An interdisciplinary symposium on photographic futures in a post-digital world.
4 December 2015
The 'Shadow without Object' symposium in particularly explored one of the medium's long-held and contentious theoretical tenets which describes the physical relationship between a photograph and its subject - the index.
Bringing together new research from across the visual arts, particle physics and conservation studies, the symposium addressed renewed interest in photographic indexicality. It reconsidered ideas around materiality, subjectivity and realism in light of emerging imaging processes and their historical contexts.
Challenging linear histories of photography, the contributions at this event promised to open up photography's technical and conceptual operations beyond narrow dichotomies of past / future, analogue / digital and light / matter.
Symposium proceedings will be made available in a forthcoming special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Philosophy of Photography.
Presented by the BA Fine Art Photography department at Camberwell College of Arts.
Speakers:
Jananne Al-Ani
Artist and Senior Research Fellow at the London College of Communication. Her work explores the impact of photography, flight and the technologies of modern warfare on the representation of contested landscapes.
Presentation - View from Above: Latent Images in the Landscape.
Bernd Behr
Artist and BA Photography Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. His practice uses photography, moving image and sculpture to insert itself into historical junctures of image cultures and the built environment.
Presentation - Akeley in the Elephant Skull: Trajectory of a Taxidermic Image.
Sam Burford
Artist and PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Arts. His work deals with representations of cinematic time, introducing a malleable physical engagement with the normally intangible experience of cinema.
Presentation - Searching for Traces of the Indexical within Synthetically Rendered Imagery.
Dr. Michael Doser
Research physicist at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. He is working on a project using traditional photochemical emulsion to observe the gravitational behaviour of antimatter across three dimensional space.
Presentation - Seeing Antimatter Disappear.
Professor Dr. Peter Geimer
Director of the Department of Art History at Freie Universit in Berlin. He has published extensively on photography and the cultural histories of photographic materiality.
Presentation - The Accident is Original: On Photographic Apparitions.
Louisa Minkin
Artist and Course Leader for MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Her research interests involve technical histories and include a collaborative project with archaeologists at the University of Southampton to develop innovative uses for 3D technologies.
Presentation - Photo Sculpture: A Sum of the Profiles.
Giacomo Raffaelli
Artist and researcher based in Milan. His practice operates across film, installation and lecture-performance to explore the peripheries of scientific research.
Presentation - Non-standard Uncertainties: Experiments in the Current Visual Conditions of the Kilogram Standards.
Dr. Daniel Rubinstein
Artist, writer and Course Leader for MA Photography at Central Saint Martins. He has published widely on the philosophical implications of emerging imaging cultures and is co-editor of the journal Philosophy of Photography.
Presentation - Graven Images: Photography after Heidegger, Lyotard and Deleuze.
Betty Sacher
Sacher works in the field of museum conservation, currently based at University College London Institute for Sustainable Heritage and the Wellcome Library. Her research concerns the impact of different lighting intensities on the long term stability of artefacts.
Presentation - Managing Change to Collections using Microfadeometry.
Duncan Wooldridge
Artist, writer, curator and Course Leader for BA Photography at Camberwell College of Arts. His practice employs strategies of appropriation and interruption at the site of photographic reproduction.
Presentation - Some Notes on a New Realism: Relocating Representation in the Technical Image.