[SIGCIS-Members] CfP: After Post-Photography 7 (June 2-4, 2022, St Petersburg // online)

Dr. Friedrich Tietjen ft at mur.at
Thu Feb 3 11:38:45 PST 2022


   Dear Sigcis,
please see below the CfP for our next After Post-Photography  
conference in St Petersburg. Maria Gourieva and I started the  
conference series in 2015 and since then enjoyed the annual  
conferences quite a bit as did the (mostly) Russian audience - in  
particular because the open call attracted speakers from a wide  
variety of disciplines. So if you're doing research that one way or  
the other involves photography, feel welcome to submit a paper.  
Personally, I would be very interested in particular in papers on  
techno-racism (you probably remember the infamous HP-camera that would  
only recognize and track the movement of Caucasian faces) and on image  
generation in digital cameras (to name but a few subjects).
   Feel free to spread the word, and thanks for that
   Friedrich

   Stiftung Reinbeckhallen Berlin

   https://en.stiftung-reinbeckhallen.de/
   https://univie.academia.edu/FriedrichTietjen




---snip---


After Post-Photography 7 - Presence and Absence
International conference on visual studies, history and theory of photography
2-4 June 2022
European University (St. Petersburg, Russia // online)

Maybe we never depended on photographic media as much as we do since  
early 2020. Probably we never looked so often, on so many occasions  
and at so many photographic images, as when wave after pandemic wave  
crashed into the world as we knew it. The less we could physically  
interact, the more we did by means of visual media. Instead of  
traveling we watched documentaries and were comforted a bit when  
videos showed a pair of dolphins swimming through Venice‘s Canale  
Grande where these animals had been absent for ages. We perused old  
family albums or sifted through the thousands of pictures on our hard  
drives. As libraries were closed, generous colleagues would snap page  
after page of book chapters someone else in the world was desperate to  
read. Our seminars were replaced by screens from which the  
participants‘ faces stared frontally, each one an involuntary panoptic  
jailer and inmate. And the breakout rooms of conferences were hardly a  
surrogate for the drafty hallways where gossip was exchanged and wild  
new research ideas developed over lukewarm coffee. The pandemic drama  
found its visual metaphors and allegories in the photograph of an  
Italian nurse collapsing after too many shifts, a short video of the  
former German tennis star Boris Becker applauding care workers from  
the balcony of his luxury mansion and demonstrations against the  
pandemic, lockdowns, vaccinations and the state as such. And as usual,  
many of its aspects remained invisible – the rise of domestic violence  
and alcoholism, the boring routine work in hospitals, the terrors of  
proximity in overcrowded camps, the dying in squalor of which there  
was rather more than less.
    In these and many more respects, a multitude of medialized  
relations of presence and absence and photography or – on broader  
terms – of visibility were negotiated within the framework of the  
pandemic. But of course these relations did not only emerge through  
the pandemic alone. In fact they are at the very core of images in  
general, and of photographs in particular. As photographic media shape  
our understanding of the world outside our immediate vicinity, their  
practices and politics of presence and absence are fundamental to  
modernity and its societies. Both practices and politics obviously  
depend upon what the images show. But in equal measure they also  
depend on how images are produced, distributed and reach out to their  
audiences. Thus, photographic presence and absence can happen in a lot  
of different ways. Photographic images can be applied to highlight,  
generate, select and obscure persons, objects, events and relations;  
they can render them special, ordinary, normal or boring. They can  
address individuals or everybody, they can aim for eternity or  
ephemerality. How all this was, is, or can be done depends not only on  
intentions but also on the technologies of the photographic media in  
question. These technologies however are neither objective nor are  
they neutral. How they cast the visibile - and invisible - into  
photograpic images depends upon the common politics and practices of  
visibility: if a team of engineers developes a facial recognition  
systems and trains it with portraits of predominantly white men, it is  
hardly surprising that it fails to identify or even recognize  
non-white persons.

Under these conditions, possible topics include, but are not limited to
- The image is the real thing: Photographic replacements
- Skype, Zoom and BBB: Visual telepresence and other panoptical experiences
- This can't be me: Non-representation through photography
- Mobile presence: The smartphone as representation of the self
- Photographic decay: What do faded photographs tell?
- Technical blindness - what photography can't see or show
- Photographic media and their audiences
- You'll only see this once: Technical ephemerality
- Photographs of what never has been: Retouching, rendering and other  
technologies of photo-realism
- Pseudo-photography: The photographic aesthetics of sonographs,  
tomographs and other imaging methods

As it was the case with previous conferences however, After  
Post-Photography is driven by a general curiosity in subjects of  
photography. Thus, there is only ground rule for submitting a paper to  
After Post-Photography: If you‘re doing Sociology, Nuclear Physics,  
Ethnology, Computer Sciences, Gender Studies, Meteorology, Law, Memory  
Studies, Criminology, Architecture, Archaeology, Botany, Art History,  
Mathematics, Numismatics, Astronomy, Game Studies, Oenology, Art  
History or any other discipline from science and humanities and your  
research involves photography in the broadest sense, we are happy to  
receive your paper. Please submit your application, including a short  
summary of your paper (250-400 words) only in English no later than  
February 28, 2022. Use the following link:  
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=app7; do not send submissions  
per eMail. Note that you need to register at the Easychair website in  
order to submit your application. Should you like to get in touch with  
us prior to your submission, please write to app at mur.at; we will get  
back to you within two or three days and if need be are also happy to  
talk to you via Zoom or Skype.
There is no participation fee for the conference, neither for speakers  
nor for guests; should you like to support the conference however, let  
us know. As the pandemic continues, traveling options are impossible  
to predict which is why we plan for a hybrid conference. If your paper  
is accepted and you would like to come to St. Petersburg we regret  
that we can’t sponsor traveling or accommodation but can help you  
finding a place to stay. We will also provide you with an invitation  
in case you need a visa.

The working languages of the conference are Russian and English, and  
during the conference, both papers and discussions will be translated.  
For programs of After Post-Photography conferences since 2015, please  
see www.after-post.photography

We would sincerely appreciate it if you would circulate the call to  
your own networks and other mailing lists.

Organizing committee After Post Photography 7
Olga Annanurova, Maria Gourieva, Olga Davydova, Natalia Mazour, Daria  
Panaiotti, Friedrich Tietjen
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