Artistic submissions to the conference exhibition and proposals for paper presentations, poster sessions, workshops, roundtables, or colloquia are invited for the Fifth International Conference on the Image, to be held 29-30 October 2014 in Berlin, Germany. Submissions are welcome from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, and faculty and students are encouraged to jointly submit proposals discussing The Image through one of the following themes: The Form of the Image; Image Work; The Image in Society.

The deadline for the current round of the call for papers is 3 October 2013.  Additional information is available here.

Submissions for the 2013 Image Conference and exhibition in Chicago are also still open. More information on the submitting your proposal or attending the conference in Chicago is available here.

If you are unable to attend the conference, you may still join the community and submit your article for peer review and possible publication, upload an online presentation, and enjoy subscriber access to The International Journal of the Image.

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 WHAT IS DOCUMENTARY? YESTERDAY, TODAY & TOMORROW
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON IN PORTLAND, OREGON
April 24-26, 2014

Documentaries continue to play important roles in defining, exposing, and transforming social realities. Today, we are witnessing an explosion of documentary making enabled by new digital production and distribution technologies, even as traditional news media may seem compromised and in decline.

We will gather at the University of Oregon’s Portland campus from April 24-26, 2014, to explore the past, present and future of documentary in all its forms. The conference will feature a unique coalescing of media scholars and students, media professionals, independent media producers, government and community officials, as well as interested community groups and the public. The event will feature keynote speakers, roundtables, paper presentations, and screenings, in an attempt to answer questions about the changing nature of documentary.

We welcome proposals that address any and all forms of documentary – film, video, radio, audio, photography, print, digital media, online, etc.

Send 250-word proposals by October 1, 2013, to:
Janet Wasko (jwasko@uoregon.edu) or Gabriela Martinez (gmartine@uoregon.edu)
School of Journalism and Communication
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97405, USA

Photograph by Dorothea Lange, “Dust storm at this War Relocation Authority center where evacuees of Japanese ancestry are spending the duration” (Manzanar, CA, July 3, 1942. 210-G-10C-839 [http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/#home]).  

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I don’t think we’ve mentioned this before, and it’s new enough to still be off the radar for many in both the professional and academic communities, so:

Philosophy of Photography is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the scholarly understanding of photography. It is not committed to any one notion of photography nor, indeed, to any particular philosophical approach. The purpose of the journal is to provide a forum for debate on theoretical issues arising from the historical, political, cultural, scientific and critical matrix of ideas, practices and techniques that may be said to constitute photography as a multifaceted form. In a contemporary context remarkable for its diversity and rate of change, the conjunction of the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘photography’ in the journal’s title is intended to act as a provocation to serious reflection on the ways in which existing and emergent photographic discourses might engage with and inform each other.

The publisher’s web page for the journal, along with the table of contents for the current issue, is here.  Intellect publishers focus on cultural and media studies, film studies, visual arts, and the performing arts.

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Parodic alternations of iconic images are a dime a dozen online, which makes it all the more telling when an artist uses the same technique.

Polish artist Zbigniew Libera has altered a number of classic images to overlay their dark themes of violence and death with the decor of popular culture, childhood, or other familiar sites of fantasy.  These alterations are detailed enough to create the desired disorientation, but not so much that they don’t circle back around to also reaffirm the original scandal.  The image above is particularly interesting in that regard.

The composition starts out as a mockup of Dmitri Baltermants’ “Grief,” a photograph of villagers from Kerch, Crimea looking for their loved ones who had been slaughtered by the Nazis in 1942.  Although often seen as documentary witness to the horror of civilian casualties in warfare, it appears that the Nazis, you will be shocked to learn, had in fact rounded up thousands of Jews for this massacre.

For a Polish artist to play with such a photo is not inconsequential, but I’m not going there.  What strikes me at the moment is how the retouched image can, when seen in the context of the Boston Marathon bombing, look eerily like a new photograph of yet another slaughter.  And a slaughter once again by people who will kill innocents in the name of purity.  If the message of the parody is that the past is still with us amidst the distractions of contemporary mass culture, then the artist may have done his job.

You can see other images in the series here.  Thanks to Kamila Zrembska for the link.

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In the emotional aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, people from all walks of life created and encountered memorials to those who were murdered. Vernacular art appeared almost everywhere—on walls, trees, playgrounds, vehicles, houses, tombstones, and even on bodies. This outpouring of grief and other acts of remembrance impelled photographer Jonathan Hyman to document and so preserve these largely impermanent, spontaneous expressions. His collection of 20,000 photographs, along with field notes and personal interviews, constitutes a unique archive of 9/11 public memory.

In The Landscapes of 9/11, Hyman offers readers a representative sampling of his photographs and also relates his own story in a clear and detailed narrative. He is joined by a diverse group of scholars and museum professionals, including editors Edward Linenthal and Christiane Gruber, who use the Hyman collection to investigate the cultural functions of memorial practices in the United States and beyond, including Northern Ireland, the Palestinian West Bank, and Iran.

Full disclosure: John Lucaites and I co-authored one of the essays in the volume.  The book is being released this month in cloth and paper; you can order copies here.

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CFP: THE COLD WAR CAMERA

GUATEMALA CITY, FEBRUARY 21-23, 2014

 Photography plays a key role in the cultural politics of the Cold War and its aftermath, from its use in state surveillance operations; through its deployment in acts of resistance to state-sponsored terrorism; to its role in commemorative and on-going judicial processes. While scholars have begun to outline the visual cultural politics of the Cold War in regional and national contexts, there has yet to be a full exploration of the global, interconnected networks of production, circulation and reception of photography during this period. A full picture of photography’s role during a war that was prosecuted on multiple fronts requires the collaboration of scholars from multiple disciplines and wide-ranging historical expertise. The aim of this conference is to spark this scholarly network and collaboration. The Cold War Camera is a conference that brings together scholars from varied fields to trace how photography forges these intercultural links and mediates this global conflict.

Participants in this conference are invited to present 20-minute papers on a range of topics relating to the theme of the Cold War Camera, including but by no means limited to:

v   the enlistment of photos to prosecute a war with multiple ‘fronts’ across the globe

v   the under-theorized concept of visual propaganda

v   the development of a communist visual theory

v   photographs’ function within state-sponsored regimes of ‘anti-subversive’ terror

v   the role of photos in resisting this terror

v   links between desire and subversion

v   the relationship between the spectacle of war and the ordinariness of daily life

v   zones of production and exhibition, from Havana to Moscow to Beijing

v   challenges of archival research

v   the impact of archives in constructing public histories and cultural memories

LOCATION AND EVENTS

To shift critical discussion from the US-USSR binary, the conference will be held in Guatemala City, the epicenter of proxy conflicts in Latin America. In 1954, the constitutionally elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup, plunging Guatemala into four decades of political violence. 200,000 citizens are believed to have been killed or disappeared. Guatemala represents an early case of CIA intervention, and training ground for further action in other, better known ‘cold war’ sites in the hemisphere, such as Cuba, Argentina, and Chile. For this reason, Guatemala City is a critical location for investigating the global cultural significance of the Cold War Camera.

In addition to discussion following presentation of papers, this conference will include visits to sites for memorializing the Guatemalan Cold War genocide, including the Historical Archive of the Guatemalan National Police and the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.

Confirmed plenary speakers include Ariella Azoulay, Alberto del Castillo, and Nicholas Mirzoeff.

INSTRUCTIONS AND DEADLINES FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS 

We invite submission of abstracts, from which we expect to select up to twenty, and are delighted to offer funding to cover accommodation and subsistence to those participants whose proposals are accepted.

August 1st, 2013. 500-word proposals and brief biographical note and contact info are due.

September 1st, 2013. Selected participants will be notified.

December 20th, 2013. 10-page drafts of conference papers are due for circulation with co-panelists and discussants.

Contact info: Please submit all proposals, cvs, and inquiries to info@inthedarkroom.org under the subject heading “Cold War Camera conference.” Questions can also be directed to the organizers: Thy Phu (tphu@uwo.ca) and Andrea Noble (andrea.noble@durham.ac.uk).

Visit the Cold War Camera website and blog at http://inthedarkroom.org/coldwarcamera/

Publication plans: Participants in the conference are invited to adapt their presentations into a 500-word blog for the Cold War Camera website. Expanded papers from this conference may also be invited for consideration in a co-edited, peer-reviewed volume of essays.

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VISCOM, the Visual Communication Conference will convene June 26-30 at the Sheraton Hotel in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

“The Visual Communication Conference is a un-Organized conference… there is no association, no board, no dues, no official membership. It is an annual get-together of people passionate about Visual Communication and it is that passion that makes it the most satisfying, most creative four days you will ever experience.  The conference is plenary… everyone presents to everyone.”

You don’t have present to attend, but you do have to register.  The penultimate draft of the conference program is here.

Photograph from Rocky Mountain National Park, May 19, 2013,  by Jill Rumley.

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OK, this is a mash-up.  There are two events this weekend that we didn’t publicize earlier, so they are being posted together.  First, Photoworks in the UK is putting up the House 2013 exhibition at sites around Brighton.  This year’s theme is Art and Domestic Space.  To get a sense of the imaginative range, consider that the exhibition includes this photo.

You can read more about the event, artists, and venues here.  The exhibition runs from May 4 through May 26.

For those in the Chicago area, the Theoretical Archaeology Group is hosting a conference this May 9-11 at the University of Chicago.  The conference theme is Vision, which the paper call defined as including (but not being limited to):

•vision as dream: from its Latin root, visionem – things seen in dreams, the imagination, the supernatural
•vision as sense: the phenomenology of sight and the place of art, aesthetics, and contemporary architectural theory in archaeological contexts
•vision as power and domination: surveillance, panopticons, and legibility
•vision as time and intention: planning, futures, utopias, millennial movements, and the forecasts of the past
•vision as method: the rapidly changing visual methods of archaeology through computer technology and imaging and the ways these methods are transforming epistemology

To see where that lead, you can download the program and abstracts here.  Conference details are here.

Photograph by Mariele Neudecker.

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This weekend the Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest is underway in East London.  Many of the shows are focused on or around film, but the festival also includes an exhibition of work by photographer and essayist Claude Cahun (nee Lucy Schwob).

The show is curated by Ashley Lumb, Kay Watson, Hazel Johnson, and Fangfei Chen from the curatorial collective Hemera.  Those in the area can check it out, but the rest of us might pause for a moment to consider the question of whether there is much of a relationship between photojournalism and queer experience, a queer gaze, queer optics, or queer aesthetics and politics?

This blog promotes photojournalism as an important public art, and we believe that public arts and public culture alike are necessarily oriented toward mainstream audiences, with all the limitations and powers that define that demographic.  (To get a sense of both the conservative bias in and political importance of the mainstream, consider the massive rollback that is occurring right now regarding discrimination against gay people.)  So, it should come as no surprise that much photojournalism is heteronormative, and the critique of same doesn’t say much we don’t know.

But still, and especially compared to film and other media arts, it does seem that photojournalism is very, very straight.  From the macho ethos of the conflict photographer to how rarely we are brought to see with a queer eye, you have to wonder.

There are exceptions, of course, and I don’t just mean that there are photographers who are gay or photographers who document (and affirm) gay subcultures.  I’m talking, at the very least, about seeing in a way that can reveal how the world looks to someone who has been told to be invisible, and who has been hurt deeply by what others simply take for granted, and perhaps who has learned how much can be gained by seizing appearances and surviving through performance; and how society is strange and vicious and capricious and sometimes all we have and yet capable of being amazing; and how seeing that way might make others a little less thoughtless.

There are some examples of what can be done.  Bernard Pierre Wolff provided terrific work that showed gay life as one form of friendship that fit seamlessly into public spaces.  As you see through his work, your conception of friendship and of love becomes larger, gentler, richer, more kind; and you see how granting visibility creates and expands the human world.

There surely have been others.  The history of photography was influenced profoundly by Eadweard Muybridge, who, if he wasn’t queer, provided a pretty good approximation.  And just as some see gay life in his photos and others missed it, there could be shades in other work that many mainstream viewers are missing today.  One also has to recognize the work done in fine art photography, such as was showcased at the exhibition on Contemporary Queer Photography.  But art photography is rarely mainstream, while photojournalism has an obligation in that direction.  If you want to change society, you have to go through the mainstream, and queering photojournalism, bending it away from its old assumptions about gender and sexual orientation, could improve both the art and the society it serves.

This is not to blame anyone, and especially not the gay community.  You can’t expect photography to have flourished in the closet, and now there is much else to do.  Nor am I trying to essentialize any part of gay life or anything else.  And I have no doubt that I could have missed a lot due to my being too ignorant, straight, or otherwise clueless.  Wouldn’t be the first time.

Still, I can’t help but think that something important is missing.

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