[ecrea] Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication cfp

 Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication


Call for Submissions
Critical Histories of Photography in the Middle East
Special issue of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication


A rich vernacular photographic culture has thrived in the Middle East 
for well over a century. The history of this culture, however, remains 
largely unknown. The ways in which “photography” and “Middle East” have 
most commonly been brought together in scholarly writing has largely 
eschewed local photographic practices in favor of only one type of 
photographic production, created for western audiences and located in 
western collections. Very little is known about the many local 
deployments, markets, and usages in which photographs have flourished 
and continue to thrive.

A new generation of scholars has recently begun to shift the focus of 
enquiry towards local photographic practices. Mining previously unused 
sources spanning family and provincial archives to local studios and 
flea markets, a very different photographic history is emerging at their 
hands. This special issue of the Middle East Journal of Culture and 
Communication aims to map this emerging field.

We seek contributions exploring the varieties of local photographic 
traditions and practices including the production, circulation and 
consumption of photographs across the region in multiple social 
contexts. We welcome contributions from a wide range of academic 
disciplines (social and cultural history, anthropology, sociology, 
visual, cultural, and media studies) that place local photographic 
practices at their centre. We welcome both historical and contemporary 
perspectives, ranging from the origins of local photography in the 19th 
century to the most recent developments in digital media, including 
photographs circulated on Facebook or on mobile phones. We seek 
contributions that are theoretically sophisticated, especially when it 
comes to understanding the performativity, materiality and vernacularity 
(i.e. embeddedness in social contexts) of photographs. However, we 
require a strong engagement with original material and original research.

We are particularly interested in contributions that explore, but are 
not necessarily limited to, the following aspects of vernacular photography:

* Studio practices, pictorial conventions, cultural flows. Local 
meanings, global
influences. Markets. Visual languages and visual economies.
* Genres and their usages. Studio portraiture, photographic albums, family
snapshots, travel photography, weddings, portraits of patriarchs on 
walls and of children in wallets.
* Circulation: hanging, framing, showing, displaying, exchanging, 
giving, hiding,
destroying, forgetting, losing.
* Photographs and gender; photographic objects as mediators of social 
relations.
* Photographs as instruments of power and authority. Photographs as 
mediators
of cohesion, subversion, resistance, conflict, memory, social identity, 
status, taste, subjectivity, belonging, intimacy.
* The afterlives of photographs. Photographs lost and found, sold and 
bought:
critical reflections on preserving, archiving, curating or collecting. 
Collage, manipulation, photoshopping. Re-using, re-deploying.
* Photographs’ relationships to other media (painting, writing, print, 
digital
environments, mobile phones) and to other sensory regimes (touch, smell, 
sound). Photographs’ relationship to space and time.


Please submit a 500 words abstract by 30 November 2013 to 
(lucie.ryzova /at/ history.ox.ac.uk). Selected authors will be notified by 15 
December and invited to submit their papers by 30 March 2014. The volume 
is scheduled for publication in early 2015.

We also welcome photographic and multi-media essays related to any of 
our topics, whose inclusion into the print-edition of the MEJCC might 
not be feasible, but which could be accommodated in an accompanying 
feature on the Jadaliyya Photography Page.





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