You Have to Rethink Everything

by Roberto Tejada

You get to your mid-thirties and you think you may never have an opportunity to be radically challenged. Then you come across somebody whose thinking is so remarkable that it completely turns everything around. You have to rethink everything in terms of this person's writing.

Dr. Elizabeth Grosz has been really inspirational. I remember even just the first day of her seminar on "Time and Becoming," which looked at temporal philosophers, such as Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. Her opening lecture articulated things that had been under the surface of what I had wanted to write about. They had come up in my curatorial projects with the visual arts.

The fact that I was writing about photography professionally was of interest to Liz, so it has been a very nurturing and productive relationship. I had had the professional and some critical or theoretical background, but somebody with her philosophical training could bring out the kinds of connections that I didn't know about, ideas which I needed to consolidate my ideas about photography.

As a guest curator for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, I have just completed writings to be used in the catalogue and the wall texts for an exhibition of photography by Manuel Alvarez-Bravo, the Mexican modernist. He is a modern master and is 99 years old.

During Liz Grosz' seminar, I realized how much the work of Bergson was being read in Mexico and how much it influenced Alvarez-Bravo's particular kind of image-making. It's very much about image-making itself, very much about photography, very much about the medium, very much about matter and memory. These ideas are very much in the philosophy of Bergson. They seem self-evident now that I've had that seminar, but they weren't before.

For anybody who thinks that at the age of 36 it's too late to go back and get their graduate degree, as my fear was at the time when I started, that fear has been completely proven wrong by my experience here at UB. It has come at a time when I can enjoy it, and I'll be able to apply my studies to the writings I'll produce as an art writer in the future.