1st-2nd November 2019
Light | Sensitive | Material
Conference
University of Westminster
The fields of photography theory and history have in recent years moved away from the assumption of a break between the analogue and digital image to a more nuanced understanding of both past and contemporary photographic practices, images, and technologies.
Increasingly photography is discussed in relation to other media, to industry and markets and to climate and the environment. At the same time questions of aesthetics and interpretation are recast and understood in terms of sensual, haptic, embodied and everyday encounters with material images.
This conference examined photography as simultaneously material and immaterial, addressing not only the tangible properties of photographic objects, but also the ecosystems in which they circulate.
We live in and through the photographic, in its physical presence in the world, and in our thought. The conference thus also invited considerations of the ways in which a mode of philosophical thinking can be conceived as photographic or vice versa.
The conference was convened by Professor Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool) and Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya (University of West London).