Pictures of War: The Still Image in Conflict since 1945

Since the end of the Second World War, the nature and depiction of geopolitical conflicts have changed in technology, scale and character. The Cold War political landscape saw many anti-colonial struggles for liberation and national identity become proxy battlegrounds for the major powers. Wars continue to be waged in the name of democracy and terror, and in the interests of linguistic, theological and racial worldviews and migration and displacement are again at the top of the agenda.

As the technologies of war have shifted, so have the technologies of making pictures. This conference seeks to engage with these phenomena through critically engaged approaches to the processes of visualisation, their methodologies and epistemologies in order to contribute to our understanding of the ways conflicts are pictured.
Conference Themes: A Heritage of Images; Pictures on the Move, Visualising Solidarities; Witnesses to Existence: The ethics of Aesthetics; Visual Activism and the Middle East; Pictures, Conflicts, Modes of Transmission; The Unresolvable Past: Post-Conflict Trauma and Representation.

For further information and registration:
http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/events/2018/the-pictures-of-war

Programme

Wednesday 23rd May 2018, 17:30
Free Public Lecture
Louie Palu documentary photographer and filmmaker
War & Storytelling After 9/11: A Photojournalist's Perspective
Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton Building, Lecture Theatre 3.

Thursday 24th May 2018
9.15 - 9.45 Registration and coffee

9.45 Welcome (Jim & Mary)

PARALLEL STRAND 1
Witnesses to Existence: The ethics of Aesthetics I
10.00 - 11.30 The Photographer's vision
1. Corinne Silva (University of the Arts London). Garden State: Photographing the Politics of Planting in Israel/Palestine
2. Sally Miller (University of Brighton). Contemporary photojournalism, post-humanitarianism and the ironic spectator
3. Daniel Alexander (London Southbank University). Interrupting a militarised seeing system: Imaging the Drone War

Discussion

11:30 - 11:45 Coffee Break

11:45-13:15 Picturing the perpetrator
4. Eva van Roekel (Utrecht University). In the Eye of the Beholder. Visualizing violence from a perpetrator's perspective.
5. Sandra Plummer (University of Dundee) Pictures of Derry: Community Photography and the Visualisation of 'the Troubles'
6. Amy Gaeta (University of Wisconsin-Madison). "The Way" of Archipelagic Intimacy: Re-framing Guantánamo Bay

Discussion

13:15 - 14:15 Lunch Break

Pictures, Conflicts, Modes of Transmission
14:15 - 15:45
1. Simon Popple (University of Leeds). Re-staging Afghanistan: Digital simulation and the return of the analogue aesthetic.
2. Nathaniel Brunt (Ryerson University and York University). #shaheed: a metaphotographic study of Kashmir's Insurgency
3. Yanai Toister (Artist and Scholar). Photography from True/False to Actual/Virtual

Discussion

15:45 - 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 - 17:00
4. Shimrit Lee (New York University). Israel's Commercial War Image: Between Brand, Fantasy, and Public Secret."
5. Jane Quinn (Birkbeck, University of London). Interpretative war art in a digital space: structures, aesthetics and change

Discussion

PARALLEL STRAND 2
A Heritage of Images

10.00 - 11.30
1. Kevin Foster (Monash University). National Projections: Photography and the Cultural Afterlife of WW2 in modern Australia
2. Edward Fairhead (University of Kent). The body of late modern war and the spectacle of sacrifice
3. William Fysh (University of Toronto). The State Eyewitness: Atrocity and Colonial Visuality in the Algerian War of Independence
4. Justin Barski (University of British Columbia). The Society of the Seen

11:30 - 11:45 Coffee Break

11:45 - 13:15
5. Louise Purbrick (University of Brighton). Postcards: Harold Blakemore, Pinochet and Allende
6. Ray Drainville (Manchester Metropolitan University). Pathosformeln and Visual Habitus in Times of Conflict
7. Georgina Downey (University of Adelaide). The rubble-strewn interior of post-war England
8. Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernandez (Universidad de Los Andes). Flowers, detalles and Medusa's Torso

13:15 - 14:15 Lunch Break

14:15 - 14:45 Discussion

Witnesses to Existence: The ethics of Aesthetics II
14:45 - 15:45 The aesthetics and ethics of the book
1. Lewis Bush (University of the Arts London). Brecht's War Primer: Three Conflicts, Three Strategies.
2. Tilman Schreiber (Friedrich Schiller University). Montage as ethical form. Criticism of Media and Society in Bertolt Brecht's Kriegsfibel.

15:45 - 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 - 17:00
3. Jessie Bond (University of the Arts London). Photojournalism and the Materiality of the Photobook
Discussion

17:30 - 19:00 Conference Keynote Lecture, The Bureaucracy of Angels
Oliver Chanarin, from artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin.
Drinks and Dinner following Keynote

Friday 25th May 2018

PARALLEL STRAND 1
Pictures on the Move, Visualising Solidarities

10.00 - 11.30 Cold War solidarities
1. Catherine Speck (University of Adelaide). Thunder raining poison': how contemporary Aboriginal artists are responding to nuclear bomb tests of the Cold War era.
2. Joshua Simon and Nechama Winston (Independent photographers and Scholars). Jewish Arab Brotherhood: Jacob Kösten and Palestine Communists in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
3. Darren Newbury (University of Brighton). Visual mobility and cordiality in the Cold War: Africans in the United States

Discussion

11:30 - 11:45 Coffee Break

11:45 - 12:45 Affective communities
4. Nela Milic (University of the Arts London). Belgrade riots through images and objects
5. Zeina Maasri (University of Brighton). Draw Me an AK-47: the Aestheticization of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism

Discussion

13:15 - 14:15 Lunch Break

Visual Activism and the Middle East
14:15 - 15:45
1. Alex Beldea (University of Huddersfield). Digital Intifada
2. Ruthie Ginsburg (Tel Aviv University). Armed with a Camera: Visual Documentation and Human Rights Politics in Israel/Palestine.
3. Chava Brownfield (Beit Bert College). Moving Images - Visual Confessions and Visual Testimonies
4. Yoav Galai (Central European University). The Victory Image: Israeli War-fighting From Lebanon to Gaza

15:45 - 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 - 17:30
5. Hala Georges (University of Northampton) Syrian War: A Personal and Domestic Perspective of Suffering
6. Ana Cardin-Coyne (University of Manchester). From Military Sublime to Documentary Dystopia: Beyond the Photojournalism/Visual Art Divide
7. Rona Sela (Tel Aviv University)

Discussion

PARALLEL STRAND 2
The Unresolvable Past: Post-Conflict Trauma and Representation

10:00 - 11.30
1. Garry Clarkson (University of Wales). Event. Aftermath. Archive. Disruptive strategies for the depiction of trauma through 'post-memory' reverberations of war and conflict.
2. Frank Möller (University of Tampere). From war to peace: a trajectory of post-war photography
3. Jayne Buchanan (Plymouth University). Conflicting Memories: War art and Trauma

11:30 - 11:45 Coffee Break

11:45 - 13:15
4. Johnny Alam (Independent artist and researcher). Understanding Post-Conflict Trauma and the Long-Term Hazards of Representation.
5. Charles Fox (Nottingham Trent University). Submerged Past: Photographing the Underwater Deminers of Cambodia

Discussion

13:15 - 14:15 Lunch Break

Conference Cost and Registration
£75 per day. £120 for two-days
Student: £15 one day, £25 for two-days
Prices include tea/coffee/refreshments and 2x course hot lunch buffet with desert.

For bookings, follow the Tickets/Register link:
https://www.kxregistration.mmu.ac.uk/Registration/Welcome.aspx?e=35A6F559D2388EE89B7872F0F3F2022C