The Accident That Pricks
Hunter Integrated Media Arts
Fall 2025
Course IMA78378
Room: HN 544
1 Credit Course
Sunday October 19th from 10am-1pm on zoom
Saturday November 1st from 10am-6pm in person
Wednesday November 5th from 5:30pm-9pm in person (public event)
Lynne Sachs
The Accident that Pricks: Family and Photography is a course in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, grand-parent, aunt or uncle might become material for the making of a personal film. Each participant will come to the first day with a single photograph they want to examine. You will then create a cinematic presence for this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. This course is inspired by French theorist Roland Barthes’ theory of the punctum, the intensely subjective effect of a photograph, and Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s writing on her family living under Fascism during World War II. Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.”
Reading:
John Ashberry, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” poem
Roland Barthes, Camara Lucida (selections)
Tina Campt, Listening to Images, Introduction and Chapter 1.
Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon, pp 5_35
Clarice Lispector, “Mystery of Sao Cristovao” from Family Ties
