Nationellt högre seminarium för fotoforskning

Seminariet startade våren 2008. Målet var att skapa ett forum, ett arbetande seminarium, där det fanns möjlighet att diskutera teoretiska och metodologiska frågor inom fotografiforskning i Sverige. I nätverket deltog konsthistoriker, idéhistoriker, medieforskare med flera som forskar på fotografi i Sverige. Flera av deltagarna har varit med i det nordiska nätverket för fotohistorisk forskning, Nordic Network for the History and Aesthetics of Photography, som stöddes av Nordforsk 2003-2007.

Nätverkets stöddes av Kung. Vitterhetsakademien 2008-2018.

Kontakt och frågor:  Anna Dahlgren, Institutionen för Kultur och Estetik, Stockholms universitet       

anna.dahlgren@arthistory.su.se

Aktuellt 

För närvarande pågår arbetet med att skriva en ny svensk fotohistoria. Flera av detta nätverks deltagare är involverade som författare och Anna Dahlgren är redaktör för bokverket som planeras att ges ut 2022. 

Tidigare seminarier och aktiviteter

Torsdag 31 augusti 2017 kl. 13-15 Institutionen för kultur och estetik, Stockholms universitet, Frescativägen 24, rum 509

Andrea Kollnitz och Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe presenterar sina respektive forskningsprojekt om konstnärers självframställning genom fotografisk bild 

Andrea Kollnitz, FD i konstvetenskap och lektor i Modevetenskap vid Stockholms universitet

Becoming Leonor Fini. Artistic Self-fashioning in Photographs as Creative Act and Self-Empowerment  

My presentation aims to give new perspectives on artistic self-expression and -performance through fashion, costume and self-stylization in photographic portraits and thereby problematize the marginalised significance of self-fashioning in notions of the artist’s role and art itself. It will highlight the self-fashioning and self-representation of the Italian Surrealist painter Leonor Fini.  Having gained an international reputation as a skilled portrait painter, an imaginative surrealist artist and author, Fini was also famous and highly visible as an often photographed beauty icon in mesmerizing costumes and in close collaboration with the fashion world. She may be understood as an artist who consciously made her life and personal appearance an artwork. Her case raises questions on fashion, costume and conscious photographic self-representation as creative artistic expression and as part of a socially provocative artistic life-style questioning gender conventions in the art world. Revising the male dominated discourse of surrealism, which has partially devaluated Fini’s self-fashioning practices as feminine superficiality and vanity, I interpret those as creative acts of empowerment confirming Fini’s artistic and personal autonomy.

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, docent i konstvetenskap vid Stockholms universitet

Nell Walden’s Public Persona: Performed, Projected, Pictured

My presentation focuses on the photographic self-presentations of the artist, writer, and art collector Nell Walden (1887-1975), who during the 1910s and 20s belonged to the inner circle of the Berlin-based expressionist art journal and gallery Der Sturm. In the discussion, I propose that Walden’s practices of visual self-presentation, employed not only as objects of study but also as primary visual sources, enables an enhanced knowledge on the histories of (gendered) identification and agency within and beyond the modernist art field. Two aspects are of particular interest: 1) how Nell Walden’s photographic self-presentations negotiated with social expectations, visual and verbal projections of others, and gendered tropes within a broader field of visual culture—including art, popular culture, and amateur photography—in Imperial and Weimar Germany; 2) how her portrait photographs were produced, reproduced, and disseminated as a means of social and professional promotion within and beyond the art world. In a more general sense, the discussion addresses the usefulness of photographs as visual sources in art historical research.

Onsdag 26 april 2017 kl. 13-14  Lokal: Auditoriet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik, Frescativägen 24E

Photography, Archives, and the Phases of Digitisation

Nina Lager Vestberg, professor i visuell kultur vid Inst. för konstvetenskap och 

mediestudier vid Norges Naturvetenskapliga Universitet (NTNU)

What do we talk about when we talk about digitisation? People working with photographic images tend to understand this concept in different ways, depending on whether they work in museums, archives, the stock photo industry, media outlets, publishing, or education. The impact of digitisation has likewise been varied across these different areas: affecting anything from exhibition design and archival practices, via research methods and learning experiences, to business models and intellectual rights management. Photographic technologies are moreover hardwired into the digital interfaces of everyday life, of which smartphones are the most obvious example. Inspired by the sociologist Roland Robertson’s (1992) attempt at «mapping the global condition» through the development of a «minimal phase model of globalisation» I propose to chart the digital condition of photography through a similar phase model of digitisation. This mapping exercise produces a conceptual framework that can be helpful in historicising how photographic practices in general, and photographic archives in particular, are affected by the emergence and consolidation of digitisation as a cultural form.

Nina Lager Vestberg is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Art and Media Studies at NTNU in Trondheim. Nina’s work on photo history and archives has been published in international refereed journals, and she sits on the editorial board of History of Photography. Other research interests include the digitisation of museums and the environmental aspects of media technologies. Recent publications include «Ordering, searching, finding» in Journal of Visual Culture (2013), Media and the Ecological Crisis (Routledge 2015, co-edited with Richard Maxwell and Jon Raundalen), and «‘There is no cloud’: toward a materialist ecology of post-photography» in Captures 1:1 (2016). 

Onsdag 21 September 2016 kl. 13-15  IKE, Stockholms universitet, Frescativägen 26, 2 tr, rum 509 

Vreni Hockenjos: Early Kodak Moments in Sweden Revisited 

It is commonly assumed that the rise of amateur photography at the close of the nineteenth century was predominantly linked to one man and one camera: the American businessman George Eastman and the introduction of his Kodak camera in 1888. The Kodak was a camera which was so simple to use that all one had to do is “press the button and we do the rest”, as a famous advertisement slogan put it thus paving the way for the masses to take pictures on their own. This paper now seeks to challenge and nuance this widely accepted understanding of Kodak’s crucial role by examining how the early Kodak models were actually marketed and received in Sweden around 1900. My thesis is that far from having been a photographic revolution, Eastman’s camera was actually not very popular in Sweden at the time. Aside from exploring the early reception of Eastman’s Kodak, this paper may also serve as a case study on the mechanisms of photohistorical research in the tension of global versus local historiographies.

Vreni Hockenjos is a freelance researcher based in Vienna, Austria. She received her PhD from Stockholm University in the field of cinema studies with a dissertation on August Strindberg and the visual media of his time (Picturing Dissolving Views, 2007). She is currently editing a book on Strindberg and photography and her research interests cover various photohistorical and theoretical aspects concerned with, among other things, amateur photography, image reproduction techniques or socially committed documentary photography. 

Måndag 9 november 2015 kl. 13-15. IKE, Stockholms universitet, Frescativägen 26, 2 tr, rum 509

Seminarium: The personal versus the institutional voice in an open photographic archive 

Karin Wagner, professor i Konst- och bildvetenskap vid Göteborgs universitet lägger fram ett utkast till en tidskriftsartikel.

Web-based photographic archives, such as Historypin, that address both cultural heritage institutions and the general public, result in heterogeneous collections of images with regard to subject, technique, and quality. The metadata supplied by private persons can differ quite substantially from the metadata normally produced by institutional staff. Taking examples from Historypin, this presentation will deal with the personal voice in contrast to the institutional voice in an open photographic archive.

Torsdag 7 maj 2015 kl. 13-15  Filmhuset, Borgvägen 1-5, plan 5 (Centrum för modevetenskap).

Seminarium: Body Pose and Nonverbal Identity in the Age of Early Photography

A presentation of an ongoing research project on body language at the turn of the twentieth century using portrait and street photography. The study focuses on how a culture of performativity was spread to all sections of society following the introduction of photography, and how early photographs can be a gateway into the nonverbal identities that cannot be gauged through written sources.

Peter K. Andersson is a postdoctoral researcher in history at Lund University. His previous research has dealt with streetlife and everyday conduct in Victorian London.

I samarbete med Centrum för Modevetenskap vid Stockholms universitet.

Fredag 16 maj 2014

Seminarium: Ett medium för visuell bildning

Konstvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms universitet, Frescativägen 26, 2 tr, lokal: 509, kl. 14-16  

Anna Dahlgren, docent vid Konstvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms universitet

Presentation av boken "Ett medium för visuell bildning. Kulturhistoriska perspektiv på fotoalbum 1850-1950".

http://www.makadambok.se/dahlgren.htm

Tisdag 3 juni 2014

Disputation: Niclas Östlind disputerar i fotografi på avhandlingen 

"Performing history. Fotografi i Sverige från 1970-2014".

Hörsalen, Göteborgs konstmuseum, kl. 13-17

Se vidare: http://www.akademinvaland.gu.se/aktuellt/e/?eventId=1785028888

Tisdag 4 juni 2013 13.00-16.00, Lokal:  D 752, Stockholms universitet
Temat är olika aspekter av fotografi och det digitala. Under seminariet kommer tre projekt att presenteras:

Sara Callahan, presenterar sin magisteruppsats i Konstvetenskap från Södertörns högskola: Tracing shadows: the "analogue" and the indexical sign-status of the photographic object.

Pelle Eriksson, doktorand i Innovation, Design och Teknik vid Mälardalens högskola: Convergence Cameras and the New Documentary Image 

Textunderlag: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WAPC7XT7r9D2xCaGubMX/full

Vendela Grundell, doktorand i konstvetenskap vid Stockholms universitet presentera en fall-studie inom ramen för avhandlingsprojektet Interface photography. Glitching as Photographic Experience. 

För mer information om Vendelas projekt se: http://www.arthistory.su.se/om-oss/kontakt/doktorandpresentationer/vendela-grundell-1.108258

Tid och plats: 4 juni 2013, 13.00-16.00, postseminarium, Helldénrummet, D 752, Konstvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms universitet

Onsdag 17 april 2013 kl 13.00-15.00, Lokal:  D 752, Stockholms universitet

Magnus Bremmer presenterar ett avsnitt om Uppsalameteorologen Hugo Hildebrandssons fotografiska molnstudier från sitt pågående avhandlingsprojekt. Tid och plats: Onsdag 17/4 kl 13-15 , Helldénrummet, D 752, Konstvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms universitet. Textunderlag skickas ut en vecka i förväg.

Nätverkets deltagare.