CALL FOR PAPERS / APPEL À COMMUNICATIONS:

Reimagined Meanings: Photographs Repurposed in Literature and Art

Panel at IAWIS International Conference, Lausanne (Switzerland) July 10-14, 2017
Panel au Colloque international AIERTI, Lausanne (Suisse) 10-14 juillet 2017

Reimagined Meanings: Photographs Repurposed in Literature and Art

By their very nature, photographs are unmoored fragments: free-floating and code-less messages, ready-made to adapt to or adopt whichever meaning comes to beset them. Yet, photographs carry with them, always, a certain trace of their origin, that Barthesian essence of «l’avoir-été-là » or “having-been-there”. This panel discussion takes this conventional narrative of the photograph as its starting point, but it aims to explore ways in which photographs operate when inserted into other works of visual art (e.g. collage, mixed-media, etc.) or into literature (e.g. illustration, graphic novels, photo-romans, etc.), looking specifically at the processes, practices and consequences.

As a photograph becomes an element of a larger work, its meaning can undergo change. What are the forces, the mechanisms, or the techniques that must act upon a photograph that will allow either for meaning to carry through this transition or cause it to be lost? How might combined media elements act to erase individual meaning from a photograph, or how might they act to multiply meaning or invent it? What happens when a photograph is used in such a way that it no longer represents a photograph at all? Can the photographic essence resist these forces of manipulation, of change, of erasure?

Papers invited to be presented on this interdisciplinary panel will address these and similar questions from the perspectives of literary studies; art history, visual culture, and/or media & communication studies.

Topics may include:

• (Un)conventional uses of photography in literature and visual art
• Found or appropriated photographs in art, illustration and literature
• The photograph as object
• Text/image relationships in literature
• Photographic theory across disciplines
• Photographic meaning across disciplines
• Photographic meaning and/in (re)mediation

Submit your 250-word proposal ( in English or in French) for the panel Reimagined Meanings: Photographs Repurposed in Literature and Art before August 31, 2016 via the link below:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vote850Mssh1r1oLZe3fiKnrpPdSt_WSTBNQNQ_eC14/viewform?c=0&w=1

Envoyez votre projet de 250 mots (en français ou en anglais) destiné au panel Reimagined Meanings: Photographs Repurposed in Literature and Art avant le 31 août 2016 via ce lien :

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vote850Mssh1r1oLZe3fiKnrpPdSt_WSTBNQNQ_eC14/viewform?c=0&w=1

Pour tout renseignement, veuillez contacter Matt Rushton: matthew.rushtoncarleton.ca