Alejandro Cesarco is an artist whose work explores, through different formats and strategies, repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating. He has recently presented solo exhibitions at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin; Midway, Minneapolis; Parra Romero, Madrid; and Frac Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris. He is the director of Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.), a nonprofit organization committed to activating the key components of the printed book: publication, distribution, and spaces of reading. He is represented by Murray Guy in New York, where “Loyalties and Betrayals” was on view in 2015.
  • Nancy Davenport is an artist living in New York. Her work has been shown at a number of galleries and museums including Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NY, the Liverpool Biennial, Sao Paulo Biennial. She recently opened a permanent installation at the Military History Museum in Dresden.
  • Moyra Davey is an artist and photographer. She lives and works in New York City.
  • Michael Famighetti is an editor and writer. He's currently working on a relaunch and redesign of Aperture magazine. He has edited numerous photography books, including volumes by William Christenberry, Robert Adams, John Divola, Jonas Bendiksen, and a series based on the website Tiny Vices. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Bookforum, Aperture, and OjodePez, among other publications. Famighetti has degrees from Bard College and Columbia University, where he has also taught. He has served as a judge for the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine Awards and has been a guest reviewer and speaker at many international photography festivals and institutions, including the Bamako Biennial; Krakow PhotoMonth; GuatePhoto; Rhubarb Rhubarb, Birmingham, U.K.; Festival de la Luz, Buenos Aires; Museet for Fotokunst, Odense; and Fotografiska, Stockholm.
  • Danny Gordon received an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2006. He has exhibited his photographs in solo exhibitions at Zach Feuer Gallery and Leo Koenig, Inc. in New York City and Claudia Groeflin Gallery in Zurich. He has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the CCS Museum at Bard College, and MoMA PS1. Gordon is the author of Portrait Studio and Flying Pictures. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
  • Dan Torop lives and works in New York City. He works with lenses, film, paper, words, vehicles, and computer languages. In 2013 Torop showed Alkali Desert, an exhibition that retraced Mark Twain’s 1861 journey across Utah’s alkali desert, at the Green Gallery in Milwaukee. Alkali Desert was also on display at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover Exhibit Hall One in 2012.
  • Hannah Whitaker is a photographer and Triple Canopy contributing editor based in New York City.
  • Sarah Resnick has published in n+1, Bookforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Triple Canopy, where she was previously an editor. Her writing was selected for 2017’s Best American Essays and for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York.
  • Molly Kleiman is Triple Canopy’s director, co-director of the Back Room, and part-time faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School.