reconsidering cameraless photography

reconsidering cameraless photography

Cameraless or lensless photography employs a variety of techniques of producing photographic images without a camera (such as the photogram, the luminogram or the chemigram). Within most photographic histories, cameraless photography is limited to the discussion of avant-garde artists using these techniques to define or redefine the specificities of the photographic medium. Yet the practices of placing objects on light-sensitive paper or drawing on blackened glass plates can be also related to radiography, photocopying, and digital scanning – technologies that can be defined as post-lenticular. From sensor or laser scanners to screenshots, remote sensing, light detection methods and lensless imaging, the varieties of the cameraless gradually expand and the very concept of cameraless photography becomes a productive theoretical and methodological tool that helps to not only inquire into the contemporary automated visual systems but also to link them with the wider tradition of photographic and other technical images.

Our conference will address the wide, heterogeneous and shifting field of cameraless imaging while simultaneously asking what and why still counts as a “camera” or a “photograph” in contemporary visual culture.

Presentations:

Susanne Kriemann (Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe)
Pechblende

Olga Moskatova (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Photographing Hyper-Objects: The Non-Human Temporality of Radioactive Trace

Abelardo Gil-Fournier (FAMU in Prague)
Into the Forest: Adversarial Landscapes and Latent Space

Antonio Somaini (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
On the “photographic” status of images produced by General Adversarial Networks: Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017) and Grégory Chatonsky’s Complétion 1.0 (2021)

screening: Anouk De Clercq, Thing
(Video, b/​w, 16:9, stereo, BE/​IT/​FR, 2013, 18′)

Martine Beugnet (Université de Paris) & Catherine Wheatley (King’s College London)
To scan a dream: on Anouk De Clercq’s Thing

(may you have any questions about the event, please contact the organisers)

Link here: Operational Images – cameraless photogpraphy