Dr. Sara Dominici is a Senior Lecturer and the Course Leader for the MA in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster, London (UK).

This paper examines the space of the wet darkroom as one of complex entanglements between material practices and embodied perceptions. While the darkroom as the site of photographic manipulation has received sustained attention, the process of attending to photographs has been largely under-researched. Yet, the darkroom is not a neutral container for photographic production, but a performative space where the photographer or technician moves through tactile and sensory gestures made possible by the acquisition of tacit skills. How do these material and haptic rituals shape photographers’ experiences? What do they tell us about the role of the darkroom in photography’s histories? I address these questions by focusing on the case of amateur photographers in Britain between 1880s and 1910s, a period in which their growing numbers utilised the gelatine dry plate process. Although more practical than previous processes, the recently introduced dry plates still demanded a knowledge of chemistry and photographic manipulation to develop and print plates oneself, which many keen amateurs did. To learn how to do so, they went through a process of repetitive work informed by the how-to literature (e.g., manuals and advice columns printed in the photographic press). I use this material as the entry point for exploring what working in the darkroom meant to them. Specifically, I examine texts written for beginners as these sought to disclose what experienced photographers did instinctively. I argue that the tacit knowledge embedded in material and haptic rituals produced not only photographs but, crucially, an empowered sense of self. 

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Allison Pappas is a doctoral candidate studying the history of photography at Brown University, and a co-director of Framing the Field: Photography’s Histories in American Institutions.

Photography has always existed between object and idea. The different aspects of the medium—the physical and chemical base of the photograph, and its social construction (its conventions of use and discourse)—develop relationally. Particular processes andtheir results prompt new conceptualizations, possessing agency as heuristic objects that are actively engaged in a network of ideas, individuals, materials, and technologies. I propose a dialogic model in which the ideas used to make sense of photography are actively formed in relation to the material photograph itself. In this paper, I explore the use of the word “impression” around the development and announcement of the paper photography process in England in the 1830s, delineating how the photographic experiments and theorization of William Henry Fox Talbot and John Frederick William Hershel simultaneously positioned photography as an invention of scientific experiments in optics and chemistry, and an inheritor of pictorial conventions. This case study demonstrates the dialogue between the material and the virtual at two levels: first, in the interconnected processes of making and making sense, and second, in the multiple meanings encompassed by “impression.” One of the words Talbot, Herschel, and others commonly used to describe to the new, unknown type of image, it effectively coupled the printed impression of graphic mediums and empiricism’s sensible impression of light on the retina of the eye. Bridging the physical and the perceptual, these two lineages modeled different conceptions of photography—models that, despite subsequent theoretical treatment, remain inextricably entangled.

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Fionn (pronounced ‘Fin’) Montell-Boyd is a doctoral candidate in History of Art at the University of Oxford researching the role of silver within photography’s emergence in Britain.

The emergence of photography in Britain was underpinned by access to materials. For William Henry Fox Talbot, silver was the central physico-chemical component of photographic experimentation, the light-sensitive properties of its salts allowing for the production of images made up of areas of light and shade. As Talbot wrote, without this material, his process of photogenic drawing would have been unthinkable. During the first half of the nineteenth century, access to silver in Britain was contingent on a global trade sustained by colonial enterprise. Imported in great quantities from Spanish colonial mining zones in Central and South America, silver was channelled into different sectors of the British economy, reaching a range of suppliers from whom it was acquired for photographic purposes. This paper aims to situate Talbot’s photographic work within the context of the supply network upon which it relied, focusing on his ability to procure silver in a range of forms. Prior to the establishment of a specialised industry in Britain, the availability of silver for photography depended on the intersection of numerous trades and professions, including pharmacists, popular chemists, assayers, and silverware manufacturers. This examination of Talbot’s interactions with silver as a chemical commodity prompts an inquiry into his relationship to its assigned value as a precious metal. As Talbot’s own investments in silver mines in both Britain and Mexico attest, photography, as a material practice and a way of seeing, depended on scientific networks of chemical supply and knowledge production tied to colonial technologies of mineral extraction.

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Isabel Frampton Wade is a PhD Candidate in the Art History department at the University of Southern California and a recipient of the Visual Studies graduate certificate. 

Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles is one of the most significant and fastidious archives of a city assembled by an artist, comprising over five hundred thousand photographs taken from the back of Ruscha’s pickup truck. What began as a photoshoot for Ruscha’s well-known artist book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) became a photographic and archival project that has spanned six decades, capturing the entire street-level views of several major LA boulevards. A team at the Getty Research Institute has digitized over one hundred and twenty thousand photographic negatives from the archive, now accessible on two websites. This paper considers the stakes of its digitization and newfound accessibility through a case study of commercial architectural photography of LA. The publication of Julius Shulman’s 1961 Photographing Architecture and Interiors confirmed architectural photography’s rise in the United States as a distinct profession and image-making practice and furthered its reputation for glamorizing and selling architecture. By the 1960s, Los Angeles had become a popular subject for architectural photography: images circulating of its vanguard architectures contributed to the region’s increasingly exceptional and idealized status both nationally and internationally. Architectural photography created a bedrock of imagery that influenced how, in the 1960s, Ruscha approached Los Angeles as a subject not only in his well-known artist books but in his production of the Streets of LA archive. Rather than a critique of commercial architectural photography, Ruscha’s project, this paper will argue, shared conceptual and practical approaches to image making with the commercial genre that were not fully realized until the project’s digitization. Furthermore, in digital form, the archive retroactively burdens, or gifts, depending on your perspective, the individual images of LA’s buildings with extravisual information such as metadata and geospatial tagging, giving the artist’s photographs a new usefulness and visibility for urbanists and architects studying the form of cities. This paper will explore how the relationships between images and information made available through the digital archive bring together in new ways the histories of commercial and noncommercial photography and the shared material and immaterial processes attached to their visibility and circulation.

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Michelle Smiley is an Affiliated Fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. Her current book project, Daguerreian Democracy, examines how the daguerreotype became an object and technique around which sitters and photographers conducted experiments in democratic politics, relations, and aesthetics.

In this paper, I will discuss a series of tintypes created by the video artist Isaac Julien on the set of his 2019 film Lessons of the Hour. I argue that these objects illustrate the inextricability of the material and the virtual in photographic history, as Julien activates the tintype’s iron substrate, black enamel, and collodion emulsion as a means for conjuring representations of lives lost to archival representation, while also reenacting a nineteenth-century dream of photography as a democratic medium. Titled “Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow,” after a collection of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the tintypes depict three “characters” from Julien’s film: the orator Frederick Douglass, the photographer J.P. Ball, and Douglass’s first wife Anna Murray Douglass. The objects were originally displayed in the gallery outside the black-box installation at Metro Pictures and appeared as props within the film. The tintypes illustrate a larger trend in which contemporary artists are mobilizing what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” as an imaginative (or virtual) practice that is nevertheless rooted in the materiality of art objects. In particular, the portrait of Anna Murray, of whom few images survive, shows how the tintype, with its veneer of historical authenticity, serves as both archival reparation and feminist affirmation of her overlooked role in Douglass’s life. Ultimately, both the tintypes and the film conjure the utopian dream of Ball’s nineteenth-century multiracial Cincinnati studio, where photography was imagined capable of breaking down racial barriers in the service of the intertwined material and social practices of abolition.

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Sara Callahan is a postdoctoral researcher in Art History at Stockholm University. She specializes in 20th and 21st century art and visual culture.  

Post-war appropriation practices marked a new stage in the artistic use of existing images. Rather than picking up motifs from previous artworks, mythology or biblical stories, it was now almost exclusively photographic images that were reused, referenced and reconfigured. Ideas about specifically “photographic” qualities and characteristics of images were key to these practices and those that followed. The overall argument of this paper is that the separation between idea and object, or between W.J.T. Mitchell’s image and picture—both of which are related to the conference theme of material and virtual —is difficult to maintain in such artistic appropriations, and that they therefore offer a useful lens through which to consider overlaps and intersections of these seemingly incompatible modes of understanding photography and its history. This paper examines the use of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies by artists in the 1960s and in the 2010s. Following the increased media self-reflexivity among artists, Muybridge’s images are not referenced primarily in terms of their motif. Instead, it is their status as historical, and intensely historicized, images that makes them useful to artists interested in the “photographic” as on the one hand materially and technologically conditioned, and on the other, a reproducible recursion of references and circulation of largely immaterial images. The paper considers text-based conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s (Åke Hodell, Carl Andre) as well as digital and analogue moving images and installation at the turn of the twenty-first century (Sarah Sze, Samson Kambalu, Kajsa Dahlberg, Peter Geschwind). 

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John Jacob is McEvoy Family Curator for Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His forthcoming exhibition "Intimate Objects of Affection and Regard" will draw on SAAM's collections of miniature painting and early photography to trace their shared histories as intimate objects of exchange. 

Like the painted miniature portrait, early American photography is typified by encased images circulating as intimate objects. As objects of exchange, they enacted the social relations of love and loss. As objects of affect, they operated as relics in the profoundest sense. Photography succeeded miniature painting by expanding its social networks, exceeding its reliquary operations and contributing to the social relations of death in nineteenth century America. It is as a variant of mourning portraiture that the first spirit photographs were made. In mourning portraiture, a living subject enacts remembrance by standing alongside a portrait of the visible but non-present deceased. In spirit portraiture, by contrast, a living subject stands alongside the present but non-visible deceased; the "spirit extra" discernable only by the camera. In the closing paragraphs of his influential first essay on spirit photography, film historian Tom Gunning suggested that some spirit pictures were made as mourning images rather than as evidence for survival. The assertion was unique in the literature on photography, but Gunning never returned to memorial portraiture, and it has never been contested or validated. Subsequent scholarship, shifting from an embarrassing aberration to a critical moment in the social history of photography, has examined spirit photography in relation to everything from memory and Victorian mourning culture to invisibility and the spectral. While most writers acknowledge a historical relationship of spirit photography to memorial portraiture, however, none have investigated that history. That investigation, focusing on photographs by William Mumler, is the goal of this paper.

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Maíra Vieira de Paula is a PhD candidate at University of São Paulo. She researches Rosana Paulino’s works on appropriated photographs of black enslaved individuals.

Since 2006, Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino has been using 19th century appropriated photographs of black Brazilian enslaved individuals in her works. Paulino’s main concern is shedding light onto how slavery and its legacies still defines black people’s lives. But how to tell a history of a process that is yet to end? Paulino’s answer is to actively engage with (and against) slavery photographic archives, trying to overcome its material limits and intrinsic violence. For her, engaging with them involves an intellectually critical and emotionally invested approach, which emerges from an inherited painful experience of dispossession caused by slavery subjection and anti-blackness violence. In her installation Assentamento [Settlement] (2013), Paulino has appropriated of three Auguste Stahl’s photographs of a black enslaved woman, commissioned by Louis Agassiz during the Thayer Expedition (1865-1866). She has found this image on a 2004-publication about 19th century Brazilian photographs of black people. Drawing on material thinking approaches (mainly Elizabeth Edward’s), this paper offers an unprecedented analysis of Paulino’s photographic appropriation strategies to create Assentamento. Such analysis will focus on the entire chain of her creative process’ procedures: image researching and selection, all material transformations to which these photographs were submitted, and their juxtaposition with other imagery and techniques on the installation’s display. Through such gestures of curating and physically manipulating these photographs, Paulino has given them additional layers of meaning and renewed multi-sensory, affective and embodied performative potentials.

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Emily Doucet is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany. In the Fall of 2021, she will be the Singer Family Fellow at the Ryerson Image Centre and in January 2022 she will begin a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University. 

Based on Eastman Kodak’s microfilm system (known as Recordak), the Airgraph and V-mail services were strategically implemented to reduce the size and weight of correspondence sent to British and American troops stationed around the globe throughout World War II. Inaugurated in Cairo, Egypt in 1941, the Airgraph system facilitated British military communications between 1941 and 1945. The US military took up use of the Airgraph system in 1942, renaming it “V-mail.” The use of these systems led to the establishment of international photographic mail operations in Australia, Burma, Canada, Egypt, East Africa, India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and South Africa, among other locales. This paper focuses on photographs that documented the network of machines and workers that facilitated the Airgraph and V-mail systems, examining how the representation of these processes functioned as a tool for wartime propaganda, helping to shape understanding of the strategic significance of long-distance communication throughout the war. Produced by the British and American militaries and postal services as well as by Kodak Australasia and Eastman Kodak, these photographs document the symbolic and material roles of photographic technology in maintaining global networks of communication, as well as the strategic significance of the compression of information offered by microphotography. While the use of the Airgraph and V-mail systems was relatively short-lived, their development and use offer a compelling case study of a collaboration between a privation corporation (Kodak and its subsidiaries) and state institutions to maintain global communication networks throughout a period of international conflict. 

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Colin Hemez is a graduate student studying biophysics and gene editing at Harvard University. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in art history from Yale in 2018.

The intertwined histories of photography and nuclear technology highlight the hybrid character of the photographic surface, which can function in turn as a direct register of data from the world at large and as a repository for knowledge, meaning, and symbolism. In this study, I focus on a single image taken at a pivotal moment in nuclear history: Jack Aeby’s capture of the Trinity explosion, the only known color photograph of the first nuclear weapon test in human history. I trace the photograph’s material life, from its production in the New Mexico desert in 1945, to its publication—in dramatically altered form—in American popular magazines four months later, to its disappearance from the archive, and on to its reemergence as a purely digital image reproduced on websites and book covers. A close study of Aeby’s photograph reveals how the image evolves from a tactile fragment of scientific data into an icon of human technological dominance. I then consider whether the hybrid nature of the photographic surface, as illustrated by the life of Aeby’s image, takes on new potency in the anthropocene. Japanese photographer Takeda Shimpei, working in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown, leverages both antiquated photographic tools and Internet-based communication channels to document the global consequences of human-instigated environmental disaster. Such contemporary projects illustrate how symbioses between the physical and intangible lives of photographs are possible—indeed, are necessary—when coming to terms with the perilous ecological circumstances of our moment.

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Douglas Klahr is Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington.  

The material and the virtual have always coexisted in a distinctive relationship in stereoscopic photography since its advent in the early 1850s. Dual images printed on card stock, glass, or tissue paper retain their two-dimensional materiality but then offered a deeply immersive, three-dimensional visual experience when viewed through a stereoscope. The experience was real – there were no hallucinations on the part of the viewer – but it did not exist within the realm of physical reality.  One material in particular offered unparalleled viewing experience possibilities: tissue paper. These stereoviews of the 1860s and 1870s permitted a viewer to change a scene from greyscale/unilluminated to color/illuminated. The viewing process was entirely in control of the stereoscope user: the shifts in color and illumination merely depended upon the angle of light striking the stereoview, and the viewer could vary the pace and direction of the transformation. It would be reductionist to label this seamless, non-mechanical, flicker-free experience proto-filmic, much less proto-cinematic, but it was a visual experience poised between all forms of still photography and film. This ability to smoothly shift scenes differentiated these stereoviews from their counterparts produced on glass or card stock. Moreover, with card stock and glass stereoviews, how a viewer’s gaze moved from object-to-object and plane-to-plane created a narrative. However, once a viewer of tissue paper stereoviews began to shift a scene between the greyscale/unilluminated and color/illuminated endpoints, the variables of pace and direction redirected the viewer’s gaze, producing even more complex narratives. Although the three-dimensionality of the experience cannot be replicated without the use of a stereoscope, the shifting scenes can be experienced two-dimensionally by using a PowerPoint, which is what this presentation will demonstrate. 

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Adrienne Lundgren is a photograph conservator at the Library of Congress. Her research is primarily focused on the technical development of 19th-century photographic practice.

Photographic scholarship has focused on the physical print as the foundation for inquiry. While the nature of the object invites examination and comparison, beyond it there is an archivally traceable history which reflects the development of the medium in broader terms. These records have been codified in numerous indices, most notably Craig’s Daguerreian Registry and Peter Palmquist’s Pioneer Photographers series. The digital “repackaging” of these analog resources offers a bird’s-eye perspective on photography’s evolution in the United States during its first twenty-one years. Focusing on practitioners and established businesses rather than extant works, the data offers an equalized platform regardless of object survival. As a result, this approach sheds light on understudied groups, most notably women photographers. Photographs by women are under-represented in collections. Often explained as a direct result of statistical scarcity, examining geographical trends among women practitioners may provide additional clues to as to their relatively poor representation. This lecture will not seek to explain the observed trends but will instead present them in terms that will ideally stimulate discussion and inspire new avenues for scholarly inquiry. It also hopes to encourage others to undertake similar projects broadening the geographical boundaries of datasets like this to areas outside of the United States. Looking beyond physical objects poses new questions and re-calibrates our conclusions about the development of the medium.

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Erin Pauwels is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

This paper explores the analog roots of virtual phenomena such as hypertext and crowdsourcing by tracing how a group of photographs created in 1867 to illustrate Henry Theodore Tuckerman's Book of the Artists: American Artist Life facilitated interactive viewer experience. The Book of the Artists was among the earliest histories of art in the U.S., and it was marketed with images sold separately to encourage “extra-illustration”—a popular pastime that involved customizing publications with independently sourced illustrations. Photographers George Gardner Rockwood and Napoleon Sarony were excluded from mention in Tuckerman’s traditional art history, but they nonetheless secured a place in its pages by promoting their portraits of American painters and sculptors as ideal supplements to the text. Indeed, surviving extra-illustrated books reveal how the mass-reproduction of photographic images was already upending established media hierarchies and expanding access to art. Rockwood and Sarony’s photographs appear as “original” prints, autographed cartes, and reproductions clipped from newspapers. Diverse stakeholders benefitted from this mobilization: the photographers won acclaim by bringing their work into dialogue with fine art; painters and sculptors renegotiated their professional representation by corresponding with readers; and the book’s users became co-authors a multimedia record of their moment. In this way, the Book of the Artists functioned less as codified canon than what Lev Manovich calls a “cultural interface,” a physical storage system through which diverse media and information might freely flow. Reimagining analog photography in these new media terms illuminates how photography exhibited virtual behaviors even when tethered to material form.

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Roy Ng is a curator from Singapore. His research focuses on photography, aesthetics, and colonial Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. 

This article seeks to establish ancestral photographs as objects of worship and explores the social function of photography in the context of Straits Chinese (or Peranakan) ancestral halls, also known as rumah abu, in Southeast Asia. While Barthes argues for the conceptual link between photography and death, the case for Straits Chinese ancestral photographs is much more literal and rooted in its perceived metaphysical nature. These portraits are commissioned as not only images of visual commemoration, but also objects for physical reverence. Ancestral photographs served as points of reference for chia abu (to ‘invite’ the ancestors) and piara abu (to ‘upkeep’ the ancestral shrine) on special occasions such as death anniversaries; where the image performs the tangible representation of a living identity. More than simply taking on the posthumous function of the dignified ancestor, the photograph becomes a projection of the emotional cathexes of the worshipper, and the portrait’s materiality reifies the ancestor’s physical presence within a traditional Chinese social order. The photographic object, when ceremonially placed next to incense, food offerings, and soil from the graveyard, combines to become an indexical sign twice over, augmenting the image of the dead with a presence that is bound ever more intimately to mortal space and time. Elevated as a ‘participant’ of the ritual, the ancestral portrait transforms into a social actor inasmuch as it is entangled in a web of material practices. Rather than merely a stage setter for physical acts of filial piety, the photograph is also integral to them. 

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Suryanandini Narain is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

The turn of the millennium saw a hybridisation of photographic practices in India, blooming to their full potential in the area of wedding photography. Moving on from a rich history of the painted photograph (Gutman 1982, Pinney 1997), the digital moment in India has led to several home-grown innovations in photographic editing and embellishment. The unevenness of the media archaeology in popular Indian studio photography ranges between heavy overpainting of an earlier time to sophisticated, digitally edited photographs and albums of today. This paper focuses on how the wedding album is a prime site for calibrated experiments in representational photographic technologies. I will focus on the period of the late 1990s and the early 2000s, looking equally at the materially rich production of tangible wedding albums and the digital turn towards the expression of visual desires associated with marriage. Connections will be made between older, ‘obsolete’ techniques and fast changing cutting-edge ones in the market of wedding photography. The materiality of such albums prevails on multiple layers, from the wedding’s physical site of conspicuous consumption, to richly produced photographic portraits and albums archived and displayed by families. A shift towards the dematerialised nature of digital photography has both diminished and enhanced the materiality of weddings, increasing the production paraphernalia of such images while also embedding visual archives in the virtual world. The makers of wedding photographs frequently employ self-developed software ‘plug-ins’ for the post production enhancement of design elements, or use digitally available backgrounds and body templates, granting the sitters enhanced post modern aesthetic contexts for matrimonial self-visualisation. Paradoxically, the aesthetically driven socio-economic values that these technologies attempt to envision correspond to older and deeply seated conjugal expectations of a patriarchal society. This paper will examine the photographic media used for the amplification of culturally rooted ideals of matrimony, tracing the technological and aesthetic shifts that articulate social aspirations and fantasies in Indian wedding photographs.

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Kris Belden-Adams is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi, and specializes in the history and theory of photography.

Thispersondoesnotexist.com offers a refreshable, seductively realistic series of digital portraits of exactly that: amalgamated images of fictional people. Built from an unknown number of Flickr photographs, these photographically hyper-realistic images enjoy the appearance of veristic “truth,” yet are framed by their status as synthetic products generated by Artificial Intelligence, or A.I. Like other images generated using A. I. algorithms, thispersondoesnotexist is known as a “DeepFake” generator. Thispersondoesnotexist, its spinoffs (thisAirBnBdoesnotexist, thesecatsdonotexist, thiswaifudoesnotexist.net, and thisstartupdoesnotexist), FakeApp, DeepFaceLab, DeepNude, and a proliferation of others, create images and videos so seemingly realistic using an archive of materials that they hardly – if at all – can be distinguished from photographs of real people. This technology, currently in its adolescence, is feared by many for its capacity to create “fake news.” This technology fed fears of a digitally-kindled, “post-truth,” fake news, era of “alternative facts,” and widespread information illiteracy. This paper examines the recent phenomenon of A.I.-generated DeepFakes and looks past the anxieties they raise to address them as extensions of digital photo/video montage practices that predate the digital era (even if the use of A.I. [human-generated algorithms] to make them is new). The emergence of digital media simply calls us to the task of articulating the complicated nature of “data portraits,” and ones that may be produced independently by computers following human-provided directives.

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Sasha Whittaker is a PhD candidate in Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her dissertation examines George Hoyningen-Huene’s fashion photography within transnational artistic networks.

The proliferation of amateur photography in digital news over the past twenty years, labeled as “participatory photojournalism” or “citizen photojournalism,” has sparked debate as to whether this constitutes a revolution in reporting. While some have characterized the phenomenon as a paradigm shift (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2011; Wall 2015), others have argued that amateur images have an insignificant impact on mainstream news (Nilsson and Wadbring 2015; Schmieder 2015). However, this debate often overlooks participatory photojournalism’s long history, as the majority of scholarship on the subject analyzes digital imagery rather than analog photographs printed in the illustrated press. By investigating the analog pre-history of digital participatory photojournalism, this paper will demonstrate how bringing object-based and virtual histories together offers new insight into the nature of this purported paradigm shift in reporting. Specifically, this paper will examine amateur photographs published in Life in the late 1930s, together with contemporaneous articles in Popular Photography advising readers on how to sell their photographs to magazines. While this material reveals certain continuities between analog and digital forms of participatory photojournalism, this paper will argue that Life fostered a mode of public participation in producing news images that is distinct from its virtual equivalent today. Considering Life alongside more recent examples of amateur news photographsilluminates how analog and digital formats can shape the nature of the “participatory” in participatory photojournalism. The notion of a revolution in reporting can therefore be reframed as a transformation in what it means to participate in creating images for the news. 

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Estelle Blaschke holds an interim professorship in media studies at the University of Basel. She is the author of Metabilder(Wagenbach, 2021) and Banking on Images: The Bettmann Archive and Corbis (Spector Books, 2016) and a member of the editorial board of Transbordeur. Photographie, Histoire, Société. 

During its active years, the news picture agency Black Star, like most of agencies of the twentieth century, was not created with long-term archiving in mind. It rather functioned as a temporary depot. In the daily rush of receiving hundreds of negatives, prints or entire film rolls and the need of creating and distributing picture products as fast as possible, the techniques for organizing the masses of images were often reduced to the bare minimum: captions, keywords and call numbers were scribbled on the reverse side, on envelops or sheets of paper and then classified in hanging files or kept in piled-up boxes. The commercial setting required quick and pragmatic decisions. At the same time, the staff had to ensure the efficient circulation and potential recycling of Black Star’s picture capital. The talk focuses on the news picture agency as a vessel of elusive narratives and sedimentations of practices and meanings. The hypothesis that guides the reflection is that the news picture agency as an infrastructure of visuality, is a particularly suitable model for thinking about the multiple characteristics of photography, in particular digital photography: its ephemerality and fluidity, the dealing with erratic masses, its ability to appear not in a fixed but in varying forms, the dependency of photography on metadata, and the rapidity with which images move as a means of visual communication.

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Kevin Lotery is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Boston College. He is the author of The Long Front of Culture: The Independent Group and Exhibition Design (October Books/MIT Press, 2020) as well as essays on Robert Morris, Tacita Dean, and Richard Hamilton.

Inspired by a visit to Roy Lichtenstein’s studio in March 1968, Richard Hamilton began asking friends—artists, musicians, writers—to take Polaroid portraits of him. A kind of “game” as he described it, the result would be 128 one-off portraits of Hamilton taken over forty years by an international array of cultural figures. What attracted Hamilton to the Polaroid was its decidedly Pop technology, offering ready-to-hand, throwaway image-objects that were also, like photograms or daguerreotypes, not themselves reproducible. It was an ideal technology, then, to explore the object-status of the photographic image—its touchability, tradeability, even its pinup-ability—in a burgeoning era of virtual entertainments. The 128 portraits became the basis of four, nearly pocket-sized photobooks designed by Hamilton (Polaroid Portraits, vols. 1-4, 1971-2001). Surprisingly neglected in the literature, these publications drew on Hamilton’s longstanding engagement with the medium of the book. But the Polaroid books’ spare design and small format, with each photograph allotted its own page, also signaled a novel interest in the form of the photobook as a multiply authored, intermedia construct placed between photography, printmaking, object-based practices, performance, literary genres like the autobiography, and the medium of exhibition making (since the portraits also exist as a set of unique images that can be installed in the gallery). My paper argues that Hamilton approached the photobook for the strange new mixtures of tactility and virtuality, surface and narrativity, authorship and reception that it might proffer. I am particularly interested in two aspects: 1) Hamilton’s fusion of the image-object of the Polaroid with the peculiar object-status of the book, and 2) his expansion of the genre of self-portraiture into a temporal and literary endeavor, merging the slow passing of years with the instantaneity of the Polaroid snap and the fleeting gesture of turning pages.

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Alice Morin’s doctoral and postdoctoral work—on the “Fragmentwanderungen” project—focuses on the mediatic uses of photographs, their production and circulation in a transnational context. She was also scientific advisor to the Vogue Paris. 100 Years exhibition (Palais Galliera, Fall 2021).

Jens Ruchatz, professor of media studies at Philipps-University Marburg and deputy speaker for the research unit Journalliteratur, examines the history and theory of photography, periodical and serial forms in media, culinary media, history of the interview, media reflection—amongst a broad spectrum of media.

What constitutes, throughout its multiple manifestations, a photographic image? This paper sets out to explore the tension between materiality and virtuality, foundational to photographic image culture. Beyond the dogma of the reproducible photographic image, readily obscuring differences between concrete materializations, we posit that any photograph, to become perceptible, must take on material form(s), even if only temporarily. Such occurrences are shaped by the materiality prescribed by each respective “context of presentation,” implying operations performed on the picture to make it suitable for display. These dynamics, already at play in the passage from negative to positive print, are made even more evident in the rematerializations and recontextualizations required to cross media borders (e.g., from print to periodical to book). In this respect the virtuality/materiality distinction rather concerns the relationships formed between various pictorial manifestations, begging the questions: what connects these manifestations into one “image”? Is the said image virtual, i.e., an “interpictorial” construct, abstracting from a series of public iterations; or material, i.e., contained in the negative as its hidden “origin,” re-performed with every manifestation? How does this usually invisible material origin relate to the virtual entity of the image (perhaps then becoming a “work”)? These questions are especially meaningful when ongoing reuses, or “circulations,” cohere into a photographic “icon.” To engage with these questions, we seek to offer a systematic theoretical reflection based on the close examination of one image transferring across different contexts and materialities, from a perspective rooted in media studies and drawing on theories of performance, material anthropology semiotics and visual studies. Following a photograph from the series snapped in London in 1937 by Henri Cartier-Bresson which appeared in several editorial configurations from magazines (Harper’s Bazaar (1945) and LIFE (1952)) to album (Scrapbook (1946)) to photobook (Images à la sauvette (1952)), as well as on museum walls (The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, MoMA (1947)) and collections (“Master Series” (1973-1979), we aim to assess how these reuses are interrelated into the forming of an iconic image. Harking back to a time when reuses were situated in defined sites and times, this case study proves all the more topical in the age of the elusive and “originless” digital photographic image. 

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Leslie K. Brown, PhD, is an independent curator and scholar. Specializing in the history of photography and modern/contemporary art, she teaches across New England. 

 This presentation considers how various versions of the Picture Spot — signs placed into the touristic landscape to show and tell us where and how to take photographs — straddle and shuttle between the photographic “intangible” and tangible. Kodak first installed these markers in the American landscape as a part of a roadside advertising campaign associated with the tagline “Picture Ahead!” in the 1920s, later expanding them into Disney Parks, World’s Fairs, and other built environments at midcentury and beyond. In my paper, I will examine the roles these little-studied objects and photographic behaviors play in the acquisition and distribution of images, real and ideal. Photographs created at these signs can be latent — via the potentiality of the encouraged image — or corporeal, by way of a comparative print on the sign itself or an image inserted into a family album or slideshow. When shooting at these picture-taking signs, amateur practitioners display and promote “conspicuous photography.” Related to conspicuous consumption, this is a set of photographic expectations, actions, and entities tied to corporate culture and technology, which are observed, enacted, and then reified in a vernacular setting. Whether posted along a road or connected on social media via hashtags, picture-taking signs offer some comfort in the face of image proliferation. These opportunities have also inspired creative and critical responses, suggesting just how ubiquitous this visual training and aesthetic imitation has become. Given Kodak’s bankruptcy and renewed interest in photographic accoutrements and activities, an examination of this topic now is both essential and apt.

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Katherine Mitchell is a PhD student in History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. She studies nineteenth-century landscape photography.

In 1867, American landscape photographer Carleton Watkins travelled to Oregon and took some of the first known pictures of the Columbia River Gorge. He assembled many of the mammoth-plate images from this trip in the album Photographs of the Columbia River and Oregon in 1872. The Willamette and Columbia Rivers form the central structure of the book, in which Watkins uses well-established Euro-American cultural and visual tropes to present the Pacific Northwest as a place in the process of being conquered. He mixes compositions reminiscent of his earlier Yosemite work with images of industry to show the ongoing development in the area and the interaction of humans with the landscape. Watkins’ trip was partially funded by the California Geological Survey, which sought documentation of dormant volcanoes, and logistically supported by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, whose steamships and railroads permeate the images in the album. The photographs support Euro American claims to this landscape and demonstrate the entangled nature of scientific study and resource extraction in the period. Watkins presents a landscape that is simultaneously aesthetically beautiful, geologically rich, and in the process of being altered by and for human use. My paper takes up the centrality of the rivers in this album. The water is the protagonist and driving force of the images, propelling the viewer through the book. I also consider the album’s claims to indexicality through place-specific image titles and the materiality of the images and book binding. 

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Elizabeth Siegel is Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago.

For the first three years André Kertész spent in Paris—1925 to 1928—he produced nearly all of his photographs on common carte postale paper. Kertész’s choice to employ the humble postcard may initially have been borne of economy and convenience, and the format met the modern circulation and communication needs of an immigrant and a budding professional, allowing Kertész to both connect with family back home and advertise his photographic skills among acquaintances at café tables. But the photographer transformed this recently introduced innovation in modern material culture—a favorite of casual tourists and frequenters of Paris’s amusement parks—into something with new artistic possibilities. He embraced the paper’s velvety tones, pleasing surface texture, and intimate scale. The carte postale format enabled him to combine a candid, amateur approach with lessons learned from an international circle of artists; to experiment with a creative approach to composition, further refined while contact-printing in the darkroom; and to explore the relationship of image to ground that would continue to inform his later work. In conjunction with the first exhibition and catalogue of Kertész’s carte postale photographs, this paper argues that the material form of the works cannot be separated from his innovative formal decisions as an artist and that the carte postale format reflects the freedom and exploration of the amateur photographer and the wide array of new artistic influences he found in 1920s Paris.

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Daniel H. Magilow is Professor of German at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the author or editor of six books, and co-Editor-in-Chief of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

In the age of social media, controversy regularly erupts when tourists post inappropriate photographs of themselves at Holocaust memorial sites to their social media feeds. These “Shoah selfies,” which exist mainly in virtual formats and only rarely become material objects, subsequently trigger vitriolic online shaming when outraged, self-appointed defenders of Holocaust memory accuse selfie-takers of desecrating the memory of the dead. But while these viral images are usually dismissed as evidence of bad taste and a crisis of Holocaust memory among the young, this paper argues that both Shoah selfies and Shoah selfie shaming fulfill other, more nuanced functions. I argue that however offensive they may be, Shoah selfies must be understood as examples of “social photographs.” In media theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s definition, a “social photograph” is a digital image whose “existence as a stand-alone media object is subordinate to its existence as a unit of communication.” Within social media streams, Shoah selfies contribute to an ongoing narrative of self-fashioning, in this case, to the narrative that one is the type of socially conscious person who visits Holocaust sites. However, as Shoah selfies show how new media have effected tremendous shifts in Holocaust memory, the overrepresentation of young women and effeminate men as targets of shaming show how this response to offensive virtual Holocaust photography concurrently sustains oppressive gender hierarchies.

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For any questions about the symposium, please email photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com