Archive for June 2023

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[Commlist] call for papers Conference "Local Shots. Stage photography in the cinema of the Italian regions"

Fri Jun 30 16:23:24 GMT 2023





Call for papers.
"Local Shots. Stage photography and Italian cinema"

December 15-16, 2023
University of Salento (Italy)


Keynote speakers: Greta De Lazzaris (photographer), Barbara Grespi (Università degli Studi di Milano Statale)


Stage photography originated as a support to film productions, with promotional or documentary purposes. Since the origins of film industrial production, the set is the object of the action of the set photographer, whose work is used for the realization of paratextual iconographic apparatuses (playbill, poster), along with other artistic forms such as illustration. Having exhausted its promotional function in the lifespan of the film and its distribution, however, set photography continues to have a documentary function, retaining relevant information about filmmaking practices at the aesthetic, technological and organizational levels, as it also very often reproduces the backstage of a set. Set photography also enables the reconstruction of other phenomena such as stardom and authorialism. There is, however, a further, important spillover of stage photography to social reality: it is the set of representational practices that have been called placetelling by geographer Fabio Pollice. The need for territorial storytelling is all the more significant in the current system of the Italian film industry, which for the past thirty years or so has experienced a process of marked production decentralization. Since the late 1990s, in fact, Italian cinema has shifted from its nerve center (the Capital) to the regions, constituting a polycentric system that maximizes the role of territories. Stage photography, in this sense, has followed the vicissitudes of this territorialization of Italian cinema, producing a great quantity of images that, having exhausted its strictly promotional function, now ask to be archived, analyzed, studied, interpreted. Almost always excluded from the histories of photography, set photography has developed original forms and styles-sometimes becoming stereotypes-that demand to be compared with parallel typologies such as photojournalism or fashion photography. The aim of the conference is therefore to bring together scholars from scientific fields with converging interests to take stock of the current reality of the scene-photographic heritage of the Italian regions and its management, and to propose technological solutions for the census, protection and enhancement of the works. In particular, both the theories and practices of stage photography and the tools, methods, and technologies of archiving this heritage, which has been affected (like photography in general) by the digital revolution, posing new questions of preservation and restoration, will be the subject of the conference. The conference, in this sense, intends to urge the scientific community to think about evolved tools for Digital Cultural Heritage in the framework of Digital Humanities, with a specific focus devoted to: tools for the integration, archiving and consultation of the photographic documentation of Italian cinema; tools for the interrogation of the content information of digital photographic resources and the direct interaction between users and resources, such as, for example, advanced digital recognition systems functional for the consultation and interactive use of digital collections of scene photographs; tools for the long-term preservation of digital data (LTDP), i.e., metadata protocols that enable the reconstruction of the life process of digital resources; tools for the dissemination of cultural heritage, meaning both platforms where data are represented and organized in such a way as to be directly available to entities and institutions responsible for the protection and enhancement of cultural heritage, in accordance with sub-trajectory 1. 5 of the Three-Year Action Plan of the National Cultural Heritage Technology Cluster, three-year period 2023-2025. Thus, the conference will allow to begin to have an overall vision and an initial mapping of the consistency of the sceno-photographic heritage; identify the main lines of research of future projects on the protection, enjoyment and enhancement of the works; determine the set of tools and methods most appropriate for the approach to the objects of study; and establish the most urgent interventions to be promoted with respect to the sceno-photographic heritage.

Among the possible declinations of the conference themes:
- Styles, techniques, figurative conventions and forms of stage photography
- Profiles of scenic photographers and photographers
- Sodalities between filmmakers and still photographers
- Relationships between still photography and filmic discourse (camera direction, directing)
- Theories of stage photography (aesthetics, semiotics, visual sociology)
- Editorial works of stage photography (volumes, catalogs)
- Archives of stage photography (existing, constituting, potential)
- Tools and methods for the preservation, cataloguing and enjoyment of the photographic heritage of cinema
- Stage photography and storytelling of territories
- Stage photography in related fields of application (theater, dance, music)

Proposals (max 2000 characters), accompanied by a brief biographical note, should be sent by July 15, 2023 to (luca.bandirali /at/ unisalento.it) <mailto:(luca.bandirali /at/ unisalento.it)> and a response will be received by July 30, 2023.

The conference is co-funded by the Technological Innovation in Cultural Heritage (TICHE) Foundation and has been selected among the projects and initiatives related to UNESCO's celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) and the 20th years of the Convention on the Promotion and Protection of the Intangible Heritage (2003).

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