Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997), Emerson and the Climates of History (1997), Paper Graveyards (2021), and, with Sara Nadal-Melsió, Politically Red (2023). He has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject? (1991), Cities Without Citizens (2004), and The Itinerant Languages of Photography (2013). He also has introduced and co-translated, with Liana Theodoratou, Nadar’s memoirs, Quand j’étais photographe, which appeared under the title When I Was a Photographer (2015), and a collection of his essays on photography has appeared in Spanish under the title La imagen en ruinas (2015) in Santiago, Chile. He has curated installations and exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum. He is co-directing, with Eyal Weizman, a multiyear project on the relation between political conflict and climate change titled Conflict Shorelines that includes field work in Amazonia, the Negev desert, and the Arctic, and collaborating with Fazal Sheikh on a project titled Exposure that is documenting the ruination of the Utah landscape by uranium mining and oil and gas drilling and the consequences of this ruination on native communities.

Workshop description
Alphabetographies [spacing between lines seems different below than in the other paragraphs]
co-tutorship with Susan Meiselas

This course takes its point of departure from a collaborative project put together by Susan Meiselas in 1974 entitled Learn to See, which included 101 different exercises that use photography both inside and outside the classroom in order to encourage us to see things differently. Taking its title from the first exercise in the project, an exercise entitled “Alphabetography” that encouraged children to find lines and forms in the world that resemble each letter of the alphabet, the course will think about the relations between texts and images, and this because, from the very beginning, it is impossible to dissociate images from the language without which we could never approach them. It begins in the conviction that images cannot appear without language. In order to begin to read an image, in other words, we have to understand that the image itself can never appear alone: it requires language to begin to give us a context through which we can start to situate the image in relation to the several traces that are sealed within it. We will consider a series of collaborative projects between photographers and writers or theorists of photography, or between photographers and the subjects who share their stories with the person taking their photographs. We will consider the role and place of stories, documents, interviews, letters, poetry, and even drawings and paintings within these photographic projects and, in each instance, we will think about what drives a photographer to collaborate with a writer or his or her subjects and what inspires a writer or theorist of photography to think about images.