Autor: Nadine Kulbe

+++ Deadline postponed to March 15, 2022 +++

Presence and Absence. International conference on visual studies, history and theory of photography

Maybe we never depended on photographic media as much as we do since early 2020. Probably we never looked so often, on so many occasions and at so many photographic images, as when wave after pandemic wave crashed into the world as we knew it. The less we could physically interact, the more we did by means of visual media. Instead of traveling we watched documentaries and were comforted a bit when videos showed a pair of dolphins swimming through Venice‘s Canale Grande where these animals had been absent for ages. We perused old family albums or sifted through the thousands of pictures on our hard drives. As libraries were closed, generous colleagues would snap page after page of book chapters someone else in the world was desperate to read. Our seminars were replaced by screens from which the participants‘ faces stared frontally, each one an involuntary panoptic jailer and inmate. And the breakout rooms of conferences were hardly a surrogate for the drafty hallways where gossip was exchanged and wild new research ideas developed over lukewarm coffee. The pandemic drama found its visual metaphors and allegories in the photograph of an Italian nurse collapsing after too many shifts, a short video of the former German tennis star Boris Becker applauding care workers from the balcony of his luxury mansion and demonstrations against the pandemic, lockdowns, vaccinations and the state as such. And as usual, many of its aspects remained invisible – the rise of domestic violence and alcoholism, the boring routine work in hospitals, the terrors of proximity in overcrowded camps, the dying in squalor of which there was rather more than less.

„Call for Papers: After Post-Photography 7 (June 2-4, 2022, European University, St Petersburg, Russia // online)“ weiterlesen