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Photography Theory, in a New Companion Volume

With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose. (Full disclosure: one of the chapters is by Hariman and Lucaites.) Frankly, it’s a splendid volume. And pricey in the cloth edition, but it also is available at a much lower price for Kindle.

Available at Amazon and Routledge; the table of contents is available at both sites.

 

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Lookout America!

“Lookout America! brings together John Ford, Marilyn Monroe, and all manner of Cold War generals and operatives in what amounts to Dr Strangelove: The Documentary.  Prodigiously researched, beautifully illustrated and written, and insightfully theorized, this book feels frighteningy current and necessary.” (Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York University)

Available here.

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Paper Call: Design, Sound, and Vision

The 8th William A. Kern Conference on Visual Communication

Rochester Institute of Technology

April 26-28, 2018

Design, Sound and Vision in Midcentury Media

Call for Papers

The 2018 Kern conference will be focused on the topic of “midcentury media.” The traditional focus of the Kern conference is visual communication, and this year’s aims to reveal how the visual intersects with broader dimensions of media, such as design, literature, and music. Further, we want to do some ‘looking backward’ to historicize visual culture by focusing on the midcentury period, roughly between the 1940s and the 1960s. We are looking for papers on topics of how media technologies were introduced, visualized and promoted; how design, photography, print, and other visual technologies created glamourous imagery, often of midcentury media objects themselves; how the midcentury literary and popular imagination elicited and relied upon visual displays and representations; and how Cold War anxieties, ideal lifestyles, and optimism for the future impacted midcentury media. We aspire to promote efforts to think about design and modernism within a larger frame of visual culture. We are particularly interested in under researched areas, case studies, and figures.

We encourage submissions that:
• Re-imagine and reassess midcentury media
• Explore the continuing significance of midcentury aesthetic production and material     culture, including graphic design, vinyl records, radio, television, film, popular media, and ephemera
• Interrogate identity – race, class, gender – and ideology
• Integrate approaches to communication, design, history, media studies, and visual culture

Preliminary list of invited speakers:
Greg Barnhisel, Department of English, Duquesne University
Michael Brown, Department of History, Rochester Institute of Technology
John Covach, Institute for Popular Music, University of Rochester
Keir Keightley, Faculty of Media & Information Studies, Western University, Canada
Kristin L. Matthews, Department of English, Brigham Young University
Monica Penick, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin
Tom Perchard, Department of Music, Goldsmiths, University of London
R. Roger Remington, College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology
Penny M. Von Eschen, Department of History, Cornell University


Following in the tradition of Kern conferences, we plan a rich program of interdisciplinary scholarship and conversation.

Conference Chairs: Jonathan E. Schroeder, William A. Kern Professor of Communications, Rochester Institute of Technology and Janet Borgerson, City, University of London

Submission deadline: January 15, 2018.  Additional information is here.
Send extended abstracts (500 – 2500 words) via email to Jonathan Schroeder: jesgla@rit.edu

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Paper Call: Image, History, and Memory

CALL FOR PAPERS

International conference on IMAGE, HISTORY AND MEMORY

Warsaw, 6–8 December 2017

The goal of this conference is to promote an interdisciplinary discussion of the relationships between image, history and memory. We welcome paper proposals from the fields of art history, history, sociology, cultural studies, political science and others. The papers should address images in their various roles: as witnesses to history, as means of materializing memories, as active creators of history or as producers of the contents of memory. Suggestive images can provoke historical events, just as they can influence memory. The latter role particularly affects those who did not directly witness historical events but became heirs to instances of post-memory. Thus, when members of subsequent Soviet generations ‘recalled’ the October Revolution, writes Susan Buck- Morss, what they really remembered were images from Sergei Eisenstein’s films. Thus, the arrangement of the three concepts of interest to the conference—image, history and memory—is circular rather than linear. We want to focus on the complexity of the triangular dynamics between historical narratives, their visualization and memories. These relationships are important to any effort to understand and describe interactions between history and biography, and the individual and collective processes and mechanisms of remembrance.

The conference discussion will focus on these issues from a regional perspective that will highlight questions about ways in which historical images fit into the dynamics of remembrance in Central and Eastern Europe, but they will make references to other historical, political and cultural regions of Europe and of the world.

Scholars of various disciplines are invited to submit paper proposals addressing, but not limited to, the following themes: A. Remembrance, history, image: Theories and cognitive perspectives; B. Image and historiosophy: Artists’ reflections on history and memory; C. Images of history vs. remembrance;  D. Monuments as images of memory; E. Image in popular culture and the new media: Medium of memory, fabric of history; F. Film: Medium of memory, fabric of history.

To apply to present a paper at the conference, please send (a) your abstract (300 words) along with your presentation title and if possible the panel topic, as well as (b) a short bio to: <genealogies@enrs.eu>.
More information is available here and here.   Deadline for submissions: 15 July 2017.  (NB: Late submissions are possible; contact me at <robert.hariman@comcast.net> if interested.  Full disclosure: I’m a keynoter for the conference.)

The list of the chosen participants will be announced by the end of September 2017. There is no fee for taking part in the conference.

Organisers: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS); Institute of Arts History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; History Department, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; Institute of Art and Visual History, Chair of Art History of Eastern and East Central Europe, Humboldt University of Berlin; Social Memory Laboratory, Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw.

Partners: Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw; The Committee on Art Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

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One Voice: Portraits from the Tibetan Diaspora

Photographer David Zimmerman’s One Voice offers beautiful testimony to the dignity of the individual person amid catastrophic displacement, abandonment, and loss.

This book of portraits of displaced Tibetans also includes two short essays (full disclosure: I wrote one of them) and several poems.  You can see some of the portraits at David’s website; the book is available from Kehrer Verlag in Germany and at Amazon.   Although part of an activist project, these images are contemplative: they offer a mindfulness that is another way to resist those forces that, given enough time, would make all of us refugees.

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Conference Paper Call: Helsinki Photomedia 2018

Helsinki Photomedia 2018

Reconsidering the “Post-truth Condition”: Epistemologies of the photographic image

March 26 -28, 2018

Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

Contemporary photography takes place in a world where the relation between facts and values is a social and political issue which has repercussions in art and education as well. The public discussions on information warfare, fake news, and manipulated media contents have shaken the epistemology of news media and generally revitalized the questions of trustfulness of media representations. Problematic statements about the ‘post-truth condition’ symptomatically reflect this situation and pose new challenges to our understanding of the epistemology of the photographic image.

Helsinki Photomedia 2018 invites critical examinations, artistic reflections, and presentations of educational projects of photography after the ‘post-truth condition’, especially work which addresses the variety of ends that photographic truth, authenticity, indexicality, manipulation, and suspicion have to stand for. Photomedia 2018 will take up the multifaceted question concerning the photographic epistemology by focusing on topics including (but not limited to):

  • Evidence and testimony
  • Photography and knowledge
  • Technical aspects of photographic data
  • Visual information and counter-information
  • Strategies of authentication
  • Photography and education

Deadline for 500 word abstracts: October 31, 2017.  Guidelines for submissions are here.

Keynote speakers 2018:

Professor Robert Hariman (Northwestern University)

Professor John Lucaites (Indiana University)

Professor Barbie Zelizer (University of Pennsylvania)

Artist Keynote TBC by August

Helsinki Photomedia is a biennial photography research conference organized by four Finnish universities since 2012. The conference offers various platforms where artistic, philosophical, social, cultural, economical, and technological approaches to photography meet. We welcome submissions from all areas of photography research. Since 2016 photography education has been one of the areas and we welcome submissions for the educational panel for presenting educational projects and related research. The conference language is English.

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Helping Others: A New York Moment

ThIs image is my pick for photograph of the week.  Trigger warning for the sophisticated: I’m going to get sentimental.

The car plowing through the pedestrians in Times Square wasn’t a terrorist attack, but it could have been.  Same levels of surprise and senselessness.  Same aftermath of shock, injuries, death, disruption, and fear.  Unfortunately, we know the basic story too well.

But that’s not the only story.  This photograph reminds us of another: one that always is there but also is too easily forgotten.  The story of how ordinary people step up and lean in to help those around them.  To help those strangers around them–people they don’t know, whom they won’t see again, who can’t be expected to return the favor.

There are two helpers in the foreground of this photograph, each of them reaching out to the injured woman between them.  One places a hand to offer gentle reassurance while looking up as if to watch for another threat or additional help.  His balanced stance is protective and yet careful: he isn’t going to move her unnecessarily or otherwise go beyond his skill level.  He can only do so much, but he is there for her.

What makes the photograph, however, is the man on the right.  He mirrors the general sense of concern posed by the man on the left, but now responsiveness acquires incredible sensitivity and nuance.  He ever so carefully pinches the hem of her skirt to pull it back down over her undergarment.  His fingers, arm, and body are finely tensed in an act of precision, as if removing a mote of dust from a precious artwork.  He acts to protect her modesty, and so respectfully that he will not frighten her or add in any way to her sense of violation and helplessness.  She has been hit by a car and thrown to the pavement, but she will not be manhandled.

That lightness of touch is heightened by the contrast with his massive arms.  Nor does it end there: he is a picture of carefully styled masculinity.  Although he won’t be Forever 21, he is looking damn good.   Personal discipline and public display are fused in his self-fashioning, but it turns out that fashion is only one part of who he is, and of what it means to live among strangers in New York City.  His delicate gesture is an affirmation of the dignity of the individual person, no matter who she is or how she has been harmed.

And of course it is a New York moment all the way down the street: from people in costumes to that dude with the greenish jacket and backpack who could be a Ninja Turtle.  (Is he in costume or not?  You tell me.)  The scene could appear in the New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary, except for the fact that people were being injured and killed.

And, as happens in New York or in Naperville, Illinois or in many, many other places, ordinary people respond to disasters in a New York minute.  The police, fire, and other first responders are still crucial, as are the dedicated emergency room staffs and all the rest that locks into place to provide emergency care.  But let’s not forget these moments of simple caring that are there to be seen briefly.  They are acts and signs of the social trust and commitment to a common life that is essential for living together.

There is no art of the deal here.  No market exchange or competitive advantage or utility maximization, and nothing is monetized.   Instead, people are acting like fellow citizens.  And so they are, whatever their status otherwise.  Citizens of New York, and citizens of photography, visible yet unnoticed most of the time, yet ready to help one another without bidding.  Examples for us all.

Photograph by Jewel Samad/Getty.

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