Call for papers
Transformation and Trouble: Photography as a Tool in Nineteenth-Century France
9 November 2023 – 1600 (GMT) / 1700 (CET) / 1100 (EST) / 0800 (PST)
It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century changed the course of visual culture in France and abroad. New photographic inventions, such as Louis Daguerre’s ‘diorama’ (a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects) introduced novel visual mechanisms to a wide audience. Though denigrated by critics like Charles Baudelaire for its presumed limitation to merely reproduce the visible world, photography was in fact in dialogue with other means of visual expression. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Paul Cezanne were indebted to the medium for the development of many of their paintings; Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of bodies in motion allowed artists such as Edgar Degas to reconsider the artist’s capacity to depict movement. While linked to aesthetic and scientific advancement, however, photography was equally a vital tool for French colonial endeavours, reinforcing propagandistic messages, justifying missionary activities, and lending seemingly objective evidence to the pseudoscientific project of eugenics and related endeavours of white supremacy. The tool of photography was put to many uses, unified by its promise of technological progress.
Call for papers:
In this session we hear from researchers who are working in diverse aspects of French visual culture and photography – if you would like to share your research as part of this event, please get in touch at [email protected]!
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
studioxix (5 octobre 2023). Call for papers. Studio XIX. Consulté le 24 juillet 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/ulgz
