[Commlist] cfp: Images among us

 Call for Papers
IMAGES AMONG US
https://helsinkiphotomedia.aalto.fi/call-for-papers/

The theme of the 5th Helsinki Photomedia Conference in 2020 is Images 
Among Us.

The conference brings together international photography researchers, 
artists and practitioners. It offers various platforms where artistic, 
philosophical, social and technological approaches to photography can meet.
“Those who write and make images will have to become envisioners.”

– Vilém Flusser

The theme “Images Among Us” refers to the roles of photographic images 
in a world that is vibrant, transitory and overcharged by affects. The 
contours and borders of media rearrange themselves in virtual and 
material environments in various platforms and social spaces. The 
flicker of their dividing lines becomes intermittently vague and 
distinct. In this dense historical assemblage, the photographic image 
itself has become disintegrated and embedded in different media.

Evidently, the present condition is difficult to access through our 
customary photographic categories and thinking. Photographic images are 
much more than familiar mediators between the world and ourselves. They 
have become simultaneously comforting and threatening. Photographic 
operations have become more and more elusive, with photography becoming 
less and less reducible to its myriad uses and capacities. However, 
enduring ontological questions on the essence, materiality and origins 
of photography have become more significant than ever. For example, 
photographs still possess traces of the evidential currency that has 
defined much of photography’s history.

Helsinki Photomedia 2020 invites alternative formulations, critical 
observations, artistic reflections and presentations of photography 
projects that react to the present photographic condition in various 
ways, seeking to instigate productive dialogues.

We invite you to address and challenge these concerns from the 
perspective of your practice, guided by the following intertwined subthemes:
Theme 1. Artistic Practices

What is the role of photographic art in the present media environment? 
How is the intimacy of singular imaging practices possible within 
contemporary visual abundance? How can artistic research contribute? Is 
the task of the artist to describe and understand or to critically 
engage? What documentary strategies and imaginary fictions have become 
most pressing?
Theme 2. Technologies & Cultures

The track technologies and cultures is particularly interested in the 
intertwinements between visual and material photographic practices. 
Exemplary questions include, but are not limited to: How are our 
understandings of photographic images altered by technologies, both 
“old” and “new”? What kinds of cultural effects do specific technologies 
have, and how in turn do particular cultures form what photographic 
technologies are understood to be? What is the relation of photographic 
technologies to various ecological concerns, to issues of privacy, or 
understandings of ethical use?
Theme 3. Critical Approaches

What does the concept of “critical” mean (or potentially mean) in the 
context of contemporary photography? What kinds of current critical 
photographic practices do we find in the realms of gender, migration, 
climate change, politics and media? How has the problem of critical 
practices been articulated in social and political theories of 
photography? How do the production of visual knowledge and critical 
practices relate to each other in the “post-truth” era?
Important dates

    30.11.2019 – Deadline for submissions (500 word abstracts) by 23.59 
Finnish time (UCT +2:00)
    Notification of Acceptance will be sent in December 2019
    31.03 2019 – Deadline for conference registration
    16-18.04.2020 – Conference at Aalto University


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