Having been a serious amateur photographer for decades, I decided several years ago to begin exhibiting, publishing, and selling my work—to professionalize, that is, as I anticipate retirement from teaching (after almost 30 years) to concentrate full-time on photography and writing. The side-bar to the right lists my published and exhibited photographs, as well as some articles I’ve written that are partly or wholly illustrated with photographs I’ve taken. My forthcoming book, Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (Punctum Books, 2026), also includes a number of my own photographs among its many illustrations.
As a photographer, I work primarily in three genres: abstract, structural/architectural, and the natural world.
In my abstract photography, I’m guided chiefly by my love of composition, which I first nurtured formally as a student of Graphic Design and then brought to my photographic work. I’ve created several series that take a specific theme or idea as their ruling motif. For example, I’ve recently been at work on several city-specific series I call “Canvases” (e.g., “Canvases: Philadelphia”), which highlight various painterly effects of two-dimensional surfaces. My Venice series, “Tele: Venezia,” takes advantage of the fact that it’s a city strongly linked both to the history of Western painting and to the contemporary art world (e.g., the Biennale) and foregrounds some of its characteristic features, such as the abundant use of stucco and the multi-layered textures of very old surfaces preserved, damaged, repaired, and worn away—palimpsests of centuries of endurance and change. The photographs in these “Canvas” series seek to destabilize conventional boundaries between photography and painting, while also highlighting elements that photography and painting share. While most of my compositions are abstract, some include figural or found elements that make them more sculptural or collage-like.
My structural/architectural photography, too, is guided by my love of composition. Also, because they usually don’t include people, these photographs are often reflections on the solitariness of the photographer. Photography can sometimes be a lonely artistic practice: hours spent on one’s own, using equipment that functions like a barrier as well as a window between the photographer and the rest of the world. At the same time, photography, like some other solitary pursuits, can open up to us features of the visible world that might otherwise escape our notice—and that we can share with others.
In photographing the natural world, I try to cultivate an intimate mode of relating to non-human beings. Accustomed to species-oriented thinking, we human beings tend to lose track of the individuals that constitute those abstract categories. My work aims to recognize individual members of a given species as unique, particular beings with their own distinctive place in the world, their own sensorium or consciousness, and their own relationship to the photographer/viewer. Since 2019, the online forum for most of my work in this genre is the public-science project, iNaturalist, where each image, or “observation,” commemorates an encounter with a particular organism in its proper (i.e., non-domesticated, non-cultivated, non-captive) state. Basic metadata (date, geolocation, altitude, etc.) are recorded automatically, and I can enter further information about the photograph and its subject manually. Of the 2200 photographs I’ve posted thus far, more than 900 are verified research-grade species observations, freely available to scientists all over the world.
Max Cavitch is a photographer, writer, and teacher living in Philadelphia. He grew up in the Boston area and earned his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers. He is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also co-directs the program in Psychoanalytic Studies and edits the award-winning blog, Psyche on Campus. He is the author of numerous scholarly and public-facing works, including American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minnesota 2007), Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge 2025), Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (forthcoming from Punctum), and Passing Resemblances: World Autobiography from Nehemiah to Knausgård (forthcoming from Columbia). His is also the editor of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (Oxford 2023), co-editor of the essay collection Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke 2024), and co-translator of Jean Louis Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema [L’Homme ordinaire du cinema] (MIT 2016). He is an Editorial Consultant for ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, a Contributing Writer for Float: Photo Magazine, and a member of the Editorial Board of Revisit: Humanities and Medicine in Dialogue. His scholarly and creative work has been supported by grants from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Austen Riggs Center, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, the Emily Harvey Foundation, and the Science History Institute. From February through July 2025, he will be the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer at Vienna’s Sigmund Freud Museum and the University of Vienna.
“Human-Canine Kinship in the Digital Era,” Mediating Kinship Workshop, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, February 22, 2024, online
Invited speaker, “Behind the Scenes of Attachment,” Transdisciplinary Connections Forum on “Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature: Lauren Berlant’s Affects,” Modern Language Association annual meeting, San Francisco, January 7, 2023, online
“No One Voice/Nom à la mer,” American Comparative Literature Association, New York University, March 23, 2014
“Class and the Long Kill in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry,” Representing Social Classes in Film and Television Conference, University of Rennes, October 11, 2013
“No One Voice: Nom à la mer,” Transnationalism: A Useful Category of Analysis?, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March 15-16, 2012
“No One Voice,” Cinema Studies Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, February 8, 2012
Invited lecture, “The Pornography of Migration: Sex, Cinema, and Unsettlement in Israel and Palestine,” Rutgers University, New Brunswick, February 1, 2010
Invited panelist, “Monuments and Memorials,” Penn Humanities Forum, Philadelphia, October 28, 2005
Invited lecture, “Interiority and Artifact: Death and Self-Inscription in Early America,” History of Material Texts Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, April 2, 2001
Commentator, Imprisoned Lightning: Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty, dir. Andrea Simon (Arcadia Pictures, 2011), https://vimeo.com/96820577
With comments by novelists Teju Cole and Gish Jen, filmmaker Musa Syeed, Lazarus biographer Esther Schor, Rabbis Sharon Kleinbaum and Amichai Lau-Lavie, scholars Ed Berenson, Max Cavitch, and Imam Khalid Latif. Commissioned by the Museum of Jewish Heritage to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty and to explore the contemporary meaning of Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus.” Produced in collaboration with the National Park Service.
Introduction and translation, Paul Celan, “Schwarze Flocken” [poem], Politics/Letters Live (on-line), June 7, 2022
Introduction and translation, Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy, “Contre-jour,” PMLA 131.2 (2016), 540-550
Co-translation (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant), Jean Louis Schefer, The Ordinary Man of Cinema [L’Homme ordinaire du cinema] (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016)
2024
"Memento mori", Street Exhibition, Glasgow Gallery of Photography, Glasgow, Ireland
"British Soldier Liche", Flash Gallery #19: The Macro World, Decagon Gallery, Brooklyn NY
"Calle", Flash Gallery #18: Urban Life, Decagon Gallery, Brooklyn NY
"Visitation", Surreal Exhibition, Glasgow Gallery of Photography, Glasgow, Ireland
"Visitation", Surreal Exhibition, Glasgow Gallery of Photography, Glasgow, Ireland
"Visitation", 7th Chania International Photo Festival, Chania, Crete
"Little Wing", Flash Gallery #17: Reflections, Decagon Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
"Monochroma 17", Red Exhibition, Blank Wall Gallery, Athens, Greece
"Memento mori", Street Photography Exhibition, Blank Wall Gallery, Athens, Greece
"Canvas 4", Moments of Color Exhibition, Blank Wall Gallery, Athens, Greece
"Memento mori [monochrome]",Black and White Exhibition, Blank Wall Gallery, Athens, Greece
2023
"Dapple and Scream Me", New Artist Exhibition, Boomer Gallery, London
"Bronze Award for Revealing Nature (Bluet Tryst, Intimidation, Never a Moment’s, Postprandial, and Sovereign)", Better Photography Magazine
"Webbings [Jaunaille 1]", Honorable Mention, competition and group exhibit, Patterns and Textures, Ten Moir Gallery, online
"Crossing, Green Domain, Monochromata 17", and "Postprandial," Art Room Gallery online exhibit, Green
"Orangerie", 6th Chania International Photo Festival, Chania, Crete
"Monochromaticae", 1-9” [series], Biennale di Senigallia, Senigallia, Italy
"Canvas 4", group exhibit, Blank Wall Gallery, Athens, Greece
"Going Home", group exhibit, Blank Wall Gallery, Athens, Greece
"Tela 99", and ''Tela 127", Blue Mesa Review 50 (December 2024), online and print
"Tela 48", Denver Quarterly [cover] 59.1, forthcoming, print
"Jaunaille 1", Blue Mesa Review 50 (Fall 2024), forthcoming, online and print
"Lumens", Salt Hill Journal 52 (October 2024), forthcoming, online and print
"Dapple", and "Going Home", Atlantic Northeast 2.2 (Summer 2024), 17-18, online and print
"Bridge", Amsterdam Quarterly 40 (2024), online
"Canvas 7", "Cornered", "Descent", and "Low", Al-Tiba9, 15 (May 2024), 52-53, print
"Canvas 1", "Canvas 2", "Canvas 4", "Canvas 6", and "Canvas 7", Hole in the Head Review 5.2 (May 2024)
"Old City", L’Esprit Literary Review 4 (April 2024), online and print
"Jaunaille", F-stop Magazine 123 (February-March, 2024), online
"Skylar", "Pigweed Beetle", "Green Heron", and "Brown Pelican", Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art 18 (December 2023), online
"Monochromata 1", and "Monochromata 2," phoebe 52.2 (May 14, 2023), online
"Interview: Max Cavitch", Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art, January 8, 2023, online
Contributor, "iNaturalist", 2019-present, online
“Life on the Delaware; or, Comings and Goings in the Riparian Zone,” Politics/Letters Live, 1 April 2021, on-line
“A Solitary Executioner Clownfrog Wants You To Know She Exists,” The Journal of Wild Culture, 17 May 2020, on-line
“Whistler’s Mothers: Painters, Models, and Uncanny Arrangements,” forthcoming in American Imago (2025)
“Specters of Translation: Jacques Derrida, Safaa Fathy, and Nom à la mer,” Oxford Literary Review 43.2 (December 2021), 209-48
“Richard Nisbett’s Map of the World,” in Steven S. Powers, ed., The Design His Own [Works of Art and Americana, gallery catalog] (Winter 2021), 48-51, online
“Becky Suss’s Haunts” (exhibition review), Icaphila.org, 23 November 2015, online
“Curbside Quarantine: A Scene of Interspecies Mediality,” Postmodern Culture 22.2 (2012), online
"Review of Matthieu Kassovitz (dir.), La haïne", (DVD/Blu-Ray), The Criterion Collection (2012) Slant (15 May 2012), online
"Review of Jean Cocteau (dir.), Beauty and the Beast", (DVD/Blu-Ray), The Criterion Collection (2001), Slant (16 July 2011), online
“Michael Lucas and the Pornography of Migration,” Senses of Cinema 55 (July 2010), online
“Sex After Death: François Ozon’s Libidinal Invasions,” Screen 48.3 (2007), 313-26
“Interiority and Artifact: Death and Self-Inscription in Thomas Smith’s Self-Portrait,” Early American Literature 37.1 (2002), 89-117
