Preliminary Programme

This presentation aims to outline a method for studying the social biography of photographs: their history of appropriation by different groups within society. Building on the work of Appadurai and Kopytoff in The Social Life of Things, I propose to take the concept of framing as the starting point for tracing the different meanings given to individual images as they travel through time and space. Which levels of framing can be distinguished? What do these different levels mean for the practice of photographic research? Taking as a case study ethically sensitive imagery from the European colonial past, I will argue that attention to framing can simultaneously produce distance from and proximity to these performed traces from the past.
Bio
Paulus Bijl studied Dutch and Comparative Literature, and was a visiting student and research scholar at UCLA and Columbia University. His PhD-thesis, which brought together (post)colonial studies, memory studies, and visual culture, was on two photographs of colonial atrocity and their role in Dutch cultural remembrance. He is currently a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. (Show less)

This paper will consider the use of photography as a research method in an auto ethnographic research project looking at how photographs are used by a Greek family to mediate loss and thus adjust and cope with it. This social/art research will present a way in which photography can be used as a creatively therapeutic medium for grief adaptation. The focus will be to first decode rituals involving family snapshots as a visual language which people can use to communicate the experience of feelings of intimacy and devastation within the family. The interpretative lens will be to make gender politics visible in the family and thus renegotiate the language that inscribes memory (how people choose to remember or forget) and thus self identity (what people choose to be through what they remember). Photographs the participants have photographed with the brief to picture their grieving related identities, will be discussed. Therapeutic photography where participants’ creative photography is employed as a process of recuperation is an exciting new way to allow for new self narratives and conversations to evolve and thus cater for the need for an unconventional self-directed redefining rituality of identity.
Bio
Evangelia Katsaiti is a PhD Researcher and practicing visual artist thematically concerned with the themes of loss, gender, memory, and identity. She had exhibitions in the UK, Australia and Greece and is currently in PhD research with Nottingham Trent University. She has academic collaborations with the Universities of Lapland , Finland, Sydney College of the Arts, Australia and the Capodistrian in Athens Greece. (Show less)

Since the advent of photography, images have become integral to how people understand war, conflict, and crisis situations in contemporary global society. Due to the ubiquitous nature of images in modern media and the ability of the photograph to essentially ‘capture’ time, pictures have arguably shaped popular understanding of particular events, creating a complex visual historical narrative. In this paper, I aim to examine the history and culture of tragedy photography from wars and international conflicts to famines and medical crises. The paper analyzes several overarching ethical quandaries inherent to crisis photography using the images of photographers such as James Nachtwey and Eddie Adams, among others, as case studies. Beyond grappling with the problem of voyeurism in the context of viewing the human being as subject matter, the concept of the photograph as memento mori is dealt with. It is important to critique photographs of death as they complicate the boundary between the living and the dead—physically preserving in the present that which lived solely in the past. In addition, this paper looks at the photographer’s crafting of an image (what is shown and what is left out) and its consequences with regard to seeing a photograph as ‘truth.’ Finally, the paper explores the impact of photography on global crisis narratives and the formation of communal understanding and memory. (Show less)

My visual research project explores how through daily and yearly cycles, the bereaved, mourners and workers develop and maintain intricate funerary rituals involving the dead buried in the cemeteries of Mexico City. Commemorative visual and material culture both religious and secular already plays an important role in mourners’ everyday life and activities. A more extensive use of the photograph and the practice of photography became a valuable social research tool, especially when looking at the exchanges and interactions between the dead, memory and the visual material worlds that assist the living, the dead and the ánima (spirit/soul) to stay connected in the spaces in which they interact.

I have chosen to explore the above social and cultural processes in part through a visual methodology, documenting meticulously through photographs as well as text the numerous ways in which the living and the dead remain connected over generations. The practice of photography eased and speeded the entry into the cemetery and mourners private and public spaces, it also opened access to the possibilities of collaboratory encounters within the field and with those people with whom I was working. Thus, I examined and extensively recorded through photography the cyclical memorialising and mourning practices, ritualised routines, and daily habits associated with the dead and the cemetery space in the borough of Álvaro Obregón, Mexico City. A visual methodology in combination with traditional ethnographic methods such as participant observation, formal and informal interviews, investigation of life histories of the bereaved, mourners, visitors and workers with an overview of contemporary Mexican funerary practices in Mexico City offered the project a productive instrument, providing a more nuanced understanding of the bereaved and mourner’s ideas about their relationships with the dead. (Show less)

1914-1918 in Belgium is a geographical and chronological period that offered a unique context for development and circulation of a rich and varied iconographic corpus. Our paper proposes to explore two illustrated weeklies published, under the control of the German censorship, in occupied Belgium. L’événement illustré is a documentary, artistic and literary magazine, which appears from February 1915 to March 1918. 1914-1918 illustré is a periodical that appeared in July 1914. Its title is then 1914 illustré. It will continue to be published throughout the war under the successive titles 1914-1915 illustré, 1914-1916 illustré…
If there are plates and drawings, the essential basis of these two magazines is photography.
Initially, we will examine the context of production and circulation of these weeklies. In a second step, we will analyze the iconographic corpus that allows a counter-analysis of a society, especially a society under supervision of an occupant. L. Gervereau present an interesting chronology of the iconographic representations of the War in France. At the beginning of the conflict, pictures multiply the indices of national power. 1916 shows a break with the appearance of an “effect of reality”: there are more and more shock photos and they henceforth tend to describe the war and its "marks". Is this chronology applicable to the Belgian case? Do we find these same thematic shifts? Unlike the French weeklies, it seems that throughout the conflict, both Belgian weeklies give to see the outskirts of a war 'quiet', and especially a war far away from the borders of Belgium. These pictures give evidence of a “war culture” peculiar to occupied Belgium that it’s important to highlight. (Show less)