Photographic Objecthood:Construction, Presence and the Sculptural Encounter

This symposium aims to provoke new approaches to the spatial, sensorial and sculptural potential of photography, exploring questions regarding the histories and futures of photographic objecthood.

Photographic Objecthood: Construction, Presence, and the Sculptural Encounter will bring together critics, academics and artists interested in the sculptural capacities of photography.

The programme opts not to examine the idea of ‘expanded’ photography where a hybridised ‘sculptural’ photograph is augmented through mixed media or in some way rendered three-dimensional. Speakers and contributors are instead invited to focus on artworks where conceptual, philosophical, or political meaning flows from a spatial or phenomenological encounter with a photograph of a specific scale and materiality.

This symposium is organised in collaboration with artist Fiona Crisp (Professor of Contemporary Art, Northumbria University).

Programme:

9.30 Registration and coffee

10.00 Introduction

Dr Sean Ketteringham, Henry Moore Institute and

Professor Fiona Crisp, Northumbria University

10.15 Chair: Dr Sean Ketteringham

Professor Fiona Crisp & Professor Hilde Van Gelder, University of Leuven

Impossible Space and Weak Images: Fiona Crisp and Hilde Van Gelder in-conversation.

11.00 Session One, Chair: Professor Hilde Van Gelder

Dr Duncan Wooldridge, artist/Manchester Metropolitan University

From the infra-thin to the photographic object: perceptual and technical encounters with photographic materialities.

Maria Luigia Gioffrè, Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico, Rome

The Drifting Trace: Photography as Sculptural Trace of Social Media Theatricality

Xiangyin Gu, Royal College of Art

Disappearance: Photographic Objecthood in the Age of Algorithmic Memory

12.15 – 1.30 Lunch in The Studio (provided)

1.30 Session Two, Chair: Dr Sean Ketteringham

Dr Rachel Wells, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford

Title tbc

Dr Elisaveta Ernst, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Between Light and Matter: Sigurður Guðjónsson and the Ontology of Photographic Presence

Dr Katarína Mašterová, Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Jan Svoboda and the Sculptural Encounter of the Photograph

Michael Kurtz, writer and critic, & Nat Faulkner, artist

Nat Faulkner: Between Object and Objecthood

3.00 – 3.30 Break

3.30 pm Session Three, Chair: Professor Fiona Crisp

Julie F. Hill, artist

Meeting Space in Silver & Glass: Photographic objecthood & cosmic observation at the Harvard Plate Stacks.

Helen Robertson, artist/Central Saint Martins

Photography as Live Encounter

Professor Martin Newth, Glasgow School of Art

Objecthood and the Photographic Apparatus: Between Image, Material and Machine

5pm Open discussion

5.30pm Drinks served in The Studio

7pm Finish