[ecrea] CFP: Session at EAUH Conference 2014 (Lisbon, 6-9 Sep 14)

Lisbon, Portugal, September 3 - 06, 2014
Deadline: Oct 15, 2013


PAPER CITIES: URBAN PORTRAITS in PHOTOGRAPHIC BOOKS

Specialist Session at the 12th International Conference on Urban History


Cities have always been incredibly photogenic places. Panoramic cityscapes
configure an early and important photographic domain, while the so called
‘street photography’ persisted as one of the most popular genres within the
documentary style. From the very initial years of the photographic medium, to
the later democratic turn of photographic practices, or to the recent age of
digital and immaterial pictures, cities have remained attractive subjects for the
photographer’s eye.

While photography reaffirms its central role in visually conveying and proposing
urban identities, the book – and especially the photographic book – also
appears as a crucial agent in the historic processes of city representation.
Though cities seem always too complex to be accurately portrayed, the book
device carries supplementary qualities for such a task: not only is it invested
with an ancient authority related to knowledge and truthfulness, but its
narrative nature also turns it into the perfect medium by which city stories can
be told. Additionally, photographic books on cities are also fruitful domains
where visual and textual messages meet to create more complex and complete
depictions of urban life, often combining poetic and objective accounts through
the personal voices of writers and photographers.

With regard to urban and city representation, and especially after the
documentary vogue of the 1930s, the encounter between literature and
photography has been particularly fruitful, generating outstanding examples like
'Paris de Nuit' (Brassaï and P. Morand, 1933), 'La Banlieue de Paris' (R. Doisneau
and B. Cendrars, 1949), or 'Lisboa: Cidade Triste e Alegre' (Lisbon: a Sad and
Joyful City, V. Palla and C. Martins, 1959), to name but a few. The prolific
production of photographic books raises imperative questions: How can a city
be visually read in the pages of a book? How do photo-books on cities
contribute and influence historical discourse? Can a history of a city be told by
its book-shaped portraits? What kind of word-and-image relationships are
present in photobooks and how do they reinforce identity building phenomena?
How are we to address the categories of documentary and fiction in these
particular city portraits?

In this session, we are particularly interested in papers dealing with these
questions and addressing book-shaped portraits of cities since 1900 to the
present. In order to examine this phenomenon from a wider perspective, we
also welcome presentations covering different geographic contexts and
encourage comparative approaches from varied disciplinary backgrounds.
Keywords: Photography; City Portraits; Books; Word and Image; Urban
Representation

Please submit a 300-WORD ABSTRACT online, via the EAUH 2014
websitehttp://www.eauh2014.fcsh.unl.pt/

Deadline for paper proposals submission: October 15, 2013
Notification of paper acceptance: December 15, 2013

Specialist Session organized by SUSANA S. MARTINS (Portugal) - Institute for
Art History / Universidade Nova de Lisboa and ANNE REVERSEAU (Belgium) -
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven



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