FRAMING TIME & PLACE: REPEATS & RETURNS IN PHOTOGRAPHY

Featured Speakers (confirmed)

Mark Klett Regents Professor of Photography and Director of the Third View project, Arizona State University.
Publications include: Second View: the rephotographic survey project. (with Ellen Manchester, 1984); Third Views,
Second Sights (2004); Yosemite in Time (2005); After the Ruins, 1996 and 2006: rephotographing the San Francisco earthquake and fire (2006).

James Ryan School of Geography, University of Exeter (Cornwall Campus),
Publications include Picturing Empire: photography and the visualization of the British Empire (1997) and Picturing Place: photography and the geographical imagination (with Joan M. Schwartz, 2003)

Re-visiting a place, an idea, a motif has a long history within visual art, literature and music. Monet and Rembrandt painted the same subjects over and over again, curious to investigate place, identity, transformation and change and to explore the specific materiality of their medium – paint. Strategies of re-visiting and re-photography have provided those working through photography, rich opportunities to similarly explore the ontology of the medium. To those interested in the visual effects of the natural and constructed world, in the impressions of light and movement, in aesthetics, in technical challenges of picture-making and in questions of visuality and in modes or systems of seeing, such practices have provided rich opportunities.

This spirit of enquiry is specifically reflected in the number of contemporary photography projects and practices through which past, present and change relating to site and place have been investigated. Such projects commonly take into account principles of representation and regulatory dimensions of aesthetics as well as socio-historical content and context. Among the best known of these is the Second View (now Third View) enquiry based at Arizona State University which combines interrogation of photographic aesthetics and technologies with investigation of socio-historical change. Indeed, the history of photography is replete with examples of imagery detailing and questioning environmental change, or investigating family histories; repeat photographs of people or places contribute to constructing the narratives through which we understand something about ourselves, our circumstances, and our relations within the social and natural world of which we form a part.

This conference will address a number of research issues relating to the capacities of photography as systematically generating narratives of stasis and change in relation to land and environment.

Conference Organizers: Professor Jem Southam, Dr Simon Standing, Professor Liz Wells