My name is Garrett Suderman. Born and raised in a small town south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, I attended the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia beginning in 2022. During my undergraduate degree, I conducted original research on the German Romantic writer Novalis (1772-1801); the British engraver and poet William Blake (1757-1827); the photographers Willy Römer (1887-1979) and Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966); and the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). I graduated with a double major with honours in the departments of Germanic Studies and English in 2026. My interests, academic and personal, form the material core of this website.
I am currently working on my Master of Arts in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), my research investigates critique, photography, and futurity in the thought of Walter Benjamin. More precisely, I ask, in Benjamin’s thinking, what is the relationship between photography and writing? In his view, how did modern photography, following the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, change the way writing was understood? More specifically, how did the emergence of photography undermine the epistemological authority of writing? To put it another way, how do new technologies shake our faith in traditional ones’ ability to represent “the truth?” And how did the narratives that once governed the interpretive rules of traditional technologies – writing, speech, print, painting, etc. – become inscribed, knowingly or unknowingly, in new ones?
Though my research centres on contemporary photographical theory and the writings of Walter Benjamin, I draw on philosophical-literary influences and conceptual tools as widely cast as critical theory – especially the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Giorgio Agamben, Immanuel Kant, and Jacques Derrida – German Romanticism, the fragment, Denkbilder (thought-images), genealogy, and the theory of signatures.
In my work, I consider how the value schemata one adopts produce their interpretations of cultural objects and how these values reflect broader concerns – especially political, social, epistemological, and moral – central to their respective historical periods. Cultural productions, like all human activities, are inextricably linked to the interpenetrating forms of social life. As the German philosopher G.W.F Hegel succinctly wrote in 1820, “it is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual could leap out of time or jump over Rhodes.” And in my view, a gentler, kinder, more thoughtful world might come into view only if we are brave enough to historicize and critique the one we already inhabit. To paint, one first needs a canvas.
“Wohl bin ich ein Wald und eine Nacht dunkler Bäume: doch wer sich vor meinem Dunkel nicht scheut, der findet auch Rosenhänge unter meinen Cypressen [I am a forest and a night of dark trees: she who does not shy away from my darkness might find rose-covered banks under my cypresses.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1883
