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• Daniela Montelongo

Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart argued that “photographs are both images and physical objects.” Their approach critically examined “the physical attributes of the photograph that influence content in the arrangement and projection of visual information.” Geoffrey Batchen similarly called upon scholars to acknowledge that “photographs have multiple manifestations and are objects as well as images,” adding “I want a history [of photography] that takes account of all my senses.” This session proposes to “think materially about photography,” with an eye to complicate the perceived dematerialization of the medium in the digital age of AI-generated imagery. We welcome papers focusing on contemporary practices utilizing analog technologies, considering the tactile and sonic dimensions of photographs, and/or investigating photo-albums, archives, and photobooks. Recent studies have moved away from essentializing ontological discussions of photography, to reveal the potential of thinking about its materiality through political, social and cultural concerns pertaining to the contemporary moment.

keywords: photography, materiality, ecology, photographic techniques

session type: panel

Surface, Sample, Site: Material Reflexivity and Ecological Photography

• Laurie White, University of British Columbia

This presentation will expand upon the exhibition Surface, Sample, Site, which I am guest curating for Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (September 8 – October 27, 2023) including works by BC based artists Víctor Ballesteros, Ramey Newell, Tara Nicholson, Deb Silver, and Karen Zalamea.

Whether considered as an aspect of scientific objectivity, or as part of an ecological ethics of connection, the concept of sampling allows artists to explore what experimental film historian Kim Knowles has called an “aesthetics of contact.” This exhibition supports the thesis that photography is particularly well suited for representing the fluid agencies of non-human natures, not only because it can capture multitudinous forms in images, but because of photography’s own materiality, be it analog or digital, chemical or crystalline. As such, formal and material interventions in the image making process can link the surface of a photograph to a particular site in ways that supplement and complicate the representational landscape or botanical image. While critically addressing the role of photography in constructing a modern, scientific concept of Nature, the artists in Surface, Sample, Site also invite microbes, plants, fungi, and other material agents to participate in—and sometimes resist—the making of their own images.

With this presentation, I aim to share the art works included in the exhibition, outline the curatorial framework for their exhibition together, and expand upon the art historical genealogies of materialist photography to which the exhibition is connected.

keywords: photography, ecology, materialism, exhibitions

Taking the white gloves off: learning photographic histories through object experience

• Dr. Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere, OCAD University

The pedagogical theories that have shaped my views on teaching and learning are rooted in the principles of active learning: that students learn by doing, and therefore take an active role in their own learning process. Students light up when they are brought face to face with objects, and when the physical distance between themselves and art is tightened. Museums and archives are wonderful places to activate central disciplinary skills such as slow looking and critical questioning through the process of direct encounter. Photographs, however, are a bit different than a Mondrian. At their core, photographs are made to be touched, circulated, collected, arranged, flipped through – not necessarily admired from a safe distance on a museum wall. So, what happens when we allow students to used photographs as the objects were initially intended? What happens when a carte-de-visite is moved from hand to hand, flipped over, and arranged? What happens when you toss students a little leather rectangle (shhh! don’t tell them it’s a Kodak No. 3 Folding Pocket Camera from the 1910s) and ask them to figure it out? When students not only think, but also experience, the materiality of photographs, they are interrogating the represented subject, the object life, and the political, social and cultural concerns of the very people in history whose hands have also touched, flipped, opened, and clicked that very same object.

Thickening the Skin of Photography: A Decolonial Take on the Photographic Surface

• Anton Lee, NSCAD University

Photography has a long running relationship with skin. From Balzac’s fear of being photographed to the 19th-century documentations of dermographism, there are many moments in the history of photography that bring the medium’s ability to capture appearances in contact with the idea as well as the substance of skin. This proximity continues in contemporary art practice.

Instead of compiling examples that attest to photography’s connections to skin, this paper focuses on the photographic surface’s potential to disrupt the hegemonic mode of looking. In other words, my interest lies in the skin of photography, the material presence of pictures that could create conflict with the alleged transparency of the photographic representation—the idea that photography is a seamless extension of the perceptible reality. According to Christopher Pinney, the surface of photographs has been treated invisible, in order to promote the illusion of unmediated, therefore unsullied access to the subject apprehended. Here, photography is entirely equated to its visual content and the immaterial image. I argue that this tendency was first formed during the 19th-century colonial expeditions and trades, where the use of photography was advocated for the sake of efficiency and profitability in data collection, circulation, and storage.

Against this background, my paper introduces postcolonial endeavors to render the skin of photographs opaque, thick, and swollen by foregrounding their materiality. This is to underscore the expressive function of skin as “dermis” that reveals and strips away, rather than as “integument” that covers and protects the inside, as Georges Didi-Huberman explains. I analyze the works of James Nicholas and Sandra Semchuk and of Paul Anthony Smith, respectively, in which photographs cease to be the source of neutral information, and become a terrain for poignant interactions between the pictures and their beholders. I contend that such decolonializing approaches to the photographic surface effectively sabotage what Frantz Fanon called the “epidermization” of inferiority.

keywords: photography, skin, surface, decolonization, materiality