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 is 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.

At a time when AI technologies are radically altering our relationship with de-materialised images and their circulation in digital space, the symposium looks to open a speculative zone of enquiry that asks how ‘being with’ the photograph might affect our thinking about presence. In so doing, the event will question how models of spectatorship that account for ubiquitous media, post-colonial and global perspectives, neurodiversity and new socio-political forms of looking have changed our experience of encounter.