Event Dates: 1 and 2 November 2019
University of West London
St Mary’s Rd,
Ealing,
London W5 5RF
The University of West London presents:
The fields of photography theory and history have in recent years moved away from the assumption of a break between the analogue and digital image to a more nuanced understanding of both past and contemporary photographic practices, images, and technologies.
Increasingly photography is discussed in relation to other media, to industry and markets and to climate and the environment. At the same time questions of aesthetics and interpretation are recast and understood in terms of sensual, haptic, embodied and everyday encounters with material images.
This conference will examine photography as simultaneously material and immaterial, addressing not only the tangible properties of photographic objects, but also the ecosystems in which they circulate.
We live in and through the photographic, in its physical presence in the world, and in our thought. The conference thus also invites considerations of the ways in which a mode of philosophical thinking can be conceived as photographic or vice versa.
The conference was convened by Professor Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool) and Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya (University of West London) and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Programme:
Friday 1 November 2019
Opening and Welcome by Michelle Henning and Theresa Mikuriya:
Session 1 Atmospheres of Photography and Film (chair Michelle Henning)
Liz Watkins – The Spectacle of Nothing in a Photographic Ecosystem of Antarctica
Victor dos Reis – Smoke, Steam and Lava: the Uncertain Landscapes of Francisco Afonso Chaves (1857- 1926)
Stephen Turner & Susanna Collinson – ‘Strange Radiance’: the Being-in-Relation of the Photographic Index
========================
Keynote Lecture (chair Michelle Henning)
Professor Laura U. Marks – A Radical Indexicality: Cultivating Cosmic Perception
Introduction:
Talk:
========================
Session 2 Histories, Process and Mediation (chair Rowan Lear)
Joel McKim – Oscillons and Cathode Rays: Photographic Hybrids in Early Computer Art
Pierre Pernuit – Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux Junior and the Reflective Media
Kim Knowles [read by Michelle Henning] – Politics of Process: Gestures of Material Understanding in
Contemporary Film Practice
========================
Session 3 Operational Images (chair Garin Dowd)
Tonje Sorenson – Above Flanders Fields: Aerial Photography, Vertical Mediation and Trench Warfare in World War I
Jussi Parikka – Operational Images: Contemporary Arts to Historical Method
Abelardo Gil-Fournier – The Vegetal Calculated Image
============================
Session 4 Figuring Presence, Evoking Pasts (chair Matilde Nardelli)
Lucy Mensah – Taken to Scale: Black Female Spectrality, Architectural Photography and Institutional Critique in Carrie Mae Weems’ Museum Series
Lara Thompson – Past-Light: Photo-filmic History as (En)lightened Cinematic Fetish
============================
Saturday 2 November 2019
Session 5 Rethinking the Photographic Image (chair James Burton)
Daniel Rubinstein – Photography after Philosophy
Ohad Zehavi – Julio Cortázar’s Las babas del diablo: Towards a Non-Photographic Non-Philosophy of Photography
Tomas Dvorak – Photography’s Eccentric Metrics
============================
Keynote Lecture (chair Theresa Mikuriya)
Professor Howard Caygill – The Photography of Plants
Introduction:
Talk:
======================
Session 6 Time and Light (chair Gillian Swanson)
Niharika Dinkar – ‘Our best machines are made of sunlight’: Photography and Technologies of Light
Peter Bennett – Latent Images and the Solidity of Memory
Elizabeth Howie – If a Tree Falls in the Forest: Wood Pulp Paper and Photographs of Trees
=======================
Session 7 Everyday Photoplay (chair Shela Sheikh)
Paul Frosh – Relocating Photography: The Screenshot as Cultural Memory
Peter Buse – Ludic Photography
=====================
Plenary discussion and close (chair Peter Buse) with Michelle Henning, Annebella Pollen, Howard Caygill & Laura U. Marks
