[Commlist] Photography Network's sixth annual symposium

Vision and Veiling: Photographic Resilience and Sociopolitical Change

Photography Network’s Annual Symposium, November 5-7, 2026 (online)

Registration is now open! <https://www.photographynetwork.net/symposium>

Photography practitioners, historians, and curators respond in a 
multitude of ways to political and cultural contexts that challenge 
their work. Moreover, in response to efforts to remove, omit, occlude, 
obscure, or manipulate, photographs often persist, transform, and 
recirculate, reformulating visual worlds. Photographs bear a complex 
relationship to political and social power; authorities might manipulate 
or remove photographs to further their goals, but forms of covering up, 
self-censorship, or self-fashioning might also function in the name of 
individual privacy, safety, or resistance. Furthermore, as the material 
capabilities and limitations of photography shift, new questions 
continually emerge about the role of photographic removal and 
photographic resilience in constricting cultural climates.

This symposium offers a platform for scholarship that investigates the 
adaptability of photography and photo history in the face of 
constraints, be they cultural, governmental, institutional, editorial, 
individual, or otherwise. What do historians, curators, and 
photographers do when limitations are placed on their work, and what do 
the limitations themselves reveal about photography? Relatedly, when is 
restriction, refusal, or withdrawal protective, strategic, or 
empowering? Finally, what, if anything, has changed about how the medium 
navigates social or cultural boundaries—what can we learn from how 
practitioners have done this in the past that might shed light on 
present-day questions?

Please join us for sessions spread across three days that will approach 
this topic from a variety of perspectives—we will discuss artistic 
strategies, exhibitions, archival work, commercial studios, political 
propaganda, and more.

Symposium registration is $15, and you must be a PN member in order to 
attend. Free memberships and symposium registration are available to 
those in need. Please email (photographynetworksymposium /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(photographynetworksymposium /at/ gmail.com)> for further information.

See the full program and register here 
<https://www.photographynetwork.net/symposium>

Thursday, November 5

Symposium Introduction (12:00 pm EST)
Welcome Remarks
Announcement of Book Awards and Project Grants
Meet and Greet (12:30 pm EST)

Keynote: Gil Pasternak (1:00 pm EST)
The Unsettled Photo Archive: Censorship, Decolonial Praxis, and the 
Limits of Visual Sovereignty

Friday, November 6

Panel 1: Artistic practices of strategic veiling and unveiling
10:00-11:30 am EST
Moderated by Natalie Zelt
Nam Huh, The Algorithmic Veil: Archival Refusal and ESEA Diasporic 
Memory in Nhu Xuan Hua’s Tropism
Myles Little, Alvin Baltrop's Waterfront Opacities
Samuel Allen, From Covert Sense to Incipient Utterance: Edmund Teske’s 
Queer Photographic Abstractions

Panel 2: Repressive governments and photographic persistence
12:00-1:45 pm EST
Moderated by Sarah Miller
Ozan Yavuz, From Censorship to Containment: Photography Exhibitions and 
Strategies of Resilience in Turkey, 2000–2023
Jesse Dritz, “Paper Monuments”: Cityscape Magazine and the Remapping of 
Washington, D.C.
João Ferreira, An image and its many publics: political restagings of 
Vladimir Herzog’s Staged Suicide Photograph under the Brazilian 
Civil-Military Dictatorship and Beyond
Evan Hume, Clandestine Camera: Deep Politics and Photographic Intelligence

Artist dialogue
2:00-3:00 pm EST
Zora Murff and Jabari Zuberi, Martyrdom and the Museum
Moderated by Mtume Gant

Saturday, November 7

Panel 3: Commercial subversion
10:00-11:30 am EST
Moderated by Gia Del Pino
Louis Kaplan, A Photographic Amusement Can Mean Serious Business: On 
Lotte Jacobi’s Subterfuges in Response to the Aryanization of German 
Photography (1933-1935)
Caitlin Ryan, “For the Price of a Bullet”: Photography and the Politics 
of Peace in 1930s France
Valentine Nyamndon, When the Backdrop Speaks Without the Painter: 
Signature Erasure and Visual Rhetoric in Cameroonian Studio Photography

Panel 4: Archives and the impact of seeing
11:45-1:30 pm EST
Moderated by Zulay Chang
Caroline Riley, Beyond Viewing: Concentration Camps and the Ethics of 
Interpretation in Thérèse Bonney’s Photography
Giuseppe Chiavaroli, Veiled Looks: Clandestine Photography and the 
Resilience of Working-Class Vision in Reggio Emilia, Late 1950s–Early 1970s
Mehrdad Mirzaie, After the Massacre: Photography, Blackout, and 
Collective Memory
Ioanna Sakellaraki, Ruins, Capital, Bodies: Afterlives of Cancelled 
Negatives in the Smithsonian’s Underwood & Underwood Glass Stereograph 
Collection
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