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Olivier Richon is Professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art, London, where he also convenes the Image and Language Research Hub. Real Allegories, a monograph of his photographic work, commissioned by Ute Eskildsen, is published by Steidl (2006). His writings on photography include: Three Essays on Photography, in Allegories, Editions de l’aquarium agnostique (2000) Thinking Things, in Where is the Photograph (2003); The Sophist and the Photograph, in Philosophy of Photography vol 1(2010). He recently edited a special issue of the journal Photographies (Routledge, March 2011) on Photography and Literature.

He has participated in the "Yingxiang Today"--the Fifth Annual Conference of CCVA held in CAFA, Beijing and given a lecture on Screen Memories: Photography, Fetish and Relic.

Brief Introduction by Olivier Richon on His Statement is as follows,

Referring to a recent photographic work, Ellipsis, that I made with historical objects from the collection of the museum Lazaro Galdiano in Madrid, my paper shall attempt to undermine the dominant notions of photography as an aid to memory or as a record of personal and collective history.

Drawing upon the psychoanalytical notions of deferred action; secondary revision and screen memories, it will discuss how remembering is subject to occlusions, distortions and displacements of meaning. The photograph, this shadow- image contributes to this unstable process of remembrance. But remembering what in particular? Is memory, like photography, an imprint of a past event, the record of a trace and a mark that tells us that something happened? Or is photography, like memory, the production of representations that construct and create a fiction of the past? Are memories and photographs forms of relics and fetishes that trigger our desire to know and to see?

Courtesy of  Olivier Richon and All Rights Reserved.

He is represented by Ibid Projects, London.