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The Lycée Champollion, in collaboration with Grenoble Alpes University and the Maison de l’Image in Grenoble, continues its series of international study days on various themes and techniques related to the photography of Michael Kenna (1953-...), a British photographer whose work has been exhibited around the world.

This second study day aims to highlight another major source of inspiration for his work: the representation of trees. Since the late 1970s, Kenna has been photographing trees assiduously: a first exhibition in 2011, organised by the KONG gallery that presents his work in Seoul, showed a selection of his photographs of trees, accompanied by the publication of a catalogue entitled Philosopher's Tree. The choice of the title to present his photographic practice on trees is characteristic of Kenna's approach. This name becomes the symbol of an entire body of work: trees allow the photographer to encounter nature in a way that is physical, sensitive, intellectual, aesthetic, but also metaphysical. 

Kenna explores the structuring power of trees in the landscape. The frequent wintry nature of his settings reveals the exceptional beauty of his subjects, the balance of their forms, and the harmonious, geometric development of their branches and trunks. Thanks to very long exposure times, which can last up to ten hours, his images reveal elements that the human eye usually ignores or cannot perceive. To quote Chantal Colleu-Dumond, who wrote the preface to Arbres in 2022, “as if through a synaesthetic effect, his images of trees are filled with a particular mystery and absolute silence that give them a sense of obviousness and universality” (2022, 4). Chantal Colleu-Dumond goes even further, making our experience with Kenna's tree photography a revelation of our relationship with time: “The time of trees is not that of humans; Michael Kenna emphasises their permanence as much as our finitude” (2022, 4). But Kenna's practice also brings us back to the notion of temporality, duration, and series. Kenna loves to photograph oak trees: he fell in love with a large oak tree in the town of Beaverton, near Portland, Oregon. In June 2021, Kenna began a series of portraits of the Beaverton oak. A year later, he had already assembled a selection of 83 photographs, taking advantage of the lockdown, which allowed him to stage this tree in a space emptied of its inhabitants. Kenna's photographs of this oak tree take us back to the early days of photography, with William Henry Fox Talbot's mid-19th century shots of oak trees, which made trees the ideal subjects at a time when photography required long exposure times that caused blurring for any non-static elements. 

We invite you to see these majestic beings in a new light, to listen to the lessons of these non-humans at a time marked by a necessary return to The Land, the title of Bill Brandt's exhibition that revealed Michael Kenna's vocation as a landscape photographer in 1976. 

The main themes covered:

1) Trees in the work of Michael Kenna

2) Trees in art history: possible links with 18th-century painters and 19th-century photographers

3) Trees on screen

4) Trees in literary creation

5) Trees as subjects of law, agency, or discourse

6) Trees as abstraction and natural minimalist architecture

7) Trees as political and ecological symbols

8) Trees as vertical axes/spiritual bridges between the visible and the invisible

9) Trees and their relationship to time: the concept of long exposure, series, and repetition

10) Trees and memory: local or universal symbols?

Papers may be published.

Call for papers: TREES IN THE ARTS AND LITERATURE. AROUND MICHAEL KENNA’S PHOTOGRAPHY

Date and venue: Friday, November 27 2026 at Lycée Champollion, Grenoble (France)
Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2026

https://www.lycee-champollion.fr/

Proposals should consist of a single file headed by the name of the lecturer; they should include a short biography (maximum one page) and the paper proposal (maximum 3,000 characters including spaces). They may be written in French or English.

Deadline for submission to jearbrekenna@gmail.com : May, 1st 2026.

The project is supported by Grenoble-Alpes University, axe transversal Création culturelle et territoire(s), ILCEA4 scientific laboratory EA 7356. 

 1Institut des langues et cultures d'Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie

This conference investigates theories, histories and methodologies relating to photographic images that are, for different reasons, unseen or unseeable. In the past twenty years, theorists and scholars across disciplines have raised the idea of the invisible image in various ways: discussing “operational” images intended for machine-reading rather than human viewing, and “invisual’ images that appear in aggregation and in which the visual qualities of the image are less significant than the metadata they carry; the legal and political processes that have restricted the viewing and distribution of certain types of images; the images that provide the ‘training’ for AI image production; latent photographic images that have been exposed and may never be developed, and the traces of erased, damaged and faded images. Writers concerned with archival photographs of racialized subjects appeal to senses other than the visual: to the rhythms and tactility of pictures. And for a long time now, photographers and artists have found creative ways to visualise absence, and especially, to make present subjects “disappeared” by dictatorships and through war.

The conference will address how we might study and account for images that are inaccessible, whether through censorship, destruction or other interventions. What methods can be used to account for images in their absence? Historically, lecturers used ekphrasis to discuss images that they could not show. What techniques and approaches now might help us to analyse invisible, inaccessible or undiscovered images? Conversely, how might photographic techniques be used to represent or express the invisible? How have photographers attempted to use the medium to visualise the unseen? What can this teach us about the nature of the photographic media or about ocularcentric cultures? What are the institutions and their internal processes that restrict certain types of images? How might we respond when archival research yields nothing but absence? When should researchers refuse to show images and why? How and why might we bring unseen images to light and what are the ethical and theoretical dilemmas surrounding this? How are unseen images produced and stored, for what purposes and by whom?

Other possible topics include:

• Photographic latency

• What photography can ‘sense’ which is invisible to human eyes

• Operational and “invisual” images

• The “invisible” labour behind digital images

• The judicial status of images 

• The ethics and aesthetics of unseen images

• Censorship and political interference in image production, consumption, and circulation

• The use of visual technologies by law enforcement, military, and the surveillance industrial complex 

• Photographs of absence/invisibility/missing referents/spectres

• Institutions and image oversight

• Accessing and assessing absent images

• The affective power of inaccessible images

• Methodological inventions into unseen images

• The manipulation, redaction and destruction of images

The Invisible Image: Photography and the Unseen
A 2 day International Conference hosted by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool.
18-19 June 2026
Instagram: @ccel_uliverpool
Bsky: cceluliverpool.bsky.social

Keynote speakers:
Prof. Jordan Bear (University of Toronto)
Prof. Estelle Blaschke (University of Basel)

We welcome abstracts for 20 minute presentations that address any of the issues above, or that relate to questions of invisibility and photography in ways we have not anticipated. Please send abstracts of 250 words (max) with an indicative bibliography of up to 5 texts and a short bio of up to 100 words, to CCEL@liverpool.ac.uk by 30 January 2026.

I am organizing a conference entitled "Camera-Centered Histories of Photography," which will feature our own Dr Michael Pritchard as the keynote speaker.  The call for papers is attached. I would be delighted to see abstracts covering British photo history topics. Abstracts are due by 31 July.

Here's the call as a PDF: Camera conference CFP -- full text pasted below

Call for Papers

Camera-Centered Histories of Photography

Held online and at the California Museum of Photography (UCR), Riverside, CA

Friday December 2, 2022

Abstracts due July 31, 2022

What does our understanding of photographic technology tell us about photography? Scholars often frame the study of cameras through a media archaeology lens, such as Peter Buse’s examination of the Polaroid archives to contemplate what it contributes to our understanding of the ubiquitous instant photograph, or Jonathan Crary, whose examination of the “observer” in Victorian viewing evinces questions about modernity. Yet others neglect the role of the camera outright. This is not a disingenuous move; many photographers resent people asking about the device they use, because the question implies that the equipment, not the eye and mind, provided the skill. Photography’s relationship to its technology is equal parts intrinsic and fraught.

This one-day conference interrogates what photo history looks like when we foreground the technology that made the images. We invite scholars and artists to address the place of the camera in photographic histories. Themes may include (but are not limited to):

-The relationship between the camera and image

-The place of digital image-making in relation to technology-centric concerns

-Case studies that foreground the camera with regard to a specific photographer/image-maker

-Social histories that foreground photographic technologies

-Media archaeology approaches to cameras and photographic technology

-Business, legal, or advertising histories about camera manufacturers

-The role of patents in the advancement of photographic technologies

-Design histories relating to cameras

 The conference will be held as a hybrid live event, on-site at the California Museum of Photography (Riverside, California) and livecast via Zoom. Papers can be presented in-person or online.

 The conference will include a keynote address by Dr Michael Pritchard, author of A History of Photography in Fifty Cameras (2014) and a tour of the Larry S. Pierce American field camera collection by collector Larry Pierce.

 Please submit abstracts of approximately 350 words for 20-minute presentations to Leigh Gleason, Director of Collections (California Museum of Photography/UCR ARTS) at leigh.gleason@ucr.edu

In one of his recent statements, Noam Chomsky presented a truly pessimistic diagnosis of our times: the very beginning of the 21st century led us towards the crisis of democracy. Nowadays, we need to confront the system in which property relations play a decisive role in our social network. Power, according to Chomsky, is inevitably associated with wealth. In consequence, the rules of democratic societies are no longer valid, since the capital helps to avoid them.

The need to look at the problem of power in a broader way, which would go beyond the context of political domination, has already become strongly present in contemporary humanities. This topic became the subject of interest of the authorities of our academic discourse (especially Michel Foucault, Pierre Nora or Bruno Latour). Chomsky, however, in the aforementioned statement, also raised a second issue, which is especially important in our attempts to analyse today’s iconosphere: the phenomenon of the so-called ‘fake news’. At this point, his thought meets the observations of Giorgio Agamben. The recognition of the condition of our times made by both scholars is accompanied by the observations regarding the crisis of images. Paradoxically, despite the gradual loss of faith in the image (progressing with the growing awareness of the ways of manipulating it and using it as a means of persuasion) the thesis of Hans Belting, claiming that “we live in images and understand the world in images” still remains in force. After all, armed conflicts and trade wars are followed by the stream of provocative photographs. This spectacle of suffering was considered as a product created for consumption (Susan Sontag) or as a fast stream of “photo-shocks” (Roland Barthes).

We are strongly convinced that the tension growing on the axis power versus photography is the key issue for the research focusing on contemporary visual culture. Therefore, in the next issue of “Daguerreotype. Studies in the history and theory of photography” we would like to invite you to present your answer to the question of how photographic strategies place themselves in the complicated network of power, history, and memory. Let us ask ourselves what role photography can play in the game between those mighty opponents: is it stronger than only a defenceless pawn?

We invite you to send texts regarding the following problems:

• Blame(less?) photography: photographs as the means of ethical persuasion, ideological propaganda and/or a tool of violence
• Photography as a form of intervention: are the attempts to construct an unconventional “counter-history” (to use the term coined by the Polish historian Ewa Domańska) always doomed to failure? Can photography serve as a medium of re-figuring an abusive narrative? Or maybe the image, replacing the body, only replaces the actual participation, creating the illusion of participation in the social debate?
• The transgressive dimension of photography: in what kind of traps can photography fall into? When the strategies of visual rebellion, which were supposed to overcome the dominant power, eventually take its place? How does the reading and meaning of the photograph change depending on the place of its exposure, the field of exploitation or the status and role of the author?
• Photography through the prism of feminist discourse: photographs as tools for self-identification, the emancipation of body and contestation of social roles imposed by the system
• Photography and archiving/museum strategies: when organizing can be understood as control over the past, in which only the narratives of winners are present? When and how is curatorial practice an intervention that breaks the status quo and reminds the non-normative attitudes?

The issue of relationship between photography and power requires a broad, interdisciplinary perspective. Therefore, we invite scholars which work in different fields, such as anthropology, social and cultural studies, philosophy or art history, to join this discussion. Our intention is to present both theoretical essays, as well as case studies in our journal. The starting point of each paper can be located in the field of documentary, creative photography or photojournalism, but may also include analysis of examples from the private sphere or from the world of advertisement. Although the tension in the relations of photography and power is particularly noticeable in the era of the digital image, we are open for the reflection which refers to the roots of the photographic medium, which would be close to the title of our magazine and its traditions.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Małgorzata Maria Grąbczewska and Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch

The deadline for sending the final articles is: 28th February 2019

Please prepare the text according to our editorial guidelines (you can also check our website dagerotyp.com) and then send to the address: dagerotyp@shf.org.pl  (if you won’t receive a confirmation from us, please send the text again)

We encourage our potential authors to consult the topics of the articles with the editorial board before sending the final text.

CFP
No. 2 (26) / 2019: Photography and power