Call for Proposals: 2026 Symposium “Vision and Veiling: Photographic Resilience and Sociopolitical Change”
Photography Network Virtual Symposium, Nov 5–7, 2026
Three holes have been punched through the 35 mm. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-T01-000260-M3]
Call for Proposals
Photography practitioners, historians, and curators respond in a multitude of ways to political and cultural contexts that challenge their work. Moreover, in response to efforts to remove, omit, occlude, obscure, or manipulate, photographs often persist, transform, and recirculate, reformulating visual worlds. Photographs bear a complex relationship to political and social power; authorities might manipulate or remove photographs to further their goals, but forms of covering up, self-censorship, or self-fashioning might also function in the name of individual privacy, safety, or resistance. Furthermore, as the material capabilities and limitations of photography shift, new questions continually emerge about the role of photographic removal and photographic resilience in constricting cultural climates.
This symposium offers a platform for scholarship that investigates the adaptability of photography and photo history in the face of constraints, be them cultural, governmental, institutional, editorial, individual, or otherwise. What do historians, curators, and photographers do when limitations are placed on their work, and what do the limitations themselves reveal about photography? Relatedly, when is restriction, refusal, or withdrawal protective, strategic, or empowering? Finally, what, if anything, has changed about how the medium navigates social or cultural boundaries—what can we learn from how practitioners have done this in the past that might shed light on present-day questions? We welcome interdisciplinary approaches, and we especially encourage international scholars to submit.
We invite submissions of 15-minute talks related to topics such as:
Photographic exhibitions in complex political or social contexts
Collecting institutions’ navigation of political pressures
Image circulation and content moderation on social media
Privacy and surveillance
Photographic archives and repatriation
Photojournalism, political figures, war imagery
Image withdrawal, refusal, or veiling as a form of justice, resistance, or repair
Challenges in conducting scholarship on controversial imagery
Canceled exhibitions, publications, and public history projects
Archives and historical erasure
Cancelled negatives, “killed” negatives
The aesthetics of photographic concealment—the blur, the black rectangle, the crop
We also, of course, encourage approaches to these questions beyond what we have outlined here.
To submit, please send an abstract, bio, and CV to photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com by May 31, 2026.