[ecrea] CFP: Rethinking Early Photography

CFP

*Call for papers – ‘Rethinking Early Photography’
16^th -17^th June 2015, University of Lincoln*

/Keynotes/: Kate Flint, Lindsay Smith, Kelley Wilder

Attitudes to photography have undergone a radical shift in recent times. 
Partly in response to these contemporary changes, historians, curators 
and photographic practitioners have begun to re-examine older forms of 
photography: exploring the wide variety of historical technologies and 
techniques, finding surprising ways in which images were manipulated and 
determining how an ideology of photographic realism was maintained. Yet 
there remains a need for scholars to explore questions of early 
photographic ‘authorship’, singularity and objectivity in much greater 
detail.

Scholarly studies of nineteenth-century photography have been heavily 
influenced by later theoretical constructions. As an alternative, Daniel 
Novak has posited a ‘Victorian theory of photography’. Yet this theory 
remains unelaborated. Similarly, Elizabeth Edwards and others have 
called for a move away from the traditional Art History model of 
analysing photography. This interdisciplinary conference will explore 
the question of what such an analysis, and such a theory, might look like.

Possible questions and areas of interest for the conference include:

   * How do technological narratives influence our understanding of
     photography?
   * Photography as a business; photographers as workers.
   * The hegemony of nineteenth-century photographic realism, and
     resistances to it.
   * Can/should we do away with the Art History model of photography?
   * Alternatives to the photographer-as-author model of photographic
     exhibition and analysis.
   * To what extent can we think of photography as being separate to
     other print and visual media?
   * The role of photography in the creation of nineteenth-century
     celebrity.
   * Early photography as represented in literature, art and film.
   * Photographs as networks; photographs as objects.
   * When does ‘early’ photography end?
   * Does digital photography allow us to ‘read back’ the
     performativity of images from earlier periods? How might the
     revival of Victorian photographic techniques by current
     practitioners influence historians?

Organisers: Owen Clayton, Jim Cheshire, and Hannah Field.

To submit proposals for 20 minute papers, please send an abstract of 
200-250 words to *(rethinkingphotography /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(rethinkingphotography /at/ gmail.com)>*. The deadline is *12^th Jan 
2015, 5pm (GMT)*.