[Commlist] CfP – Unstable Images and Shifting Histories: Photography, Anthropology, Cinema

    Call for Papers – Unstable Images and Shifting Histories:
    Photography, Anthropology, Cinema


      Edited by Dr. Hanin Hannouch (Kunsthistorisches Institut in
      Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut)

If the scholarship on photography has often lodged its cultural and 
philosophical significance within the epistemological framework of 
evidence, it has also increasingly taken into account how photography 
was the medium of choice for bringing the foreign and the exotic to the 
salons of the European bourgeoisie thirsting for images and texts from 
newly-colonized territories (Sekula 1981, Shohat 2008, Göttsche 2013). 
By maintaining close ties with anthropology (Pinney 2001), as well as 
with colonial administrators and military personal, photography 
perpetuated long- held identity constructions within asymmetrical power 
relations and transmitted them as supposed “truths” to various European 
and American ethnological museums, thus accounting for their 
extraordinarily large archives (Geary 1988). Beyond its function as 
anthropological record, photography’s use as source for shaping 
historical narratives runs in parallel to its ability to provide a 
“reckoning with history” (Tucker, Campt 2009), by bringing (visual, 
textual etc.) sources to their limits and by unmasking the constructed 
dimension to the narratives they are meant to articulate. Moreover, 
though the archive bestows upon photography and cinema — its preeminent 
materials — the authoritative status of document (Ellenbogen 2012), 
differing epistemologies continue to underpin its various stakeholders 
(Hamminga 2016) exceeding their initial framework of reference. And 
although (moving) images suture the subject into a supposedly 
scientific, anthropological, or historical project, buried within the 
very process which representation eclipses is a greater uncertainty as 
to the kind of history that is being inscribed, and most importantly, 
/whose/ history is being told.

Consequently, the special section of the issue number 17 of Cinergie 
analyzes how images “disturb the core nodes of historical relations and 
practices of history” (Edwards 2016) rather than how they constitute it 
through nation-building. By investigating how artists re- appropriate 
(anthropological, scientific, or historical etc.) photography and film, 
and how they re-read them against their own original trace, as in 
against the very object whose presence they inscribe, this volume 
examines how images are deployed against the history they are thought to 
depict. Cinergie seeks to historicize this failure of evidentiary and 
documentary claims to visual media as disturbances causing epistemic 
shifts. Furthermore, it focuses on how their narratives remain 
ever-shifting despite theorists' use of “context” (understood here as 
the fruit of a process of framing and of interpretation attempts to give 
meaning and coherence) as a reliable backdrop to comprehending them and 
pinning them down. By asking how certain archival practices and the 
system of knowledge they bespeak inadvertently undermine institutional 
power, this section considers how instability has always been integral 
rather than contingent to the image and how fractures are part of the 
archive, irrelevant of the framework made to fix its internal 
contradictions.

Contributions will be considered that include but are not limited to:

  *

    How do artists employ colonial, scientific, or historical
    photography and film in order to shift their initial significance
    and what kind of new epistemologies do they create in the process?

  *

    How do scientists, photographers, officials etc. attempt to palliate
    contradictions between the visual materials they generate and the
    theories they formulate?

  *

    How do various artistic operations question the constitution of
    indexicality, and have the image emerge as a site of contested
    encounters resisting collection and interpretation even (or
    especially) within the archive?


        Submission details

Please send an abstract and a short biographical note to Dr. Hanin 
Hannouch, Post- Doctoral researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Insitut in 
Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut at: (hanin.hannouch /at/ khi.fi.it) 
<mailto:(hanin.hannouch /at/ khi.fi.it)> *by December 31, 2019* — [subject: 
Unstable Images and Shifting Histories: Photography, Anthropology, 
Cinema + name surname author(s)].

Abstracts should be from 300 to 500 words of length (English).

If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the 
full article *by February 15, 2020*.

The articles must not exceed 5,000/6,000 words.

Contributions will be submitted to double-blind peer-review 
<https://cinergie.unibo.it/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess>.

The issue number 17 of /Cinergie/ will be published in *July 2020*

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