[artinfo] The Ethics of Photography and the Politics of the Image in Times of Crises

[ober]

CALL FOR CONFERENCE CONTRIBUTIONS (May 19-20, 2016)

Centrul de Fotografie Contemporana (Center of Contemporary Photography) in
Iasi (RO) is organizing the conference ëíThe Ethics of Photography and the
Politics of the Image in Times of Crisesí in the framework of ëCAMERA
PLUS. Biennial of Contemporary Photography and Moving Imageí.

May 19-20, 2016
Venue: ëBenjamin Fondaneí Hall at the French Institute,(Romania).

Argument:
In the last years, striated by a multitude of crises -- economical,
political and cultural crises --, the photographic practices have created
ethical tensions and they have been politicized out of a necessity to
speculate the opportunity of transforming the reality. The financial,
governmental and axiological objectivities came to be reconsidered by
narrative reconstruction, fictional manipulation of the representation and
(self)caring techniques of subjectivization, facilitated by the freely use
of editing and the invasive post-processing tasks accomplished by
decisions of masking, cropping, retouching, filtrating.
The relativity of the ethical judgment of an image could be given by the
prevalent political nature of the message where both the justification of
an interest to emphasize a fact and the argumentation of interpreting an
action could be significant. In this case, the correctness comes to be
discussed in relation with the acceptability and the responsibility would
reach the situation of being exposed to an ideological deconstruction.
Considering that the gray area or the blind spot of the photographic
ethics could be constituted as object-objective of utopical exploration,
new ways of understanding the politics of photographical practice could be
configured, in the times of crises, beyond the motivation of the citizen
journalism, as well as new ways of rethinking the constitution of an
ethics of image from the perspective of a necessary production of reality,
maybe even beyond the critique, using the impactful power of a
composition.
Requirement:
The proposal for the presentation in the conference should include a
title, an abstract of 300 words and a short biography of the author. A
presentation should take 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of
discussions. The final papers will be published in a critical reader at
the end of 2016.
The proposals should be sent to: contact at c-f-c.ro until April 20, 2016.
Selection of the participants will be announced shortly thereafter.
Please note that funding is not provided for this event, so participants
will be required to fund and arrange their own travels and accommodations.
The conference will be held in English and it will be open to the public.
CAMERA PLUS, Biennial of Contemporary Photography and Moving Image is
financially supported by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund
in Romania, Institut Francais in Iasi, British Council Iasi, Deutschen
Kulturzentrum in Iasi.