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What is a photographic society or club? What defines an amateur? How do photographic clubs and societies foster community, educate, and serve as social networking bodies?  Assessing amateur photographic communities as a phenomenon is more urgent than ever because many of these minor groups were poorly documented at the time, and the majority of their collections have been broken up, dispersed, or lost. These amateur groups show the unrestricted flow of photographic knowledge, often through exhibition, unimpeded by geography or language, and made possible by the efficacy of print communities. Some amateur societies and clubs were founded for specific specialisms, concerns, and aesthetic preferences in a variety of locations, while others evolved from learned societies and earlier forms of education.

The earlier trend of forming clubs and societies for scientific and associational activity reflected broader developments in national and global trade economies. The variety of local photographic clubs and societies, as well as the benefits they provided, served as a vector for new ideas, new values, and new kinds of social alignment, as part of a larger surge in new forms of national, regional, and local identity inspired variously by, for instance, learned societies, Victorian arts and crafts organisations, or medieval guild influences.

Yet, much of this associational world can be traced back to British culture in ways that have not previously been considered. However, these networks and influences cannot be contained within ideas of ‘national traditions’. To recover these voluntary associations and practices requires more to be done to map and research the impact of transnational networks on British amateur communities, and a shared history, not only with Euro-North American networks, but also with global south countries like South America, Asia, and Africa, especially in the postwar years following rapid decolonialisation. It would seem timely to examine the culture of sharing ideas through the rich written world of photographic publishing; the work of foreign correspondents; the circulation of lantern sets and prints; and the mobility of photographers and artisans through transnational exchanges and rigorous theoretical and historical reflection. This will allow us to rethink the role of British culture in the development of amateur clubs and societies, and their wider historical relationships across national boundaries.

This hybrid one-day event builds on a one-day workshop at Birkbeck in May 2023 and opens a critical conversation about the under-researched origins and evolution of photographic clubs and societies around the world, and outlines new agendas to research, theorise, and interpret the variety of historical amateur circles that brought together technology, science, and art to enable a constituency of dedicated non-professional individuals to learn from one another.

We invite papers for 15 minute presentations that investigate this global network in relation to class, gender, race, and imperial legacies in the global south, including Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as the origins of this associational life in Britain’s medieval guilds, freemasonry, arts clubs, and learned societies.

What can mapping clubs and societies tell us about how people experience nationalistic and patriotic sentiment? How did the intensely local desire and sense of local distinctiveness translate to the national or transnational level? What approaches might we use now to analyse the sociability of these networks which emphasise local forms of belonging while connecting practitioners across geographical borders? How long did it take a photographic innovation to circle around the world? What were the well-established and less-travelled routes for exchanging photographic knowledge?

Proposals might explore, but are not limited to:

• The history of learned societies or arts clubs in Britain
• Early photographic clubs and societies in Britain between the 1840s and 1860s
• Links with other types of bodies and emerging disciplines that sponsored photographic sections such as literary and antiquarian, geological, natural history, medical, and archaeological societies, companies
• the rise and fall of national and provincial clubs and societies in Britain, Europe, and North America between the 1870s and 1930s
• The role of periodicals and books in drawing together societies and clubs and consolidating imagined communities
• Amateur circles in schools, universities, workplaces, and colonies, among others
• Localism demonstrated through flourishing local clubs and societies, and local learned journals
• The rise of early clubs in East Asian countries like China and Japan, and in Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Taiwan, and Vietnam after World War II
• The evolution of clubs in South America, India, and Africa between the 1950s and 1980s
• The relationship between class, gender, race, or imperial legacies and clubs, societies, and associations

 Paper proposals should be submitted as one Word or PDF document to Dr Jason Bate j.bate@bbk.ac.uk by Monday 29 June 2026. The document should include:

• Your full name
• Email address
• Institutional affiliation (when applicable)
• Paper title
• Proposal of no longer than 250 words for presentations of 15 minutes
• Indication of whether you would be presenting in person or online
• Short biographical note (100-150 words)

Event format: The event will take place at Birkbeck, the University of London (UK) in hybrid form, and we will be able to accommodate fifteen presentations. Eight speakers have already confirmed their attendance, including keynote speaker Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Professor Peter Buse, PhD student Sandrine Chene, Dr Sara Dominici, Dr Carolin Görgen, Dr Oh Soon-Hwa, Dr Michael Pritchard, and Dr Alise Tifentale.   

Importantly: Selected speakers will be invited to contribute extended versions of their papers to an edited volume on the same theme.

cfp: Globe-spanning Networks: Mapping Amateur Photographic Clubs and Societies in Local, National, and Transnational Contexts
Thursday 26 November 2026
Birkbeck, University of London, UK & hybrid
Deadline for paper proposals: by Monday 29 June 2026 to Dr Jason Bate j.bate@bbk.ac.uk

Image: Maidstone and Institute Camera Club outing, c.1908, Michael Pritchard collection. 

From the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards, photomechanical images assumed a central role in print production processes. With the development of new typographic techniques, technologies, and ad hoc materials, photography transformed into an ink image, circulating across a wide range of printed media, including newspapers, books, magazines, and postcards. Photomechanical images enabled the mass dissemination of cultural, political, and news events, the public reception of works of art, the transmission of scientific research, as well as the circulation of photography itself as an artistic language. In this way, the ink image became a modern instrument for understanding the world.

Over the past two decades, with seminal publications such as Forme e modelli del rotocalco italiano tra fascismo e guerra (De Berti, Piazzoni 2009) and Arte moltiplicata. L'immagine del ’900 italiano nello specchio dei rotocalchi (Cinelli et al. 2013), the circulation of photographic images—particularly in periodicals and illustrated magazines—has received increasing scholarly attention in Italy. The strongly transdisciplinary approach that has characterised recent conferences such as Periodicals: S.T.E.A.M. AHEAD! (Urbino, 2024), Testi, Immagini, Formati, Strutture. I linguaggi del giornalismo tra Otto e Novecento (Milan, 2025), and Testo e immagine nei periodici illustrati dell’Italia del boom (Milan, 2025) has encouraged new analytical perspectives on illustrated printed sources, although the focus has largely remained on their textual and visual content. Consequently, the material culture of photomechanical images and processes has so far been addressed only in a fragmentary and marginal manner. This differs from the international context, where the topic has been placed more centrally within ongoing research. Among the most significant initiatives in this field are the conferences De/Reconstructing Photomechanical Reproduction. Don’t Press Print (Bristol, 2021) and Photomechanical Prints: History, Technology, Aesthetics and Use (Washington, DC, 2023), as well as the Prague-based research group The Matrix of Photomechanical Reproductions: Histories of Remote Access to Art (2022–2027).

The Urbino study day aims to present a series of contributions situated within a transdisciplinary framework, addressing the use of photography in printed materials—including books, specialised journals, newspapers, illustrated magazines, postcards, etc.—as well as the objects connected to their production, such as clichés, proof prints, working materials and tools, and ephemera. Particular attention will be devoted to the Italian context, while remaining open to international comparison, within a chronological framework encompassing both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The study day aims to examine and give visibility to objects, processes, and dynamics that have thus far been overlooked by historiography, thereby opening new perspectives for the analysis and study of these materials.

Possible research topics include, but are not limited to:

• The study of technical aspects related to the production of photomechanical images;
• An investigation of the complex network of professionals involved in the processes mediating between the chemical image and the ink image;
• The analysis of the circulation and migration of photographic images in printed materials;
• A comparison between printed materials produced in Italy and in international contexts;
• The use of photomechanical material in artistic practices such as photocollage and photomontage;
• The relationship between the photographic image and textual, graphic, and typographic elements in editorial mise en page projects.

Among the objectives of the study day are:

• Highlight how photomechanical processes emerged in response to specific demands of the publishing industry and to the growing cultural need to illustrate printed products;
• Redefine existing hierarchies within the history of photography and the publishing industry;
• Investigate printed sources as material sites of re-semantisation that shape different contexts of sedimentation, reception, and use of photographic images;
• Shed light on how international models were reworked through Italian case studies;
• Analyse the processes through which the photographic image is transformed across different editorial, graphic, and typographic contexts.

Scholars, curators, museum professionals, and practitioners interested in participating are invited to submit a proposal for a 20-minute presentation by 22 May 2026 to both the following addresses: cristiana.sorrentino@unifi.it and francesca.strobino@labafirenze.com.

Proposals must be submitted in English and should include: an abstract specifying the methodological approach (approximately 3,000 characters / 400 words including spaces), a short biographical note (approximately 1,000 characters / 150 words including spaces), and an exemplifying image. The proposal should be sent as a single PDF file named Surname_Urbino_2026. Notifications of acceptance will be communicated by 30 June 2026.

A peer-reviewed volume collecting the contributions presented during the study day is planned for publication in early 2027 within the series Novecento e oltre, published by Urbino University Press. Participants will therefore be invited to submit a draft version of their paper at the time of the conference itself (1 October 2026).

The study day will take place in person in Urbino and will be conducted entirely in English.

Beyond the Image: Towards a Redefinition of the Photographic Object in Printed Materials in Italy
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy
1 October 2026
cfp deadline: 22 May 2026
Details by emailing:  cristiana.sorrentino@unifi.it and francesca.strobino@labafirenze.com.

Organised by:

Marta Binazzi (University of Florence; Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Carlotta Castellani (Università of Urbino Carlo Bo)
Cristiana Sorrentino (University of Florence)
Francesca Strobino (LABA. Libera Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence)

Scientific Committee:

Geoffrey Belknap (National Museums Scotland)
Vincent Fröhlich (University of Marburg)
Mary Ikoniadou (Leeds School of Arts)
Nicoletta Leonardi (Brera Academy)
Irene Piazzoni (University of Milan)
Paolo Rusconi (University of Milan)
Tiziana Serena (University of Florence)
Petra Trnková (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Kelley Wilder (Professor Emerita De Montfort University, Leicester)

The University of Salford and The Sustainable Darkroom are excited to announce a 2-day conference to coincide with the launch of The Sustainable Darkroom’s new book, Bury After Reading: The Afterlife of Images. For six years, The Sustainable Darkroom has fostered an international community dedicated to rethinking photography in an age of climate and ecological crisis. While many seek quick technical fixes for sustainability, our approach has aimed to look deeper—beyond material substitutions—towards more nuanced, critical, and imaginative understandings of what photography is and what it can become.

On the publication of the new book Bury After Reading: The Afterlife of Images this conference and exhibition celebrate the community of practice developed through the Sustainable Darkroom and asks how we create radical new visions for the future of photography.

Seeds of Change: exploring regenerative practices in analogue and digital photography
New Adelphi Building, University of Salford M5 4WT
Thursday 29 - Friday 30 October 2026

Deadline for submissions: Monday 27 April
Notification of Acceptance: Early June
Call for papers, art works and workshops here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kz1G79ueP1ilAfL15Df5swE2UrmFilgI/view
Submit proposals here: Open Call: Seeds of Change – Fill in form

Queries relating to the call or conference email:  artdes-sap@salford.ac.uk

The National Stereoscopic Association is pleased to announce its seventh annual 'Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography' at the 52nd annual 3D-Con on 16 July, 2026, to be held at the Clyde Hotel, 330 Tijeras Avenue NW, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Presentations are welcome on any art historical, visual studies, humanities or social historical scholarship in stereography from its inception to contemporary stereo-media. We project stereoscopically on the 3D-Con's big screen, and our growing community of international scholars represents diverse research from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Please fill out the contact information form at the link below. Then upload on a separate file your abstract of 600 words maximum, followed by a biography of no more than 300 words, and up to five images. Final presentations may be delivered in person or prerecorded. 

cfp:  Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography VII
The National Stereoscopic Association’s 52nd Annual 3D-Con
Thursday, 16 July, 2026
cfp deadline: 6 May, 2026
https://3d-con.com/history.php
Press the tab for “Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography.”
Notification of acceptance by 14 May, 2026
Images due: 18 June, 2026

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