Christina Fernandez, detail of “Suburban Nightscapes #2” (2023), courtesy of the artist.

Call for Papers: 2024 Photography Network symposium “In Relation: Photography’s Communities” 

October 25-27, 2024 

Tucson, Arizona + virtual (hybrid) 

Proposal due date: May 15, 2024

Photography Network will convene its fourth annual symposium in the Sonoran Desert Borderlands city of Tucson, Arizona in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Grounded in the themes that arise in three CCP-organized exhibitions of Latinx photography that will be on view this fall (Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer; Chicana Photographers LA, curated by Sybil Venegas; and Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature, curated by Sybil Venegas and Christopher Velasco), “In Relation” will consider how communities are made visible, defined, and constituted through photography.  

In her book Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021), Elizabeth Ferrer writes: “As the photographer/subject relationship shifted from outsider/insider to insider/insider [in the late twentieth century], the photograph became less an ethnographic document than an autonomous and self-validating form of individual and community expression.” This shift highlights questions of agency, circulation, diaspora, and storytelling that are relevant to the practice and institutional interpretation of photography. Taking this idea as a point of departure, we invite proposals that broadly respond to the following questions and themes: 

  • How have artists, especially those from Latinx communities, used photography to probe issues of visibility, belonging, and representation? How do their artistic practices constitute forms of activism? 

  • Who has the right to tell stories for whom?  

  • How does the circulation of photographs create—or restrict—communities of subjects and viewers? 

  • How have borders—in the US and beyond—shaped histories of photography, and how has photography from borderlands challenged state-imposed divisions?

  • What alternate models might exist for interpreting photographs and photographic practices that transcend simplistic binaries such as “insider” versus “outsider”? 

  • What do authentically relational, community-centered curatorial practices look like? How are methodologies such as community advisory councils rethinking the notion of curatorial voice and storytelling?  

Submission Information

Photography Network invites proposals across disciplines and a broad range of subjects that reflect the geographic and thematic diversity of the field. Practitioners and scholars at any stage of their careers are welcome to submit their research. We also welcome international scholars but note that the conference will be in English. 

The symposium organizers encourage a variety of presentational styles. In addition to proposals for individual, 20-minute papers relating to the themes outlined above, we also seek submissions for a workshop on the topic of community-centered exhibition development and for a roundtable featuring presentations from artist activists .
Please prepare for submission:

(1)  a 250-word abstract with a clear indication of format, and

(2)  a two-page resume or CV.

All files should be named “[LAST NAME]–CV” or “[LAST NAME]–ABSTRACT.”

Email completed materials by May 15 to the Photography Network Symposium organizing committee: Josie Johnson, Emilia Mickevicius, and Anne Cross at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com. Notifications of accepted proposals will be emailed by mid-June. The schedule and registration information will be available by July 1 and the symposium will be held October 25–27, 2024. 

Note: All are welcome to apply. Accepted presenters must be Photography Network members in good standing at the time of the symposium. We have a sliding scale membership: $20 (student/unaffiliated), $40 (affiliated), or $100 (sustaining). We also have free need-based memberships. Please visit the Photography Network’s membership page (https://www.photographynetwork.net/memberregistration) for more information on how to join.

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 2023 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. 

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