First Person Impressions

A National competition for Memoir and Documentary Writers, Filmmakers, and Photographers.

Each day countless stories unfold. Take a real life experience of your own and tell it in a way that only you can. Craft your story with words, photos or video. Make the ordinary magical, or the exotic familiar.
Shock us, amaze us, or make us pause to reflect. The only rule is that it’s real.

All entries must be new works that have not previously been published, exhibited, or screened in the US.

Categories
Film: up to 5 minutes
Essay: 1500 words or less
Photography: up to 5 images. Single images are welcome; multiple images must be related, as in a photo essay.

Prizes
The top three winning entries in each category will be presented at the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, November 12-16, 2008.

$500: 1st place category winners
$100: 2nd place category winners
$50: 3rd place category winners

The 1st place writing and photography winners will have their work published in various publications including the Philadelphia City Paper. For a complete listing of publications go to impressions.firstpersonarts.org. The top five entries in each category will be featured on firstpersonarts.org

Judges
Documentary Video
Steven Rea, Film Critic, Philadelphia Inquirer
Samuel Adams, Contributing Editor, Philadelphia City Paper
Ron Kanter, Emmy Award-winning director of New Cops, Acting Out, Life and Death. Dawson, Georgia

Photography
Katherine Ware, curator of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Short Memoir
Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love column in the New York Times
Laurence Kirshbaum, Founder and agent, LJK Literary, former CEO Time Warner Book Group
Amy Salit, Producer, Fresh Air, WHYY FM

Enter at impressions.firstpersonarts.org

Video: http://www.viddler.com/explore/FirstPersonArts/videos/33/

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The 19th annual Women in Photojournalism Conference will be held August 8-10 in New Orleans

Speakers include:

Melody Gilbert, Brent E. Huffman, Andrea Koriff, Lindsay McCullough, Gail McCabe, Leonel Mendez, Mona Reeder, and Ron Tarver

Also featured are exhibitions and a workshop on video

Exhibition entry deadline is June 23, 2008

Additional information is available here.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Iconotopoi/Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image)
Current Academic Practices in the Study of Images
Joint Eikones-McGill Graduate Conference
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University, Montreal
December 3 to 5, 2008

The joint McGill-Eikones Graduate Conference Iconotopoi/Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image) aims to identify and challenge cultural and linguistic barriers within the academy, so that the study of images may one day become as mobile as its objects of inquiry.

Since the early 1990s, at least two interdisciplinary fields dedicated to understanding images attest to the differences in cultural/academic approaches to the study of images: Visual Studies in America, and Bildwissenschaften in German-speaking Europe. Each of these fields traces its roots back to the Linguistic Turn, and both stem from the Pictorial or Iconic Turn (cf. W.J.T. Mitchell’s Critical Iconology and G. Boehm’s notion of Bildkritik). Bildkritik emphasizes the singular image, its inner tensions and structures, and its temporal and affective interplays. In contrast, Visual Studies often focus on the social and political contexts of image production
and reception, thereby broadening the field in which images are considered.

Iconotopoi/Bildkulturen aims to confront these diverse critical cultures of the image through case-study presentations by international scholars. The conference will forge a constructive dialogue between German-, French-, and English-language academic cultures, at a time when allegedly international discourses tend to lose sight not only of the singularity of the image, but also of singular approaches to understanding images that can be found in
different cultures.

Proposals in English or French from graduate students in all relevant
fields are welcome. We especially encourage reflections on
interdisciplinary and/or cross-cultural methodologies in the study of
images. Possible research topics include:
–Affective imagery (Anthropology, Art History, Dance Studies,
Performance Studies, Religious Studies, Theatre Studies)
–Imaging knowledge (Information Design, Scientific Visualisation)
–Non/narrative imagin(in)gs (Anthropology, Literature, Philosophy,
Psychology)
–Digital Images (New Media Studies, Informatics)

Send a 250-word abstract, along with a 100-word biography, to
iconotopoi@gmail.com <mailto:iconotopoi@gmail.com> by May 30, 2008.

All submissions should be identified with your name and complete contact information, as well as details about your institutional affiliation.

Additional information: http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/iconotopoi
<http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/iconotopoi>

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Sprawl
Society for Photographic Education

46th National Conference
March 26-29, 2009 – Dallas, TX

Call for Proposal Submissions
POSTMARK DEADLINE: JUNE 2, 2008

The Society for Photographic Education is seeking conference proposal applications for imagemaker, panel, lecture, demonstration, graduate student and Academic Practicum Workshop presentations for the 2009 National Conference in Dallas, TX. SPE welcomes proposals from all photographers, writers, educators, curators, historians and professionals from other fields. Topics may include, but are not limited to, imagemaking, history, contemporary theory and criticism, multidisciplinary approaches, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, funding and presentations of work in photography, film, video, performance and installation.

Cultural depictions of sprawl have long been a mainstay in popular culture, including the 1970s photo movement New Topographics, William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, the music of Sonic Youth, and in TV shows, such as “Weeds,” with its ‘burb’-inspired theme song “Little Boxes.” Sprawl-suburban landscape and life-serves as both cultural inspiration and critique. The organizers of the 2009 SPE National Conference invite proposal submissions illuminating the visual and cultural complexities of Sprawl as a defining concept and reality of our twenty-first century public experience.

The city of Dallas provides an informative and imaginative backdrop for the conference theme. Like other metropolitan areas since the 1960s, Dallas has seen suburban sprawl reshape its civic geography and identity. Sprawl then is a physical manifestation of civic growth and population migration, housing developments and ‘big-box’ retail parks. But the concept of sprawl also prompts discussions of environmental conservation, the appropriate use of land and resources, the loss and/or renewal of city centers and close-knit neighborhood communities.

The conference, Sprawl, will take place March 26-29, 2009 in Dallas, TX. Proposals must be postmarked by JUNE 2, 2008. For more information, please find the PDF proposal form attached or on the SPE website: www.spenational.org.

Contact: SPE National Office
speoffice@spenational.org
216/622-2733 ph
216/622-2712 fx
www.spenational.org

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MEMEFEST 2008:

EXPLORING RADICAL BEAUTY OF COMMUNICATION!

Memefest, the International Festival of Radical Communication–born in Slovenia and rapidly reaching a critical mass worldwide–is proud to announce its seventh annual competition. Once again, Memefest is encouraging students, writers, artists, designers, thinkers, philosophers, and counter-culturalists to submit their work to our panel of renowned judges.

This years festival theme is RADICAL BEAUTY. Participants will respond to an excerpt taken from themovie Rize and comment on it with their works. Here is how we defined radical beauty: Beauty is a cultural creation that expresses dominant values. In the 21st century beauty is often extremely commercialized. Radical beauty is a cultural creation that expresses the desire of a change in society. Radical beauty is about changing dominant values through action and creation. Grassroots projects are often the vectors of these changes.

As always, those whose work does not take a conventional format can enter the Beyond… category,where the name of the game is challenging mainstream practices and beliefs! Beyond… continues togrow in popularity as a category not only because of its avant-garde appeal but because it is open to non-students as well.

Memefest occurs completely on-line at www.memefest.org, and all entries will be available for full access and commentary in the site galleries. In 2007, Memefest received almost 500 entries from participants of every continent on the globe (except Antarctica). We hope to get bigger, and to spread more of those good infectious ideas, so keep thinking- and creating.

Deadline for submissions is May 20th 2008! Good luck!

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CALL FOR PAPERS:

A Return to the Senses: Political Theory and the Sensorium

– A Theory & Event Conference –
May 7 – 9, 2009

The resurgence of scholarly research on the nexus between politics and aesthetics has brought to the fore rich and diverse investigations on the role of the senses in political life. Whether engaging the theories of perception that configure our understandings of justice, or forms of aesthetic experience in an ethics of appearance, or the role of affect and the passions in human motivation, the concerns that motivate these and other cognate inquiries stem from an important fact of pluralist democratic societies: namely, that individuals or groups in pluralist democracies attend to one another at the level of appearances. In this respect, how we imagine the configuration, disposition, character and function of the senses when engaging political events is of critical importance for political theory.

In collaboration with the political and cultural theory journal Theory & Event, an international conference will be held at Trent University in Peterborough (Canada) on May 7 – 9, 2009. Multidisciplinary in scope and ambition, this conference seeks proposals from scholars whose research interests pursue the diverse cultural sites of political theory’s sensorium. Such sites might include television, cinema, new media, food, music, and dance; practices of visibility, iteration, aurality, flavor; contemporary and historical treatments of perception and taste, time and movement – from a multitude of political, historical and theoretical perspectives.

The submission deadline for proposals is October 1, 2008. Please submit abstracts of 300-400 words (Ph.D. candidates should indicate their expected date of completion) to the following email address: sensorium2009@gmail.com. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in January, 2009.
Conference Organizer:
Davide Panagia
Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies
Traill College, Trent University
Conference Coordinator:
Adrienne Richards
The Center for the Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics
Trent University

Sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and The Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics at Trent University.

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UPDATE: We are at a conference at the University of Rochester on Visual Communication this weekend. Last night we had dinner with Michael Shaw of the BAG and Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois, where we prepared a “collective” post on a photograph from yesterday’s NYT. You can see the post titled “Serpentine Days” here.

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Modernism and Visual Culture

1st-2nd November 2008
Oxford University, UK

Keynote Speakers
David Trotter (Cambridge University)
Laura Marcus (Edinburgh University)
Maggie Humm (University of East London)

“A writer … has need of a third eye whose function is to help out the other senses when they flag.” (Virginia Woolf, 1925)

In the wake of recent analyses of the landscape of visual cultures at the end of the nineteenth century, new contexts have become available for understanding the emergence and shape of modernism. This conference seeks to unpick our tangled model of the relationships between the established arts in the modernist period and between modernism and popular culture, and to illuminate the types of reactions occasioned in the established arts by the emergence of modern mass media. Papers on any aspect of the relationship between modernist literatures and cultures with visual culture, including cinema and fine art, are welcome.

Possible questions to consider:

Are recent claims for modernism’s affinity with popular culture anything new?

Was Cubism’s debt to chronophotography a model for – or an exception to – modernism’s relationship with photo-chemical reproduction?

Was the ‘modernity’ to which the established arts responded actually the emergence of a rival new cultural landscape comprised of cinema, variety theatre, instantaneous photography, stage illusions, the moving panorama, mass spectator sports, moving-image lantern shows, the illustrated short story and the cartoon strip?

Did literary modernism emerge in emulation of the innovations occurring in modernist painting?

What role did modernism play in altering established theories of visual culture?

Can modernism and late-nineteenth-century popular visual culture be seen as the twin products of a single preceding historical development?

What singular and identifiable properties, if any, did such related forms as cinema, cartoon strips or shadowgrams have in impacting on the existing arts?

Were the different modernisms of the various established arts the product of their varying vantage points on new media forms?

If new visual media generated modernism, did they do so by threatening to become art forms themselves, or by throwing the distinct qualities of the existing arts into relief?

Were modernists already modernists when their work adopted the traits of various new forms of visual culture?

Is realism in cinema equivalent to modernism in the existing arts?

Was the reflexivity learned by the group of polymedia practitioners we call modernists the basis of modernist form in all of the arts?

Speakers are encouraged to use visual material in their presentations. Send 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers to Andrew Shail (andrew.shail@at-annes.ox.ac.uk), by 1 April 2008. Panel proposals are welcome – please include contact details and affiliations for all speakers.

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The “Visible Memories” Conference will take place at Syracuse University, October 2-4, 2008. The conference will explore the intersections of visual culture and memory studies with particular focus on the ways in which memories are manifested and experienced in visible, material, or spatial form. Featured speakers  include Keynote Speaker Enesto Pujo, Cara Finnegan, Andrea Hammer, George Legrady, Julia Metzer, Phaedra Pezzullo, Gregory Sholette, David Thorne, and Patricia Zimmerman.The call for competitive panel sessions indicates a special interest in (but is not limited to) work on local sites of memory; memorials and archives; environmentalism and representations ofnature; regioal, national, or global tourism; photography or cinema; digital media; and art installations.Submission Guidelines: Submit a paper abstract electronically (500 word maximum). Include a separate cover page with paper title; author name and affiliation; and contact information. Submissions should be addressed to Dr. Anne T. Demo (atdemo@syr.edu). Deadline for abstract submission is May 1, 2008. Acceptance notification will be sent by June 1, 2008.For additional details contact Dr. Demo (above) or check the conference website.

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The schedule for the 4th Biennial Kern Conference on Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology is now online. The Conference takes place at the University of Rochester, April 10-14, 2008. If you’ve never been to one of these conferences and can get there you should attend. This year features a keynote address by Professor Thomas Benson, Penn State University; a master panel on the past, present, and future of Visual Rhetoric featuring Lester Olson-University of Pittsburgh, Carolyn Handa-University of Alabama, Charles Hill and Marguerite Helmers-University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and Kevin DeLuca-University of Georgia; and a screening of Ron Osgood’s My Vietnam Your Iraq.

Perhaps the highlight for readers of NCN will be the panel on “Blogging Visual Politics” chaired by Cara Finnegan and featuring Michael Shaw from BAGnewsNotes, Jim Johnson from (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography, and your favorite bloggers from nocaptionneeded.com.

And of course you can round out the weekend with a visit to the George Eastman House and International Museum of Film and Photography.

For more information see the Conference website.

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