[ecrea] CFP - Photography Off the Scale (conference)

(conference call)

Photography Off the Scale

FAMU in Prague, 9–10th November 2018

We have become accustomed to speaking of photography in terms of deluge, 
flow, overload, multiplicity, multitude or excess; using liquid 
metaphors, projections of exponential growth and various gargantuan 
measures that exceed not only singular images but also their series, 
archives or databases. The photographic gesture seems to be no longer 
one of pressing the shutter but rather the instantaneous uploading, 
searching, tagging, sharing, networking and filtering of masses of 
images. At the same time, the images don’t seem to represent or mediate 
anymore but rather operate, track, activate, oversee, control, detect 
and identify. Most contemporary accounts seem to suggest some kind of 
Hegelian phase transition – a becoming-other of photography, its 
breaking off and a leap from quantitative into qualitative alteration.

“Around sixty billion photographs are taken every year,” claimed Julian 
Stallabrass in 1996; Joan Fontcuberta updated the figures recently: “800 
million images are uploaded to Snapchat every day, together with 350 
million to Facebook and 80 million to Instagram.” “This year, people 
will take about a trillion photos, and for many of us, that means a 
digital photo gallery filled with images that we won’t actually look 
at,” claims Josh Lovejoy at the presentation of Google Clips, a 
hands-free AI-powered camera, which automatically recognizes and 
captures memorable moments without human intervention.

What kind of entity is “about a trillion photos”? What kind of perceiver 
does it presuppose? Do such vertiginous quantifications imply something 
about the changing nature of photography and, if so, in what sense? What 
happens to images when the displays are turned off? Are we producing 
streams of redundant images just to train machines to see?

The conference “Photography Off the Scale” seeks to address the 
ever-growing number of cameras and images and the techniques and 
approaches, both artistic and scholarly, of coping with the large-scale, 
gigantic and incalculable in photography.

Abstract of 500 words for 30-minute presentations accompanied by a short 
bio, including name and affiliation of author(s) should be sent to 
(tomdvorak /at/ famu.cz) <mailto:(tomdvorak /at/ famu.cz)>by 31^st May 2018. 
Notification of selected proposals will be sent back by 15^th June.

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