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[ecrea] CFP: Rethinking Early Photography

Wed Oct 15 08:46:39 GMT 2014



CFP

*Call for papers – ‘Rethinking Early Photography’
16^th -17^th June 2015, University of Lincoln*

/Keynotes/: Kate Flint, Lindsay Smith, Kelley Wilder

Attitudes to photography have undergone a radical shift in recent times. Partly in response to these contemporary changes, historians, curators and photographic practitioners have begun to re-examine older forms of photography: exploring the wide variety of historical technologies and techniques, finding surprising ways in which images were manipulated and determining how an ideology of photographic realism was maintained. Yet there remains a need for scholars to explore questions of early photographic ‘authorship’, singularity and objectivity in much greater detail.

Scholarly studies of nineteenth-century photography have been heavily influenced by later theoretical constructions. As an alternative, Daniel Novak has posited a ‘Victorian theory of photography’. Yet this theory remains unelaborated. Similarly, Elizabeth Edwards and others have called for a move away from the traditional Art History model of analysing photography. This interdisciplinary conference will explore the question of what such an analysis, and such a theory, might look like.

Possible questions and areas of interest for the conference include:

   * How do technological narratives influence our understanding of
     photography?
   * Photography as a business; photographers as workers.
   * The hegemony of nineteenth-century photographic realism, and
     resistances to it.
   * Can/should we do away with the Art History model of photography?
   * Alternatives to the photographer-as-author model of photographic
     exhibition and analysis.
   * To what extent can we think of photography as being separate to
     other print and visual media?
   * The role of photography in the creation of nineteenth-century
     celebrity.
   * Early photography as represented in literature, art and film.
   * Photographs as networks; photographs as objects.
   * When does ‘early’ photography end?
   * Does digital photography allow us to ‘read back’ the
     performativity of images from earlier periods? How might the
     revival of Victorian photographic techniques by current
     practitioners influence historians?

Organisers: Owen Clayton, Jim Cheshire, and Hannah Field.

To submit proposals for 20 minute papers, please send an abstract of 200-250 words to *(rethinkingphotography /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(rethinkingphotography /at/ gmail.com)>*. The deadline is *12^th Jan 2015, 5pm (GMT)*.



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