Call for Papers: Photography/Archives/Ireland

Photography / Archives / Ireland

Symposium  | Dublin | Friday November 3rd  2017

The archival impulse, which remains a primary organising principle within contemporary art, is now, in an age of digital imaging and social media, also a mass-cultural  phenomenon. These developments, together with a cultural field currently preoccupied with questions of history, remembrance and divergent conceptions of national identity, make an investigation of photography and the archive in Ireland particularly timely.

This one day symposium will bring together researchers and practitioners who are concerned to interrogate  the role of the archive in the production of new knowledges about photography in Ireland, and those who offer alternative  narratives  of Irish culture through a focus on photography. It will provide a forum for the critical examination of a range of photographic and archival practices,  within both official and unofficial, public and

private contexts. The symposium aims to gather and acknowledge ongoing research in historic, artistic and vernacular photography as it intersects with practical and theoretical  considerations of the archive.

We invite proposals  for 20 minute presentations from researchers working in diverse fields and disciplines, such as: photography; media, visual, material and cultural studies; art history; museology; archival and librarian studies; digital humanities;  visual anthropology and sociology; history and geography; architecture; and philosophy and literature.

Dublin Institute of Technology, School of Media. Location:

Grangegorman  Campus

 

CONVENORS

Ann Curran (Programme Chair, BA Photography, DIT)

Fiona Loughnane (Assistant lecturer, Dept. of Visual Culture, NCAD)

Dr. Orla Fitzpatrick

(Librarian, NMI)

 

Submitted proposals  might address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

 

Art and the Archive

  • The archive and contemporary photographic  practices  in Ireland
  • Invented, found and (re) created archives
  • Ethics, aesthetics and the re-situating of photographs

 

Memory, Affect, Materiality

  • Photography, commemoration and remembrance
  • Materiality, affect and vernacular photography
  • Archives, albums and the production of family histories

 

Identity, Society and Culture

  • Geographies  of representation: borders, space,  place, migration and dislocation
  • Legacies of the colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial in Irish photography
  • Performing gender in the photographic  archive

 

Archival Science: Collecting, Preserving and Cataloging

  • Museum, library and archive as linked sites of regulation
  • Institutional agendas and the photographic  archive
  • Systems of classification, processes of collecting and conservation

 

Consuming Archives: Digital Repositories and Databases

  • Commerce, copyright and online photo banks in Ireland
  • Digitized photographic  archives, networks, communities,  users  and researchers
  • Photography, social media and the production of digital identities

 

To propose a paper please  send a 350  word abstract (excluding references)

no later than June 16th 2017 to photographyarchivesireland@gmail.com

Proposals should also include the full name and title of the author, current affiliation, full contact details (address, email and phone number), and a brief biographical note.