Robert Häusser, Relative Orientierung, 1972. © Robert Häusser – Robert-Häusser-Archiv/Curt-Engelhorn-Stiftung, Mannheim
Friday, Nov. 8, 10:30am - 5:30pm EST
Held at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ
Address and Zoom registration link below
The Developing Room holds its ninth graduate student colloquium on the history and theory of photography, in collaboration with the Essen Center of Photography, Essen, Germany. The event is for Ph.D. candidates from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography—its histories and theories—play a central role.
The Futures of Photography
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” Henri Bergson
The future once buzzed with the excitement of potential, or at least the idea of destiny once did. Today, however, the prospects of what is to come rattle with doom in a way that modernist Henri Bergson may not have anticipated given his words of charm and hope. Climate change, brutal wars and reactionary politics gather pace in what strikes many today as a doom spiral into the future. Photography has not been spared these imaginings as digital imaging technologies from thirty-five years ago and now artificial intelligence seemingly foretell the medium’s death. Or is this too pessimistic a forecast?
In the past two centuries, photography was characterized by an endless series of radiant futures that the technology afforded over its lesser imaging procedures. Daguerre and Talbot gushed that chateaus and manor homes could now depict themselves, while François Arago imagined the mass recording of Egyptian hieroglyphs with this new, far more accurate artificial eye. The charm of the future ultimately served as photography’s historical locomotive, even when many visions for the technology (imaging spirits) never came to pass, or only did so many decades after being dreamed (color photography).
In turn, photography became not only part of cultural modernity, but also one of its driving forces forward. Thinking and writing about the medium has therefore always meant looking at what it will bring, as well as the historical significance of such innovations, making for a simultaneous futurity and historiography. Almost exactly a century ago, for example, László Moholy-Nagy asked a question that has not lost any of its relevance since: Where is photography developing?
With his query, the famous Bauhaus master addressed not only novel technological developments, but a whole spectrum of possible futures dealing with aesthetics, displays, usages, and social functions, each of which unfolded in direct relation to photography’s past. Do today’s innovations in photography offer the same charmed future, and can historical precedents help foretell their destiny?
With photography’s closely linked futures and pasts as a frame, the colloquium presenters will reflect on the complex temporal positions of photography. They will discuss the medium’s past and present in order to establish a more reasoned basis for thinking about possible futures.
FORMAT
Presenters will share their work with their peers and an official respondent who is a leader in the field. The format involves a formal 25-minute presentation followed by 25 minutes of discussion. Although only four presentations are given at this colloquium meeting, the Developing Room and the Essen Center invite a large audience of students in order to ensure a rich conversation and to build a constituency from which papers can be drawn in subsequent years. Since beginning, our colloquia have brought together an international group of researchers working across a wide range of topics related to photography.
The respondent will be Dr. Steffen Siegel, Professor of the Theory and History of Photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, Germany
The event is free and open to the public.
The Center for Cultural Analysis
Academic Building, West Wing
Room 6051
15 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
If attending in person, no registration required.
If attending via Zoom, please register at this link
If you have any questions, write us at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsor
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department
Schedule (in Eastern Daylight Time)
10:30 Introduction and welcome, Prof. Andres Zervigon
10:45 Jennifer Marine
11:15 Discussion
11:45 Kwabena Slaughter
12:15 Discussion
12:45 Lunch
1:45 Winona Pawelzik
2:15 Discussion
2:45 Coffee Break
3:15 Ben Campion
3:45 Discussion
4:15 General Discussion led by Prof. Dr. Steffen Siegel
5:30 End
Respondent
Steffen Siegel, Folkwang University of the Arts
Steffen Siegel
Folkwang University of the Arts
Steffen Siegel is professor for the theory and history of photography at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, and the chairman of the Essen Center for Photography. This fall, he is a Max Kade Visiting Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Since 2019, he has been the host of a bi-annual international doctoral student’s conference in Essen and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, the Max Planck institute for art history in Rome.
Talks
Jennifer Marine, "Phonic Photography: Entanglements of Sound Recording and Photographic Practices"
Phonic Photography: Entanglements of Sound Recording and Photographic Practices
Jennifer Marine, University of Virginia
ABSTRACT
In 1856, photographer Félix Nadar imagined a machine that could capture sound, calling it an “acoustic daguerreotype.” A few years later, an array of different inventions attempted to do for sound what photography had done for light – to visualize and capture it. Histories of media have tended to focus on either acoustics or photography, missing the dialogue between the audio and the visual and their shared goals to create a picture. In this presentation, I examine the materially and ideologically intertwined histories of sound recording and photography. Using a media studies approach, I trace the shared practices of photography and sound recording, arguing that bringing the histories of photography and acoustics into conversation expands contemporary definitions of photography’s capabilities, and allowing for a rethinking of photography’s futurity.
As case studies, I turn to the Voice Figures of the Welsh artist and singer Margaret Watts Hughes’s (1842-1907) and the photographs of “tone waves” by American scientist Robert W. Wood (1868-1955). Described as “exact photograph[s] of tone,” the Voice Figures were made through the indexical vibrations of the voice rather than by light waves, and yet many adhere to photographic pictorial conventions. Wood’s “tone waves” similarly break down ideas about light and photography by illuminating the similarities between sound and light. Through these examples, my research unsettles what it means for something to be a “photograph,” and relocates sound from the periphery to the center of photo-histories. A critical reexamination offers new possibilities for understanding for the future of the medium.
Margaret Watts-Hughes, Voice Figure, c. 1880-90s, pigment on glass. © Rob Mullender and Louis Porter, London College of Communication. Image courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery.
BIO
Jennifer Marine is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Virginia. Her research examines late-nineteenth-century European technologies such as photography, X-rays, and sound recording to complicate categories of art, science, and technology, thereby offering a broader understanding of representational practices in the history of modernism. Her work has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Studies and the Joan and Stanford Alexander Award for dissertations on the history of photography from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is currently a Predoctoral Fellow in the research group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History.
Kwabena Slaughter, "A Peripheral Vision: How Mechanical Functionality Can Reshape Historiography"
A Peripheral Vision: How Mechanical Functionality Can Reshape Historiography
Kwabena Slaughter, George Washington University
ABSTRACT
In my essay “A Peripheral Vision: Framing the Cultural Bias in the Center of Photography” (Critical Inquiry, v50, no2, winter 2024), I discuss the often-unaddressed issue that the image a lens projects into the body of the camera is of a circular shape, but the camera’s film/photosensor is constructed in the shape of a rectangle. As a result, a portion of the image that arrives inside the camera lands in the peripheral space outside the borders of this rectangle. Through my interventions into the camera’s interior structure, I was able to bring that peripheral content back into the frame.
This project began with an inquiry into photography’s kinship with older forms of visual representation. Every culture around the world has developed its own methods of painting, sculpting, and drawings. Due to its creation in the Western world, photography is the only art-form that has a birth from only one culture. My investigation shows a kinship between photography and images as far back as 2000 BCE, such as the cylinder seals of the Ancient Near East.
The photo-historian Joel Snyder, in “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” has proposed that “constructing the historiography of the medium without knowing about the mechanisms that construct the medium can cause the medium’s heritage to be lost.” My presentation will discuss the functionality of the camera, my interventions into its design, then discuss applying the awareness of its functionality to the interpretation of images from the past and to the creation of future forms of photographic representation.
Illustration of camera obscura
BIO
Kwabena Slaughter is an artist, engineer, and historian; with strong skills in technical systems, archival research, and organizational management. He’s led large staff teams through complex live events and through organizational restructuring. The theoretical strategy of his work is to investigate forms of representation that have become systematized, because of a concern that when things become systematized our attention turns away from the question of how things are made. These types of narrowed perspectives can cause misrepresentation. Undermining the mechanisms of misunderstanding has been the artistic and scholarly mission
throughout his career. Among the multiple places his writings have been published are the Oxford University Press, Critical Inquiry, the African American Intellectual History Society, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. His artwork is in the fields of photography, interactive touch technologies, and the performing arts, and has been exhibited and collected in the U.S. and abroad.
Ben Campion, "The Future of Photography and the Future of the Philosophy of Photography: AI and the Orthodoxy/New Theory Debate"
The Future of Photography and the Future of the Philosophy of Photography: AI and the Orthodoxy/New Theory Debate
Ben Campion, University of Warwick
ABSTRACT
My current research assesses the history and futures of debates between so-called “orthodox” and “new” theories (NT) within the philosophy of photography as they relate to contemporary developments within photographic technology. While orthodoxy claims that photographs are created when a photosensitive surface is exposed to light, NT argues that photographs merely originate from this exposure, with post-processing necessary to produce an image. Because of this, NT has historically argued that it better accounts for the aesthetic value of photographs, as it embraces artistic interventions made by photographers during post-processing.
This presentation argues that the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms into the photographic exposure challenges NT’s ability to account for the aesthetic value of photography. AI alters image data recorded during exposure to be in-line with what algorithms view as a “good” photograph. Consequently, photography that makes use of these algorithms tends towards visuals favoured by said algorithms. Thus, while NT focuses on how the aesthetic value of a photograph is decided outside of the exposure, this is increasingly being decided from within the exposure by algorithmic preferences. Therefore, for NT to have a future as a useful philosophical framework, it needs to reckon with how the use of AI influences the artistic direction of photographs during exposure, before any post-processing. This requires philosophy to look outside of typical theories of action which focus on the photographer as agent, and instead focus on how many aesthetic decisions in photography are increasingly algorithmically pre-determined before the photographer has acted.
Diagrammatic representation of Samsung’s “AI-based detail enhancement” process. Samsung, 2024
BIO
Ben Campion is a PhD researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Warwick, UK, specialising in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. I am also an editorial assistant for the British Journal of Aesthetics and a postgraduate member of the managing committee of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts, also based at Warwick.
His research focuses on how contemporary developments in photographic technology challenge established views of aesthetic value, agency, and ethics within the philosophy of photography. My interest in how philosophical work on photography interacts with technological developments within the medium has also led to an interest in how photography is remediated by other contemporary forms of media, particularly videogames.
Winona Pawelzik, "Utopian Histories and the Ethnological Museum: Photography as a Tool of Decolonization in Emeka Ogboh’s Work “At the Threshold” (2021)"
Utopian Histories and the Ethnological Museum: Photography as a Tool of Decolonization in Emeka Ogboh’s Work “At the Threshold” (2021)
Winona Pawelzik, University of Hamburg
ABSTRACT
It is a portrait and it is not. It is the image of an object and it is an object in itself. It reveals itself and it withdraws. It is seen and it looks back. These are the first impressions which the photographs in the work “At the Threshold” (2021) by Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh provoke. The images do not depict human beings but Benin-Bronzes, that have been photographed in the style of a portrait. It seems as if eyes are looking out of these photographs into the room; they create a vibration as gazes seem to meet and part again: The photographs are imbue with an “Aura”, as described by Walter Benjamin in 1931. The work is on display at the ethnological Museum of Leipzig, Germany (GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig). The GRASSI, like most ethnological museums, has a history of colonial violence, appropriation and oppression, which is also reflected in its photographic collections and the visual narratives in the exhibition spaces. Ogboh’s photographic intervention therefor raises various questions about the complicated past of photographic images from colonial contexts, such as: Who is depicted by whom? Who has the right to look and who is being looked at? Is photography itself an appropriating medium? As the work breaks with photographic conventions and unambiguity various times in a media-reflexive manner, the intervention can be read as a proposal for a positive use of photographic images to destabilize colonial narratives in the future.
BIO
Bachelor's degree in Media and Communication Studies and Linguistics in an Intercultural Context at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) with a guest semester at Universidad de Málaga (Spain). Followed by a Master's degree in Photography Studies and Research at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen (2014-2023). Master's degree in April 2023 with the thesis “Countering the Colonial Gaze. Strategies of Intervention in the Photographic Archive”. Since May 2024 research assistant to Prof. Dr. Margit Kern in the project “Visual Scepticism. Towards an Aesthetic of Doubt” (ERC Advanced Grant Horizon 2020)..