[ecrea] Northern Light - call for papers

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

NORTHERN LIGHT: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO PROXIMITY AND DISTANCE IN 
NORTHERN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

Sheffield Hallam University, 2-3 July 2018

To coincide with the publication of our book, /Northern Light: 
Landscape, Photography, and Evocations of the North /(Chris Goldie & 
Darcy White (eds.) Transcript Verlag, April 2018) Sheffield Hallam 
University will hold a second conference around critical issues arising 
from the photographic representation of the northern landscape. The 
conference will be accompanied by an exhibition and we envisage both 
events as an opportunity for creative dialogue between theorists and 
practitioners. Selected papers from the conference will be considered 
for inclusion in a publication. A wide range of topics are welcomed for 
discussion at the conference, and we invite papers from any artist, 
critical writer, academic or theorist working within this field, whilst 
proposals can be made as contributions to one of the following potential 
strands:

  * Contemporary photography and the northern Landscape: representation
    and appropriation
  * Climate change and the politics of northern landscape photography
  * Northern landscape photography and contemporary consumerism
  * The northern landscape and neoliberalism
  * Northern landscapes as spaces of liminality
  * Documentary landscape photography
  * Discourses on the north in landscape photography
  * Historical approaches to the northern landscape
  * Landscape photography, landscape painting and the northern pictorial
    tradition
  * The scopic regime(s) of landscape photography
  * The northern landscape within global media

We emphasise that we are very open to other themes and approaches and 
particularly welcome any contributions from artists or theorists whose 
work is centred within a particular geographical location, such as 
northern Britain, northern Europe, the Nordic countries, Canada, Alaska, 
Siberia, and Russia. We also invite papers with a topographical theme, 
such as mountains, forest, wilderness, and ice.Finally, whilst the 
primary focus is photography and photography as an expanded practice, we 
also encourage contributions from artists and critics working within 
other media – cinema, animation, video, painting, drawing, performance – 
as well as from other disciplines: literary studies, cultural studies, 
philosophy, history, cultural geography, anthropology, sociology, and 
tourism.

We invite submission of a proposal for a 20 minute paper, to be 
accompanied by a 500 word abstract. Deadline for submission is 16^th 
April 2018. Send to Chris Goldie ((c.t.goldie /at/ shu.ac.uk))

There will be a separate call for contributions to the photographic 
exhibition.

For further details about the conference please go to the website- 
https://northernlight2016.wordpress.com/

<https://northernlight2016.wordpress.com/>
	
Northern Light | Landscape Photography and Evocations of ... 
<https://northernlight2016.wordpress.com/>
northernlight2016.wordpress.com
The conference and related exhibition explores the ways that 
photographic images address notions of a Northern landscape – whether 
drawing on established traditions ...


DARCY WHITE & CHRIS GOLDIE - CONFERENCE CONVENERS

*The rationale of the conference*

The aim of the conference is to explore the many ways in which 
contemporary photography represents, interprets, experiences and 
appropriates the northern landscape. We understand these different 
approaches in terms of alternative scopic regimes, ranging from the 
challenge to Cartesian perspectivalism, to critical methodologies 
questioning the role of landscape in consumerism, globalisation and 
environmental degradation.Since Descartes the notion of a mind body 
dualism has occupied and divided thinkers. Such a dualism has continued 
to concern those who seek to understand our relationship to landscape as 
a genre of the visual arts – a genre that perhaps more than ever has a 
firm place in contemporary visual culture, in the so-called high arts, 
in popular culture and in the world of commerce. Such dualisms 
artificially divide our understandings of the relationships between 
culture and nature; between mind and body; even between work and 
leisure. Many artists and commentators continue to explore such 
dualisms, particularly those who are keen to challenge the separation of 
the visual from the other senses and the promotion of a detached, 
distanced point of view, who insist instead that sight should be 
intertwined with other senses in order to produce a direct and fully 
embodied experience of place and space.

The challenge to the scopic regime of Cartesian perspectivalism has been 
pronounced within the practice of landscape photography. The direct 
experience of landscape resonates fully with the inherently indexical 
character of photography, for where painters can imagine and paint the 
world from their studio, the photographer has to be in the world in 
order to photograph it. Landscape photographer Dan Holdsworth (who has 
recently been engaged in making work in the Alps, in Iceland and in 
North America) has spoken about this:

“when you are a photographer you have to be in the world" and 
“photographers come under a lot of criticism in some ways, strangely, 
for that … "painters in their studios work away very studiously … and 
it's a very cerebral exercise … but I always find photography 
interesting because you actually have to put yourself into the world … 
its no less cerebral for that but you do have to go there and confront it”.

Photographers confront the world and we, as viewers, confront their 
representations of it. This raises the question: what is it that 
landscape photography does for us, as photographers and as viewers? What 
interests, satisfactions or pleasures arise through an engagement with 
landscape? What personal or social functions are fulfilled through 
landscape? Can landscape be understood as a site of resistance to the 
culture of capitalist modernity? Alternatively, given the burgeoning 
presence of landscape in commercialised leisure and tourism, and its 
centrality to the process of globalisation, is it now necessary to 
interrogate the co-option of landscape? We wonder if these two distinct 
aspects of landscape: as site of human presence, activity and 
experience, or as a way of appropriating the world in the era of 
neoliberalism, require different critical modes of engagement, the 
former based within phenomenology and the rejection of a narrowly visual 
approach, the latter necessarily embracing a more distanced form of 
critique.Because of its history as well as its significance in 
contemporary practice, the northern landscape remains important to these 
questions.


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