15 – 17 December 2021, FUNCHAL
The online format of the International conference is available on Zoom. You have to click on “join” on the platform and insert the following ID: 825 0619 3205
The relationship between the photographic medium and the discipline of history has been a topic for theoretical speculation and a source for analogies and rapprochements since the second half of the 19th century. However, the debate around the role of images in historiography implies also countless frictions and silences.
If due to its acknowledged transparency and realism photography is apparently a privileged index, being frequently considered a paradigm for the craft of the historian, however, due to its stillness and fragmentary characteristics technical images have generate throughout the 20th century a considerable heuristic suspicion.
Even though photography has been mostly considered as a documental and utilitarian tool, the renovation that technical images convey to the conception of history itself has lagged behind the expectations foreseen by Walter Benjamin in the 1940s.
To foster the debate on photography today, on its social uses, its circulation in a world of images with multiple meanings to history, aims at questioning concepts such as those of fact and event, visuality and truth, real and imaginary.
Hence the purpose of this conference is to envision the role of photography in different contexts – such as the institutional and personal archive, in social networks or in artistic practice -, as a means to stimulate history, here understood as a narrative that questions contemporaneity based on evidences and regimes of thought and visuality from the past.
A specific session of the conference will be carried out in partnership with PERPHOTO project (FCT/PTDC/ART-PER/31693/2017), aiming to foster the discussion on topics emerging from the relationship between photography and history in the context of performance theory and the performing arts.
The project Photoimpulse (FCT/PTDC/COM-OUT/29608/2017) is also a partner of the conference carrying out yet another session addressing the articulation between photography as a medium and the geographical and anthropological archive from the colonial era.
Organizing committee
Ana Gandum
Ana Gandum
ICNOVA – NOVA Communication Institute / EVAM Observatory
Isabel Stein
ICNOVA – NOVA Communication Institute / EVAM Observatory
Vítor Magalhães
University of Madeira (UMa) / Cultural Council
Rita Rodrigues
Head of the Heritage Studies Section – Regional Directorate for Culture (DRC – Direção Regional da Cultura)
Vítor Luís
Museu de Fotografia da Madeira – Atelier Vicente’s
Production assistant
Lisandra Faria
Museu de Fotografia da Madeira – Atelier Vicente’s
Scientific evaluation of proposals
Ana Gandum
ICNOVA – NOVA Communication Institute / EVAM Observatory
Isabel Stein
ICNOVA – NOVA Communication Institute / EVAM Observatory
Ana Lúcia Mandelli de Marsillac
Prof. at Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) / EVAM Observatory
Alzira Tude de Sá
Prof. at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) / ICNOVA / EVAM Observatory
Mônica Torres
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) / Brazilian National Cancer Institute (INCA)
Ana Catarina Pinho
eCDR – University of South Wales / IHA – NOVA FCSH
Scientific advisor
Margarida Medeiros
Prof. at NOVA – FCSH / ICNOVA – NOVA Communication Institute
Graphic design
Marco Gonçalves
Museu de Fotografia da Madeira – Atelier Vicente’s
Organized by:
Supported by:
Partners:
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