Media and Modernity: “Gawkers”

Bridget Alsdorf
“Gawkers”
[Response: James Welling]
Tuesday, April 11, 2023 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Modern Paris calls to mind the flâneur, but all around him were gawkers (badauds). Bridget Alsdorf will discuss her recent book, Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton University Press, 2022), which offers an alternative genealogy of the modern viewer. Exploring a ubiquitous mode of urban experience—idling on the margins of culture and current events—Gawkers examines paintings, prints, and films that make gawking their central subject. Alsdorf will be joined by the artist James Welling, whose recent work, Street View (2020), brings the legacy of street photography into the present.

Bridget Alsdorf is Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art at Princeton University. In addition to Gawkers, she is the author of Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (Princeton University Press, 2013), and is working on a new book about intimacy and collaboration in modern Scandinavian painting, photography, and silent film.

James Welling is an artist and Lecturer with the Rank of Professor at the Program for Visual Arts and the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University. He has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including numerous solo exhibitions, while his photographic work is held in major museum collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

A discount code will be provided to each attendee of the event. This code will provide a 30% discount on orders of Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France placed on the Princeton University Press website.

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