AFTER POST-PHOTOGRAPHY 3
Cultural, historical and visual studies in photography

With the advent of digital media in the 1990s, the first eulogies for photography were written. Old certainties lost their power: If the new images could be manipulated in virtually every aspect, if even the texture and appearance of photographic images could be simulated with the help of digital applications – how could photography retain its function as a medium that would truthfully depict reality? About a quarter of a century later, photography is far from dead – instead it is the visual key medium and its aesthetics formulate standards for other media, most notably computer graphics. What has shifted however is the place where the specific aesthetic values of photography are located: While pre-digital theory understood them as part of the image, it now turns out that they are part of the perception: The truth of a photograph is not engrained in the materialities of the images but in their reception. Paradoxically, photography is the phantasmagoria of a non-phantasmagoric medium.
From May 18 to 20, the 3rd Annual After Post-Photography Conference will take place at the European University in St.-Petersburg, Russia. As in the years before, we aim at the changing conditions of photographic images and practices after the impact of digital technologies. The conference in general will reconsider and reflect how notions such as indexicality and the truth of the photographic image retain their validity and importance even after they were deemed obsolete by the post-photographic critique. In particular we will address four central topics: Russian and Soviet photography, film and photography, identity and memory and new theoretical approaches to photography.
Participation is free. Feel free to circulate the program. For any questions please contact appmur.at.
Organizing committee After Post-Photography 3: Maria Gourieva, Friedrich Tietjen, Natalia Mazur, Daria Panaiotti, Olga Davydova

18 May 2017

17.00 – 18.00 Registrations

18.00 – 19.30 Key lecture/discussion. Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University, Middletown/USA): New faces of privacy: Trans-Atlantic historical and legal perspectives on the circulation of facial images in media, 1870-1960

19.30 – 21.00 Key lecture/discussion. Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago/USA): Archive of the Ordinary: Jason Lazarus, Too Hard to Keep

19 May 2017

09.00 – 10.00 Registrations and Coffee

10.00 – 10.15 Welcome

Panel 1: Photography in Russia and the Soviet Union
Chair: Natalia Mazour (European University, St.Petersburg) + Ekaterina Vassilyeva (St. Petersburg State University)

10.15 – 10.45 Alina Novik (European University, St.Petersburg): “Light painting” in Motion. The Rise and Fall of the Establishments of Camera Obscura in St. Petersburg in the 1840s’ first half

10.45 – 11.15 Tatiana Saburova (Indiana University, Bloomington/USA; Higher School of Economics, Moscow): Photographing and Seeing Siberia: Geographical Imagination, Ethnography, and Visual Representations of Siberia in the Russian Empire

11.15 – 11.45 Anna Zelikova (independent researcher, St. Petersburg) «It would be very sad if this new “era”, as Englishmen call it, would affect Russian photography… »: Critical Reception of Pictorial Photography in Russia

11.45 — 12.15 Coffee break

12.15 – 12.45 Arkady Bljumbaum (European University, St. Petersburg): Osip Brik and Photography. Once Again On The Bergsonian In «The New LEF»

12.45 – 13.15 Jessica Werneke (Higher School of Economics, Moscow): Art as Index: Aesthetics and Photography Theory in the Late Soviet Period

13.15 — 13.45 Maria Vashchuk (Institute for the Humanities and Information
Technologies, Moscow): The impact of political factors on the singularity of sports photojournalism in the USSR

13.45 – 15.00 Lunch break

Panel 2: Film and other forms of photographic life
Chair: Sanil V (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) + NN

15.00 – 15.30 Olga Annanurova (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, Moscow): A sense of time: stereoscopic photography and cinematic «tableaux vivants»

15.30 – 16.00 Maria Mogilevich (St. Petersburg State University): Post-Game Film

16.00 – 16.30 Olga Davydova (St. Petersburg State University): Photo Image Plus Cinema Image: Temporal Structures in “Photographic Cinema”

16.30 – 17.00 Coffee break

17.00 – 17.30 Anna Yakovets (Lomonosov Moscow State University): Film plot as out-of-frame dimension of photography (looking at Wim Wenders’ ‘Alice in the Cities’ (1974))

17.30 – 18.00 Katja Mueller-Helle (Free University of Berlin/ Germany): Black Box Photography. Harun Farocki, Operational Images, and Retroactive Legibility

19.00 — 20.30 Key Lecture/discussion. Gil Pasternak ( De Montfort University, Leicester/Great Britain): Dominant Participants and Active Producers. Popular Photographic Cultures in Photography Studies

20 May 2017

Panel 3: Life after Death, Identity and what else is new
Chair: Maria Gourieva (St. Petersburg State University) + Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago/USA)

10.00 – 10.30 Arunima G (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi/India): Visual Wars: Law, State and Citizen and the World of Competing Images

10.30 – 11.00 Patricia Hayes (University of the Western Cape, Bellville/South Africa): Dead photographs. Political funerals and the refusal of light in 1980s South Africa

11.00 – 11.30 Kris Belden-Adams (University of Mississipi, Oxford/USA): «People Don’t Want to Talk, They Just Want a Selfie». Reframed Digital/Social Relationships and Rituals on the Clinton Campaign Trail

11.30 – 12.00 Coffee break

12.00 – 12.30 Wing Ki Lee (Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University): Immortal Photo Object?: Material Culture of Porcelain Photo in Hong Kong

12.30 – 13.00 Irina Chmyreva (State Research Institute for Theory and History of Arts; Russian Academy of Fine Arts, Moscow) : Mythos and History of Memorial Photo Jewelry. Memory. Social status and communication

13.00 — 13.30 Lioudmila Voropai (University of Arts and Design,
Karlsruhe/Germany) : ‘Post-post-photography’ in the ‘post-digital culture’: Analysing today’s social use of photograph

13.30 – 15.00 Lunch break

Panel 4: And now … let’s have theory!
Chair: Friedrich Tietjen (Vienna University) + Denis Skopin (St.Petersburg State University)

15.00 – 15.30 Zsolt Batori (University of Technology and Economics; Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest/Hungary) : The relevance of indexicality

15.30 – 16.00 Maria Romakina (Lomonosov Moscow State University): Multi-screen displaying of photographic series and projects: “photo-cinema”, typologies and others

16.00 – 16.30 Anastasia Patsey (St. Petersburg/Museum of Nonconformist Art) “Go back to map”. The invisible dimension of street photography in the works by Michael Wolf, Jon Rafman and Doug Rickard

16.30 – 17.00 Coffee break

17.00 – 17.30 Christian Berger (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz/Germany): Photographs, Objects, Realities: Mel Bochner, Takamatsu Jirō, and the Intersections of Material and Image in the 1960s

17.30 – 18.00 Yanai Toister (Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art/Israel): Photography: Love’s Labour’s Lost?

18.00 – 18.30 – Close up