Announcements

CFP - Imaginaries of the Present: News Photography, Politics, and Poetics

22 and 23 October 2010/
Université du Québec à Montréal
Deadline: 1 May 2010

A production of the Équipe de recherche sur l’imaginaire contemporain, la littérature, les images et les nouvelles textualités (ERIC LINT) and Figura, centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire www.figura.uqam.ca

Photography is not a twenty-first-century imagery. Its technical, epistemological, and symbolic foundations belong, rather, to the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, photography continues to assert its contemporaneity by responding to present-day challenges, whether they are social, compassionate, aesthetic, or political. Photography stands out as an efficient imagery in terms of recording every details of history, significant or not. In fact, it fell to photography to produce the ultimate visual account of the twentieth century, some ten years ago, when the shelves of bookstores were weighed down with an unprecedented number of books full of photographs reputed to be the most famous of the twentieth century. The twentieth century will be memorable or it will not be – this was the implicit injunction behind the massive recourse to event-based photography. The twentieth century will in fact be remarkable – whence the obligatory presence of “masterpieces” of photojournalism, instant monuments exhibited as exemplary crystallizations of history, repeatedly honoured with awards and distinctions.
Even today, photography is accorded a memorial function seemingly rivalled by no other imagery. The news continues to supply multiple examples of this unalterable prerogative of photography. Whatever technological and media changes affect event-based imagery, whatever the response of contemporary societies to the events that affect them, photography remains the purveyor of icons of present times.
To what can this strong currency of photography be attributed? What are the conditions (media-based, political, mental) behind this preserved quality? To which imaginary of contemporaneity does photography contribute? What should the expression “news photograph” mean? How do mediatization procedures (selection, dissemination, repetition) and the monumentalization of press images (artification, exhibition, awarding of prizes) participate in the presentism of photography? What should we think of the persistence of the past – déjà-vu impressions, the reiteration of historical figures, the use of allegory and rhetoric, and so on – within press images?
These are the questions that this colloquium will set out to answer. The proposed papers, in French or English, may come from various disciplines (photography studies, art history, literary studies, aesthetics, communications, cultural studies, visual studies, etc.) and may deal with historical or current subjects of analysis from all geo-cultural origins. Here are some examples of themes and questions that could be explored:

-    Historicity of press images
-    Icons and allegorizations of events
-    Political instrumentalizations of the news
-    Ethical and aesthetic valorization of press images
-    Temporalities of news images
-    Imaginaries of recording and transmission
-    Intermediality and inter-iconicity
-    Figurative reconstruction and reiteration

Proposals for papers (300–500 words) must be received by 1 May 2010, accompanied by a brief CV specifying the candidate’s institutional affiliation. Please send to Vincent Lavoie, Art History Department, Université du Québec à Montréal: lavoie.vincent@uqam.ca. Those whose proposals are accepted will make a twenty-minute oral presentation, followed by a question period. These presentations may then be published in Cahiers Figura, which distributes works and essays linked to the main research axes of the Centre de recherche Figura. 

CFP: Humanising Photography
Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies (DCAPS)
Durham University, UK
25-27 September 2009

In the early twenty-first century, the still photographic image continues to be one of
the central visual technologies of humanitarianism: from the all-too familiar images
documenting successive waves of famine and disease, through those that bear witness to
the action and destruction of war, to the photo ops staged in the arena of struggles for
human rights. Disseminated across a range of media and spanning geographical distances
and cultural divides, photographic images are presented for everyday consumption,
produced by practitioners often working explicitly in the name of ‘humanity’ and
testifying to acts of injustice and states of destitution and abjection. And yet: this humanitarian deployment of photography has been vigorously attacked from a variety of angles. The contemporary moment is plagued by anxieties concerning an oversaturated visual sphere and attendant compassion fatigue, a state of anaesthesia said to blunt the photograph’s political and ethical efficacy. Humanitarian photography is predicated on humanist principles even after more than half a century spent interrogating and deconstructing the discourses of humanism. Within photography theory, not only have there been sustained attempts to dismantle ontological notions of photographic reference, but documentary has been pilloried as a practice that is profoundly implicated in the perpetuation of liberal capitalism. Despite all this, however, the fact that photographic images of human suffering, deprivation and also resilience continue to circulate and be deployed suggests an ongoing belief in their power to affect and ultimately to effect change.
‘Humanising photography’ is a single-track conference that aims to establish a creative forum in which to reflect on the political, ethical, historical, and aesthetic questions thrown up by the persistent presence of such images in the context of humanitarian discourses. It will bring practitioners into dialogue with scholars working in the academic fields of visual culture studies broadly construed and representatives from
humanitarian organizations. Whilst we welcome papers exploring salient contemporary issues and case studies, we especially encourage those that examine other contexts and histories that have been occluded in the contemporary geopolitical moment, in addition to theoretically-oriented reflections.

Possible areas for consideration might include, but are not restricted to:
What modes of humanist photography might still be valid in the twenty-first century? What are the histories of humanist photography? What are the tropes, figures and other rhetorical devices at play in such photography and what are their effects? What is the political and emotional work that is done by this mode of photographic display and does it work? What are the modes of appeal of such images, whom do they address and on what terms? How do the modes of circulation and display impact on modalities of affect and
effectivity?

Instructions for submission of abstracts
Please send 500-word abstracts for 30-minute conference presentations and a brief
biographical note (maximum 5 lines), together with affiliation and contact details to:
<mailto:photo.group@dur.ac.uk&gt;photo.group@dur.ac.uk.

Deadline for abstract submission: 1 December 2008.

Notification: by 5 January 2009.