The Invisible Image: Photography and the Unseen
A single-stream 2 day International Conference hosted by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool in collaboration with Open Eye Gallery
Programme
DAY 1: JUNE 18
9.-9.30 registration and coffee
9.30 Welcome
KEYNOTE 1 Jordan Bear, ‘Lurking Unsuspected’: Visibility and Purity in Photography’s Media
Panel 1 Archival Absences
•Tom Allbeson, Picture Post at home & abroad: Seeing and not seeing imperial citizens in postwar British photojournalism
•Patricia Hayes, Unseen: the underworld of unprocessed photographs from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa (1980s)
Panel 2 Concealment and Public Space
•Annie Rudd, Invisible Photographers: Walker Evans, Candid Cameras, and “Vanity”
•Godehard Janzing, An invisible Shooting Scene? Daguerre's “Boulevard du temple” and Fieschi's “infernal machine”
•Donald Weber, Infrastructural Walking: Photography as Residual Registration
1.45 lunch break
Panel 3 Latent Sensitivities
•Aindreas Scholz, Invisible Botanies: Anna Atkins’s Cyanotypes, Chemical Latency and Climate Change
•Ellen Yiwei Wang, Unseen Images and Latent Media: Thoughtography and Spirit Photography in Japan
•Sarah Edith James, Atomic Images: An Ultraviolet Art History of Afterlives?
3.45 tea break
Panel 4 Strategies of Recognition
•Laura Love, Using vernacular photography to ground an art historical approach to trans bodies in the UK
•Antonia Deus, Aesthetics of Image Censorship: Artistic Strategies of (In)Visibility in Contemporary Iranian Portrait Photography
•Emily Beswick, An archive of hybridity: photographs of mixed individuals and communities in early 20th century Liverpool
drinks reception for 6pm, followed by optional conference dinner at 7.30
DAY 2: JUNE 19
9.30-10 coffee
KEYNOTE 2 Estelle Blaschke, Entangled Invisibilities in AI Photography
Panel 5 Archives and Coloniality
•Erin Pauwels, Invisible Backdrops and Archival Afterlives: Recovering Agency in Indigenous American Delegation Photographs
•Anne Cross, From Slave Auction to Art Auction: Disappeared Tintypes of the ‘Princess Madia’ and the Politics of the Unseen
Panel 6 Law Enforcement and Institutional Images
•Donna West Brett, Photographic Anxiety: Surveillance and the Unseen
•Kylie Thomas, Shallow Abyss
•Clara Trivellato, A Game of Hide-and-Seek: Microdots and Latent Images in the Stasi's Cold War Operations
1.30 lunch
Panel 7 Images and Infrastructures
•Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Against “shadows of imprecision”: elucidating the “invisible” visual infrastructure of women peasants’ organizing against pesticides in Chile (1985 – present)
•Mi Zhou, Material Infrastructure of Personal Photography in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)
•Thale Elisabeth Sørlie, Uncovering an invisible and profound integration of photography in modern infrastructure
Panel 8 Technology and Invisibility
•Franziska Barth, Capturing the RAW
•Yanai Toister, Potential Picturability
•Isabelle Lynch, Seeing Beyond Fifty Meters Deep: Photography, Electric Light, and the Rapture of the Deep
5pm end
Conference full fee: £90
Unwaged/ PhD students: £45
Fee includes lunches and refreshments across both days and a drinks reception. We are unable to offer fee waivers.
Registration booking link at http://www.ccel.uk/invisible-image-programme (bottom of page)
Reference:
CONF: The Invisible Image: Photography and the Unseen (Liverpool, 18-19 Jun 26). In: ArtHist.net, May 6, 2026 (accessed May 7, 2026), <https://arthist.net/archive/52397>.