Donald Trump’s presidency began with a battle over images. Photographs had been reframed, his administration insisted, to detract from the largest inauguration crowd in history. When images of the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations showed otherwise, the new administration refused to back down. The production of knowledge in photography has been much debated, yet with little emphasis on the agents involved in this exchange and the production process. Building on Photography in Academic Research, an international event organised by Photography + (Con) Text at UCL in September 2016, this conference will address and critically discuss the power struggles between the photographer and the photographed in a world where these two roles are constantly interchangeable. It will draw on the history of photography to interrogate claims that photography finds itself in a changed socio-political context. Through roundtables, research panels, workshops and networking opportunities, this interdisciplinary event will promote collaboration and exchange between social researchers who use photography in their research and practitioners. It will serve as a space for photography, encouraging its uses, analyses and practices in social research and art.
Keynote speakers include Steve Edwards (Professor of History & Theory of Photography at Birkbeck).
This event is organised by Birkbeck’s Departments of Politics, Cultures and Languages, Geography and History of Art, the Derek Jarman Lab, the Centre for Iberian and Latin and American Visual Studies and the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre with the support of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the The Royal Anthropological Institute.
Call for panels, papers and visual submissions
Contributions are welcome from scholars, researchers, artists, educators, and graduate students working in all fields including but not limited to social research, the arts, pedagogy, history, museums, archives and other fields engaged in the analysis and the production of photography. Specific topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
The still image in a world in movement
Photographs in a world of textual hegemony
The use of photographs in social research and writing
Photographic ethnographies
The politics of visual evidence and the archive
The social and political life of photographs
Photography in Latin America
Contested relationships between still and moving images
