14 November 2013 - Participant colloquium, Bern

Thursday November 14, 2013
16:15 – 21:00 | Hauptgebäude room 105 University of Bern

This participant workshop will explore the multiple uses of the photograph as it is likely to function in our projects: as aesthetic expression, historical document, or discursive illustration.

PART 1: 16:15 – 17:30 Lecture
Silvia Naef will lecture on "Writing Art History of the Arab World: Archives, Theories and Realities" followed by a brief presentation by doctoral candidate Elahe Helbig (Uni Bonn) titled "Early Iranian Photography (1840s – 1880s) – From Appropriation to Differentiation"

PART 2: 18:15 – 19:15 Group discussion
Participants should read the articles listed below in preparation for a discussion on the progress they've made in their work and weigh in on how photographs or other types of documentation factor into their methodological approach. What are some of the issues we face as researchers who rely heavily on visual resources? What are the theoretical implications of our use of these materials?
Suggested reading (access via JSTOR):
Buckley, Liam "Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive" Cultural Anthropology (Vol. 20, No. 2), 2005
Sekula, Allen "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)" The Massachusetts Review, (Vol. 19, No. 4), 1978

PART 3: 19:15 – 21:00 Presentation by Jörg Bader followed by discussion
Jörg Bader, director of the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva, will speak to us about the increasing relevance of photography, particularly documentary photography, in contemporary arts, and as a consequence, the growing importance of photographic archives. Bader curated the 2010 exhibition "The Revenge of the Photographic Archive".

Schedule:

16:15 – 17:15 Silvia Naef
17:15 – 17:30 Elahe Helbig
17:30 - 18:15 Light Dinner
18:15 - 19:15 Discussion of projects and documentation
19:15 – 20:00 Jörg Bader Lecture
20:00 – 21:00 Discussion