December 2-3, 2010

University of California, Los Angeles

The conference is a cross-disciplinary forum bringing together researchers, teachers and practitioners from areas of interest including: architecture, art, cognitive science, communications, computer science, cultural studies, design, education, film studies, history, linguistics, management, marketing, media studies, museum studies, philosophy, photography, psychology, religious studies, semiotics, and more.

You may submit a proposal to the Conference Review Committee for an In-Person Presentation, or a Virtual paper at the Image Conference. If your conference proposal is accepted you may submit a written paper to The International Journal of the Image. All proposals, presentations and papers must be in English.

The deadline for the current round in the call for papers is August 5, 2010.  Additional information is here.

The fine photo blog Conscientious has announced its second annual portfolio competition.

The contest is free and aimed at emerging photographers.  Winners will have their work featured at Conscientious.

Details regarding submission are here.

The deadline is 13 August 2010, 11:59pm ET.

The 2009 winners are featured here.

Photograph by 2009 winner Bradley Peters.

Walter Benjamin and Media Theory: Images, Optics, Modernity

A one-week interdisciplinary seminar for graduate students will be offered at Northwestern University, July 19-23, 2010.  The University will provide partial travel support (up to $250.00), lodging, and most meals for student participants.  The seminar, directed by Professors Dilip Gaonkar and Robert Hariman, will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by leading scholars on the work of Walter Benjamin. In this year’s seminar, we will pay particular attention to Benjamin’s work on visual media and modern society. The faculty will include Michael Jennings (Princeton), Gerhard Richter (UC Davis) and Peter Fenves (Northwestern).  Sessions consist of morning seminar discussions of selected readings assigned in advance, afternoon lectures by the faculty, and group lunches and dinners throughout the week.  There also may be some opportunities for student presentations. The format enables participants to develop extended scholarly conversations that can continue well beyond the formal conclusion of the institute.

Although Benjamin is a standard citation within the literature on visual culture, there is need for more sustained attention to the character and critical potential of his work.  More than any other cultural theorist, Benjamin made visual experience the key to understanding modern life, and subjected not only media technologies and social practices but also fundamental conceptions of critical thought to reexamination on those terms.  This seminar will discuss Benjamin’s work on visual media, environments, and practices while also addressing questions of history, theory, and critical method.

Selection for funded participation is selective.  Students from all disciplines are welcome to apply by June 1, 2010.  Applicants should send a letter of nomination from an academic advisor, along with a one-page rationale for their participation, to Jesse Baldwin-Philippi (j.baldwin.philippi@u.northwestern.edu).  Inquiries can be directed there as well.

The seminar is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication and the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.

Photograph of Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque Nationale, 1937, by Gisèle Freud; reproduced in Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (Verso, 1996), p. 234.  Photograph of Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, India ink, colored chalk, and brown wash on paper, 1920 (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem).

In addition to keynote speaker W.J.T. Mitchell others speakers include Ariella Azoulay, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Richard Sennett, Susan Meiselas, Craig Calhoun and NCN’s very own Robert Hariman.  The conference addresses the question, “What does it mean to be a visual citizen–for those who are seen, for those who witness what is seen, and for those who capture what is seen in public? … In what ways do visual practices condition who belongs and who does not belong to a political community.”  For a detailed schedule of presentations, click here.

Professor Ariella Azoulay, professor of visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Cultural Interpretation, Bar-Ilan University, Israel is presenting a  lecture at Northwestern University (April 2) and Indiana University in Bloomington (April 6) titled, “The Necessity of Discussing Photographs That Were Not Taken.”  The lecture and related events listed below  are  free and open to the public at both Northwestern and Indiana Universities.

The lecture at Northwestern University takes place on Friday, April 2, 2010, 4-6 pm in the Annie May Swift Auditorium.

The lecture on  the Bloomington campus of Indiana University takes place on Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 5:30-7:30 pm in Student Building 150. On Monday, April 5, 2010, 7 pm,  there will be a screening of Professor Azoulay’s documentary film, “The Angel of History” in Fine arts 102.

Professor Azoulay’s lecture discusses the ontology of photography (and of the photograph) drawing a basic distinction between the event of photography and the photograph which is only one of its products.  The photographic examples will be drawn from the exhibition Constituent Violence 1947-1950 that Professor Azoulay curated in Israel in March-June 2009.  The exhibition provides a genealogy of the transformation of the Palestinian disaster into a “disaster from their point of view.”  Among her publications are Death’s Showcase (2001) and The Civil Contract of Photography (2008).

The lectures are sponsored at Northwestern University by the Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Center for Global Culture and Communication.  At Indiana University it is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Branigan Lecture Series.    For more information at Northwestern University contact Daniel Elam (jdelam@u.northwestern.edu) and at Indiana University Jon Simons (simonssj@indiana.edu) or Ivona Hedin (ihedin@indiana.edu).

Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959

Milwaukee Art Museum

January 30, 2010–April 25, 2010

“See more than 100 photographs in the first major exhibition of street photography from this era in nearly 20 years. Refuting the common claim that photojournalism was the only significant photographic activity at the time, Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959 uncovers a crucial time in American art, when global media was in its adolescence and photography was just beginning to gain recognition in the art world. The exhibition focuses on the work of six photographers (Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, William Klein, and Robert Frank) who broke the rules of conventional photography to create emotionally engaging photographs.”

Information about the exhibition, related programming, and catalog is available here.

Photograph Ted Croner, New York, 1947. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 13 7/8 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The 2010 World Press Photo Awards were announced last week.

You can see the photographs here.

You may have seen some of the photographs before, as when we posted on this image and The Practice of Domination in Everyday Life.  There are many others, however, and many that are likely to amaze.  Some also will raise questions about who should be the photographic subject, what should count as an artistic image, and how spectators should respond to eloquent images of suffering.  If photojournalism is to remain a public art, we will need both the photographs and an engaged audience capable of debating these issues and more.

Photograph by Rina Castelnuovo/The New York Times.

In The Vernacular

Exhibition

Art Institute of Chicago

February 6–May 31, 2010

Vernacular photographs—those countless ordinary and utilitarian pictures made for souvenir postcards, government archives, police case files, pin-up posters, networking Web sites, and the pages of magazines, newspapers, or family albums—have been both the inspiration for and the antithesis of fine-art photography for over a century. In their struggle to gain legitimacy in the art world, fine-art photographers at the turn of the 20th century endeavored to distance their work from the amateur, commonplace, and practical photographs that had become so familiar in everyday experience.

This exhibition presents the work of artists who chose instead to strategically use photography’s everyday forms as a source of inspiration, consciously appropriating, reworking, and interrogating the aesthetics, content, and means of distribution associated with vernacular photography. Photographs by Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr, Nikki S. Lee, and others represented in the Art Institute’s permanent collection challenge us to reevaluate the impact, value, and status of the photographs we encounter in our daily lives. These images persuade us to consider the ways in which photographs function as significant bearers of complex meaning, rather than mere descriptions or reflections of the world, whether they grace the walls of a museum, the pages of a magazine, the files in a cabinet, or a living room mantel.

Please note: Some images may be inappropriate for younger visitors.

Photograph: Martin Parr, Fashion Magazine: Fashion Shoot, New York, 1999.  Art Institute of Chicago, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Purchase Fund.

Urban Cuts: Appropriation and Resistance in the American City

The Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University invites papers for its Second Visual Culture Graduate Student Conference, to be held April 16-18, 2010 in St. Louis, Missouri. This year’s conference theme, “Urban Cuts: Appropriation and Resistance in the American City,” coincides with the “Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark” exhibition at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis.

Proposals are welcome from all disciplines exploring visual representations of conflicting uses and contested meanings of urban space. Taking a cue from Matta-Clark’s “cuts,” we seek contributions addressing the effects of changes in urban geography on people’s daily lives. We are particularly interested in projects that examine the role of photography, film, advertising, fine art, performance, architecture, design, and/or new media. We encourage submissions by graduate students working transnationally and comparatively on urban environments.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Representation & Iconography of Urban Space
- Demolition, Destruction & Displacement
- Fractured/Fragmented Space
- Contested Ownership
- Political Activism through Urban Space
- Memory & Subjectivity
- “Anarchitecture” as concept and practice
- Abandonment & Neglect
- Urban Renewal
- Urban Performance as Resistance

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a curriculum vitae by January 15, 2010 to vcc2010@slu.edu.
Additional information is available here. For questions, please contact Elizabeth Wolfson (vcc2010@slu.edu).

ACT OF STATE

Une histoire photographiée de l’occupation israélienne 1967 — 2007

(A Photographic History of the Israeli Occupation, 1967-2007)

Curated by Ariella Azoulay

Centre de la photographie

Geneva, Switzerland

ACT OF STATE is the first photographic history of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. This exhibition documents both a history of facts and a history of representations.  The 700 photographs taken by 50 photographers are printed on A4 sheets from digital files.  The images also are available in an Italian catalogue published by Bruno Mondadori in 2008.

28, re des Bains, Ch-11205, Geneve

t +41 22 329 28 35/F +41 22 320 99 04

epg@centrephotogeneve.ch

www.centrephotogeneve.ch

December 3, 2009-January 17, 2010

Photograph by Rina Castelnuovo, 1997.  See also Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography.