Olivier Richon & Darian Leader: 'The Devouring Eye' [Book launch & signing]

Join us for the book launch of The Devouring Eye by photographer and academic Olivier Richon. For the first time, Richon’s conceptual theory is presented in this collection of writings which radically reimagine the photographic act as a form of consumption and desire. Drawn from a series of influential lectures delivered during his twenty-five-year tenure as Head of the Photography programme at the Royal College of Art (1997–2022) – a period during which the course shaped an entire generation of photographers – the book presents a meditation on the camera as both eye and mouth: an apparatus that ingests the world in order to produce images.

Olivier Richon will be joined in conversation by psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader.

Free to attend. 

Wednesday 26 November 
18:30

Artwords Bookshop
2-4 Clarence Rd
Lower Clapton
London E5 8HB
United Kingdom

About The Devouring Eye 

Framed through a psychoanalytic lens, The Devouring Eye proposes that photography is less a neutral act of observation than a form of visual incorporation. If looking maintains distance, the mouth abolishes it. The camera becomes a devouring organ, where the object is dissolved, digested, and made into an image. The desire to see becomes entangled with the desire to consume. Through this reading, photography is revealed as an insatiable medium – one that satisfies and frustrates our appetite for representation in equal measure. The Devouring Eye invites us to reconsider how we relate to images, and how deeply they live in us.