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About the Symposium

Photography Network’s third annual symposium will be held virtually and hosted jointly with the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. In honor of the UWC’s New Archival Visions Programme—an initiative to activate the university’s archival holdings through research, fellowships, and curatorial projects—this symposium considers the subject of frameworks in the study of photography. 

In recent years, “framing” and “reframing” have become buzzwords for describing new approaches to the study of photography, including the 2018 volume Photography Reframed: New Visions in Photographic Culture, the ReFrame project at the Harvard Art Museums launched in 2021, and the ongoing archival initiative, “Framing the Field: Photography's Histories in American Institutions.” Projects like the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2023 Field Guide to Photography and Media exhibition and catalogue and the recent Vision & Justice initiative encourage reflection on how histories of photography have been constructed and how certain interventions can be made to create a more equitable field moving forward. Such interventions might also draw on “reframing” projects from the global south that interrogate colonial and metropolitan categories and temporal schemas in the history of global photography, such as the 2020 Kronos special issue on “Other Lives of the Image” and the 2019 publication Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History. 

This symposium aims to gather these types of initiatives into one space for shared reflection and future collaboration. Using the construction of a “framework” in reference to both conceptual schema and physical structures, we ask how larger patterns of social, ideological, material, economic, and environmental forces have shaped and continue to shape photographs as objects in circulation and in archival repositories. How have past theoretical, methodological, and institutional frameworks structured, and in many instances limited, the field? What work have these frames performed in the creation and interpretation of photographs and their histories? Which frameworks have been overlooked, and what types of interventions can make the most impactful changes? 

Symposium Schedule

Thursday, October 12, 2023

2:00–5:00 pm UTC

Welcoming Events (2:00–3:00 pm UTC)

Photography Network Co-Chairs Welcome
Kate Bussard and Caroline Riley

Announcement of Book Awards and Project Grants
Catherine Zuromskis

Introduction to the 2023 Symposium
Josie Johnson

Spotlight: The University of the Western Cape Archives Project

  • Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her research background is in African history, and she engages extensively with photographic archives and their methodological challenges to bring together history and aesthetics in different southern African settings. She is co-editor of Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (2019), the special issue of the journal Kronos (2020) on ‘Other Lives of the Image,’ and Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa (2021). 

Lightning Round (3:00–4:00pm UTC)
Moderator: Candice Jansen

  • Domestic spaces with their various frames, barriers and entries are contradictory sites that are crucial to the history of representing selves and familial relationality in photography. This paper brings together photographers who intentionally deploy domestic frames in their photographs from the 1970s-1990s. Part of a larger project that examines photographic art which pictures domestic technologies – televisions, washing machines and other everyday tools – this paper focuses on photographers who use the kitchen fridge as framing device. I explore how the camera and the fridge operate together to frame relational household portraits and reproduce the scalar nature of domestic spaces.

    Jane Simon is Senior Lecturer in Media at Macquarie University in Sydney where she teaches photography studies and film studies.

  • Taking its point of departure from indigeneity and the importance of storytelling as a means of knowing a place and transmitting a particular local history, this presentation examines the work of contemporary artists working in site-specific image work that leverages memory as a means of inserting history back into public discourse and artist-archivists that are using public digital forums to create new gathering places for storytelling to occur.

    Jorge Sibaja is the Curatorial Assistant at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. He graduated from Brown University with BAs in Economics and Art History.

  • This research encompasses an analysis of the historical narratives surrounding the perception of the Indian urban nocturne, which have often been entangled with notions of exoticism, tropicality, and filth, as depicted in colonial travelogues, literature, and illustrations. This study aims to explore how photography, and particularly the work of contemporary photographers like Dhruv Malhotra, Gauri Gill, and Dayanita Singh, has reframed and expanded the complexities of the Indian urban night, by exploring themes of identity, social and political realities within the neoliberal regime, gendered modes of inhabiting the urban space, and new forms of imagination.

    Dr Manila Castoro is an art historian, lecturing Critical Theory at Oxford Brookes University (UK). Manila has published extensively on the aesthetic and cultural relationships between photography and the city.

  • In December 1870, American photographer John Moran replaced famed survey photographer Timothy O'Sullivan as the official photographer of the Darien Expedition, a survey that took place between 1870 and 1874. The purpose of the expedition was to explore the Panama region of what was then the United States of Colombia to determine the feasibility of building a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This presentation will analyze some of the work of these two photographers during one of the most important exploratory ventures undertaken by the United States in the late nineteenth century.

    Juanita Solano Roa is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes. Her work focuses on the history of photography in Latin America.

Keynote (4:00–5:00 pm UTC)

  • Nomusa Makhubu is an Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Cape Town. She founded Creative Knowledge Resources (CKR) – an open access platform for socially responsive arts. Makhubu was the Deputy Dean for Transformation in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Cape Town (2020-2022). She was the recipient of the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award in 2006 and the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Le Fresnoy in 2014. She received the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) African Humanities Program fellowship award and was selected to be an African Studies Association (ASA) Presidential fellow in 2016. In 2017, she was a UCT-Harvard Mandela fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University. In that same year, she was the First Runner Up for the Department of Science and Technology (DST) Women in Science Awards. Makhubu has curated major exhibitions (including a co-curation of the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Italy), and she has published Creative Books and research papers in peer-reviewed international journals and book volumes. Makhubu moves between visual arts and academic writing and has directed her aesthetic curiosity and scholarly interests across disciplines.

Friday, October 13, 2023
2:00–6:00 pm UTC

The Photographer’s Frameworks
2:00–3:30 pm UTC

Moderator:
Jessica Williams Stark

  • Cecil Williams is an African American photographer who extensively documented the Civil Rights era in South Carolina, including the 1968 massacre of Black student protestors in his hometown of Orangeburg. Williams owned a succesful photo studio there and also worked as a freelance photojournalist, largely for the local and national Black press. He graduated from one of the historically Black colleges central to the student protests and was an active participant in the local Civil Rights movement. As a member of the community he photographed, who had himself protested and experienced arrest, Williams approached his subjects with an accomplices’ awareness of local politics and a strong empathy for the internal emotions of his subjects. His images visualize this familiarity and stage close, unposed relationships between viewer and subjects, even in moments of risk. These intimacies are absent from iconic images of Civil Rights struggles that position the viewer as an outsider looking in. Black audiences and the Black press valued his work, especially in South Carolina. Yet, studies of Civil Rights photography have not given Williams much attention, which aligns with the general overlook of South Carolina in histories of the Civil Rights era. This paper introduces the octogenarian Williams’ career-long efforts to re-vision the importance of South Carolina Civil Rights history, especially the student protest movement in Orangeburg, via his own counter-archive of photographs, ephemera, and the recorded remembrances of his fellow activists. Active to this day, Williams displays these materials in his self-designed Cecil Williams Civil Right Museum in Orangeburg, the only Civil Rights museum in the state.

    Mary Trent is an Assistant Professor of Art and Architectural History at The College of Charleston, where she specializes in American and African American art and visual culture.

  • Georgina Karvellas was one of the only women photographers documenting South Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. Apprenticed by the studio photographer Anne Fischer in 1960, Karvellas became a commercial practitioner and filmmaker, producing not only work for magazines, the fashion and theatre industry but also striking documentary work with a clear stance against the government’s segregationist policy. In 1978, Karvellas moved to Los Angeles to work for the music sector, later returning to her home country. During her career, Karvellas lived and worked between South Africa and the USA, constantly negotiating transcultural understandings of depicting Black and white people in different political systems. Being homosexual, she dealt with the possibilities and limitations of depicting women in commercial photography, mediating the implications of the omnipresent male gaze in the sector.

    Inscribing Karvellas’ important work into the histories of apartheid photography and of women working with the medium, this paper highlights the intersections of her work between commercial and political photography as well as between issues of gender, race, and class through a careful reading of the various frameworks into which it has been placed and the reasons for them. As she worked at a time when the freedom of movement of South Africa’s majority population was severely restricted, a particular focus is on Karvellas’ transnational approach and the question to what extent her choice of commercial photography might have closed doors for her, such as inclusion in the artistic canon, while giving her greater freedom in crossing borders.

    Marie Meyerding is a PhD candidate at Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation examines women’s representation in the history of photography in apartheid South Africa.

  • If the enduring exclusion of women from the history of photography has largely been due to their overall barring from legitimate forms of professional recognition[1], this research project reframes three essential, female historical figures by examining the inner dynamics of managing a photography career.

    The archives of American photographers Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, and Lee Miller unveil commonalities in the layered histories of their intense and productive professional lives. However, while recognized for some of their accomplishments, the three women are consistently reduced to their respective roles of documentarian of New York, war photographer, and Surrealist muse. Contradicting these common and reductive perceptions, the archives unfold the broad diversity of the photographers’ activities—including studio portraiture, photojournalism, advertising, fashion, and war photography—along with their ease in stepping from one context to another and linking their various practices. In all three instances, the archives offer rich, complex, dynamic portraits of highly qualified professional photographers.

    If female practitioners’ working life is marked by a myriad of specific challenges, including the lack of artistic and cultural opportunities, the archives reveal that despite these obstacles, these women all shared the capacity to adapt to the changing circumstances and to seize new arising opportunities. By defying the omnipotent mythologized and one-layered figures of the male photojournalist and the male artist, would establishing a new figure, the “professional woman photographer”[2], be compelling and efficient to reframe the history of photography for more inclusive accounts and accurate representations?

    Gaëlle Morel is Exhibitions Curator, The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada

    —

    [1] Marie Robert, “A Long Tradition of Being Ignored”, in Luce Lebart and Marie Robert (Ed.), A World History of Women Photographers, London: Thames and Hudson, 2022, 18-24; Nicole Hudgins, The Gender of Photography. How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography, London: Routledge, 2020.

    [2] Other examples could be considered, including Thérèse Bonney (1894–1978), Germaine Krull (1897–1985) and Canadian photographer Minna Keene (1861–1943), who, from the late 1890s to the 1930s, was a Pictorialist artist, the owner of multiple portrait studios in South Africa and Canada, the producer of her own licensed images and postcards, and was commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway to photograph the Rocky Mountains.

Reframing the Archive
3:30–5:00 pm UTC

Moderator:
Kate Bussard

  • At the turn of the twentieth century, American colonial photographers cemented perceptions of the Philippines as an uncivilized and primitive society. United States colonial administrators of the Philippines created a visual narrative of White saviorism in order to justify American presence in the Philippines. In my project titled Field Notes, I engage with archival images made during the American colonial period of the Philippines and create collages that deconstruct and critique the colonial gaze.

    As a Filipino-American photographer and artist, I am interested in offering a more nuanced and complex narrative of Philippine history and the history of photography itself. My collages use archival images sourced from repositories such as the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; and the Newberry Library in Chicago. These archives possess indelible images that codified colonial power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines. The cumulative effect of layering and reshaping images from these sources disrupts the reading of the original photograph. My project contributes to a growing conversation by contemporary artists who interrogate the colonizing power of the archive, not only for Filipinos, but for all people of the Global South. Field Notes considers vital questions about the intertwining roles of photography, empire, and the archive.

    Jason Reblando is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Illinois State University and a recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines.

  • This paper considers a photograph which appears in the well-known exhibition, Family of Man, which was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. The photograph is captioned “Bechuanaland. Nat Farbman LIFE.” I want to think about this photograph, notwithstanding its framing through concepts like ‘family’ and ‘man’, in a visual relationship with two another two images. The one is a family photograph from my childhood, taken at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town in 1985 and the other is a photograph also taken by Nat Farbrman at this same museum in 1946. In The Family of Man: A Visual Universal declaration of Human Rights, Azoulay states of the ‘Bechuanaland’ photograph, a “photograph of the Bushmen”, that: “In this exhibition, everyone becomes Bushmen.” In placing the photographs referred to above, the ‘Bechuanaland’ photograph, my family photograph and the Iziko Museum photograph into conversation, I want to reflect – taking into account the temporality of this bending back – on how the frame works across different temporalities and spaces to fashion a particular discourse around race in South Africa. In doing this I want to elaborate what might be called a mortificationary complex.

    Dr. Michelle Smith is a postdoctoral fellow in the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme, “A Practice of Postapartheid Freedom”, at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape. Her work is located in museum studies and public history, with a focus on visuality and race.

  • My presentation will discuss three contemporary photographic approaches to archival images from the colonial Congo under the regime of King Leopold II of the Belgians. The paper is planned around archival, (de)colonial, and dysfunctional frameworks that I will translate into the intersecting power dynamics, connecting past and present in the context of the critical discourse on humanitarian and documental photography in Africa (after S. Sliwinski, A. Mbembe, E. Boehmer, O. Enwezor). In the first approach, Preserving, I will analyze work from Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo titled Infinity Memory (2016). The sculpture consists of a wooden cabinet with an archival album of Belgian Congo hidden in the drawers, both preserving the images and burying them in a coffin-like body of the furniture. In the second approach, Embodying, I will discuss Ayana V. Jackson’s Demons Devotees I-IV (2013) series. In her self-portraits, the African American artist references an English missionary and photographer, Alice Seeley-Harris, and her portrait with Congolese children from 1905. Jackson creates a new narrative on blackness and womanhood by embodying the humanitarian photographer and mimicking (or “mimicry-ing”) the Western imagination of Africa. In the last approach, Stitching, I will present a photographic project from a Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, titled Mémoire (2006). In his works, Baloji combines contemporary landscapes of the mining town of Lubumbashi in Congo with the colonial images of exploited workers. The stitch metaphor relates to photomontage and emphasizes both physical and mental colonial wounds.

    Julia Stachura, Ph.D. Student at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, specializing in the history of photography, and global and transnational art. 2023-24 Fulbright grantee.

Virtual Tour and Discussion:
Imvuselelo: The revival
5:00–6:00 pm UTC

Sabelo Mlangeni and Joel Cabrita

Sabelo Mlangeni and Joel Cabrita will hold an in-gallery conversation about Mlangeni’s work featured in Imvuselelo: The revival, on view at the Cantor Arts Center from September 27, 2023 to January 21, 2024.

  • Sabelo Mlangeni is a contemporary South African photographer who works largely in black and white format. Mlangeni has built his practice around intimate photographs that draw out the inherent beauty in the ordinary. Mlangeni is driven by his interest in the notions of community and communing where a central part of his process requires him to spend significant time with those he chooses to photograph; sharing intimately in their thoughts, feelings, stories and everyday lives. Mlangeni has had numerous solo exhibitions to date, including most recently Ngiyabona Phambli at the Institute of Ideas & Imagination in Paris (2023) and Isivumelwano at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam (2022). 

  • Joel Cabrita is Susan Ford Dorsey Director of the Center for African Studies and an associate professor of African history at Stanford University and a senior research associate in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Her work focuses on religion, gender, and the politics of knowledge production in Africa and globally. She is the author of Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala (2023), The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement (2018), and Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church (2014).

Unruly Frameworks
2:00–3:30 pm UTC

Moderator:
Patricia Hayes

Saturday, October 14, 2023
2:00–6:00 pm UTC

  • The English colonizers considered the Revolt of 1857 in India as their failure to understand Indians and to govern them effectively. Consequently, they launched myriad surveys of the land and its people soon after suppressing the Revolt and transferring the administration from the English East Indian Company to the Crown in 1858. The already burgeoning practice of photography contributed to these surveys in unprecedented ways, enabling historically specific ways of framing Indian life and culture in the service of colonial governmentality. Indeed, the eight-volume People of India (1868—1875) was the most ambitious photographic survey the British imperial regime witnessed.

    At its face value, People of India represents an “objective” visual documentation of the diverse caste, class, gender, and customs and what it revealed about the Indian people. However, in their enormous scope, the volumes are part of a long genealogy of British Orientalism and its changing contours in India and demonstrate how visuality conditioned colonialism. Simultaneously, they embody fissures and slippages in categorization endemic to any comprehensive documentation and classification project. The proposed paper will focus on this eight-volume anthropological endeavor to delineate how text and images created typologies and a classificatory order from an inherently diverse subcontinental population. It will explicate how the volumes’ socio-political import informed not only the colonial order but also the postcolonial imaginaries. In doing so, the paper will delve into the slippery character of photography and the fluidity of photographic framing despite the medium’s promise of indubitability and certainty.

    Ranu Roychoudhuri is Assistant Professor in Performing and Visual Arts at Ahmedabad University and works on modern and contemporary art in South Asia.

  • The image has a long history in Northern Ireland. Archives like CAIN, as well as those at the Imperial War Museum and the British National Archives, attest to the fact that “the Troubles” were among the most photographed episodes in modern history, attended to by photojournalists like Gilles Peress, Chris Perkins-Steele, and Phillip Jones-Griffith. Unbeknownst to them, their iconic images went on to live rich lives of their own. Endlessly renewed in the physical and ideological landscape of the Troubles, such photographs became a part of a bitter war of words and pictures.

    Among the most photographed locations in Belfast was the Divis Flats, a transformational slum-clearance project in Catholic West Belfast. Located at the epicenter of the conflict, the flats quickly became the worst in Europe, with photographs of Divis residents condemning the community as either victimized or lawless. However, residents marshalled these same images against their discursive regimes. By making state dysfunction visible in photography, residents eventually won their bid to tear down the disastrous flats.

    As Ariella Azoulay has argued, if we read against the “disciplinary frame,” we can see photographs as negotiations and recover excess possibilities (Azoulay: 2008; Tagg: 2009). This paper looks to the ways in which photography of the Divis Flats recovers broader questions of class and ethno-religious inequality in Northern Ireland. While photographs undoubtedly reinforced state hegemony, they also chronicle the resistance of those who refused to suffer their discrimination lightly.

    Sarah Churchill is a PhD candidate at Drew University. Her research is supported by the Mellon Centre and the American Conference for Irish Studies

  • The Triple Alliance War, also known as the Paraguayan War or the Guasú War, was the bloodiest interstate conflict in South American history. It pitted the allied forces of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil against Paraguay and by the end of it the Paraguayan population had been utterly decimated. The conflict coincided with an expansion of communication and media technologies: there was a surge in the publication of newspapers and illustrated journals, photographic studios multiplied, and entertainment venues and traveling companies offered a steady stream of magic lanterns and optical illusion shows. These outlets presented their own visual approaches to the war, as the consumption of all sorts of news and images increased. Responding to the demand “to see the war”, the studio Bate & Co. financed a series of trips to photograph the conflict. Today we remember these images the most, mainly because they present views that did not shy away from the horrors and hardships of the war. At the time, however, these photographs were at odds with the prevalent modes of visual consumption and commentators were uncertain as to what to do with them. A common response was to delegate their reading to the “future historian,” an imaginary figure of insistent presence throughout the century. Thus, photographs that were originally meant to inform and report on an ongoing war were immediately read as materials for the archives, as a past for future consumption. This presentation focuses on this framing gesture and the political consequences of reading war photographs as archival documents.

    Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Images at the Front: War Photography and Visual Literacy in Argentina and Chile (1860s-1880s).

Conflicting Frameworks
3:30–5:00 pm UTC

Moderator:
Leslie Wilson

  • In 1941, Ansel Adams documented Union Carbide’s “vast city of chemicals” in West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley for Fortune magazine. Founded in 1917, the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation produced metals and petrochemicals, including explosives, fibers, industrial chemicals, plastics, synthetic rubber, and, critically for our purposes, printing inks, paper emulsions, and photographic film. Adams’ photos of Union Carbide constellate the links between the chemicals industry, mining, advertising, consumer goods, and photography, revealing an integral but uneasy relationship between art and capitalism. To reframe Adams’ contributions to an environmental visual culture, I read Adams’ photographs of petrochemical refining alongside his trademark wilderness landscapes, arguing that the photographs of Union Carbide reveal more about our relationship with the environment than his stunning shots of national parks. Adams was known for his commitment to environmental conservation, and he shaped a visual culture that informed an emergent idea of environmentalism in the twentieth century. The Union Carbide photographs complicate this narrow framing of environmentalism, foregrounding questions of environmental justice. Following the Principles of Environmental Justice, resituating photography within histories of capitalism requires reading the image through the violent human-nature interactions that make the image possible, with a focus on the unevenly distributed risks and burdens along the lines of class, gender, race, and geography.

    Siobhan Angus is an assistant professor of Media Studies at Carleton University where she teaches courses in visual culture and the environmental humanities. Her book, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography, is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2024.

  • Photography is framed by terminology. In the 1890s and 1900s, cameras and modern printing became the indispensable tools of Chinese antiquarian scholars and collectors. The “true image” was a recurring concept in their pursuit of a vivid and reliable visual representation of the studied objects—in both photographs and the photomechanical reproductions of other materials involved. Paradoxically though, the photographs published were often retouched, or even modified, to conflate representation with the object itself. These were by no means images depicting the objects in straightforward “truthfulness.” How should we understand the retouched and deceptive photographs in the antiquarian fabrics of illusion, knowledge, and representation? I argue that photography and photomechanical printing enabled the modernisation of connoisseurship, contextualised the Chinese culture of collecting in the world perspective of antiquarianism, and facilitated the convergence of the study of bronzes and stelae (jinshi xue) with the emerging modern disciplines of archaeology, palaeography, and art history. The antiquarian standards for defining the concept of “truthfulness” are the key to conceptualising photography’s transformation of the jinshi discipline. What do we mean by a Chinese “truthful” medium, and what can we learn from it under its photographic crust?

    Tingting Xu is an assistant professor of art history and an affiliated faculty member in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

  • Abigail Solomon-Godeau has warned of the “genre-fication” of photography, or the way scholars have imposed genre and categories to discipline photographic meaning. This paper asks what is revealed by focusing explicitly on genre and its stakes as a framework through which to write photography histories. I consider commercial architectural photographer Harry Drinkwater (1919-2014) and his documentation of artist Noah Purifoy’s 66 Signs of Neon (1966-69), a group assemblage sculpture exhibition created in response to the 1965 Watts uprising. 66 Signs of Neon is remembered for exposing how artists contended with Black identity through assemblage. Yet the importance of photography to the exhibition has gone unconsidered. This paper presents Drinkwater’s work through the history of commercial architectural photography in the period to argue that Drinkwater approached his 66 Signs of Neon assignment from the perspective of an architectural photographer. Commercial architectural photographers assisted urbanists, architects, politicians, and artists striving to envision urban order in 1960s United States cities in response to urban uprisings, often to the detriment of Black residents. Drinkwater’s work demonstrates how architectural photography, meant to straightforwardly illustrate artists’ and designers’ objects, often exposed the very tensions of representation it was meant to resolve. I propose a way to begin to write an expansive art history of commercial architectural photography, acknowledging genre as both a capacious and limiting framework.

    Isabel Frampton Wade is an historian of twentieth-century photography and visual culture. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Southern California in 2023. Currently, she is the Dornsife Fellow in General Education at the University of Southern California.

Roundtable: Framing & Reframing Kinshasa: Baudouin Bikoko’s
Expanded Photographic Practice
5:00–6:00 pm UTC

Baudouin Bikoko, Elisa Adami,
Warren Crichlow, & Adeena Mey

A seminal figure in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Baudouin Bikoko remains relatively little-known outside of his home country. This roundtable aims to introduce Bikoko and his work to an African and international English-speaking audience and critically engage with the various strands of his practice through a presentation by Bikoko himself and a conversation with Warren Crichlow, Elisa Adami and Adeena Mey.

Baudouin Bikoko is considered the guardian of Congolese photographic heritage. A photographer, writer, archivist and lecturer, he founded the Maison de la Photographie en Devenir.

Elisa Adami is Research Fellow and Editor at Afterall Research Centre, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.

Warren Crichlow is Professor Emeritus at York University Toronto. He has published and taught widely about cultural studies, education, moving-images and global photographic archives.

Adeena Mey is Managing Editor of Afterall Journal and a Research Fellow at the Afterall Research Centre, Central St Martins, University of the Arts London.

Archived Symposia

View 2022 Symposium

The second symposium of the Photography Network will be hosted jointly by Photography Network and Howard University in Washington, DC. The event will be hybrid (in-person and virtual).

The 2022 symposium theme is “Intersecting Photographies.” Scholarship in the history of photography has until recently focused predominantly on its technical capabilities, patronage, and modes of representation. This focus elides the longer histories of colonialism and imperialism that the medium fosters­—and in which it can potentially intervene. Recent scholarship—including Ariella Azoulay’s “Unlearning the Origins of Photography” (2018), Mark Sealy’s Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (2019), and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie's (Seminole, Muscogee, Diné) “When is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?” (1998)—are among many projects reconceptualizing photography as a site of encounter and exchange, fraught with historical inequities brought by colonizing desires.

View 2021 Symposium

The First Symposium of the Photography Network was held virtually, jointly hosted by the Photography Network and Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen.

Over the last twenty years, the study of photography’s history has been characterized by, among other things, two opposing strands: a concentration on the photograph’s status as an object and a concern with the decidedly virtual quality of its images and practices. The 2019 FAIC conference “Material Immaterial: Photographs in the 21st Century” considered these two directions in photographic conservation, asking if the physical photograph still matters today as a source of teaching, learning, and scholarship when the intangibles of code now direct the production and archiving of images