13-13.15 Introduction

13.15-13.45 Marco Solaroli: “Framing realism in news & documentary photography”

13.45-14.15 Almira Ousmanova: “The aiming gaze. Ethics and poetics of an instant (of death) in photography”

14.15-14.45 Coffee break

14.45-15.15 Ilija Tomanić-Trivundža: “Press photography and iconic invisibility”

15.15-15.45 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos: “The open-source production of visual evidence in the documentation and prosecution of grave human rights violations”

15.45-16.30 Panel discussion with the presenters

Abstracts and bio

Kari Andén-Papadopoulos

My talk considers the recent turn towards new media forensic practices and use of open-source imagery and video footage as evidence in international human rights investigations and prosecutions. I will discuss how human rights advocates and lawyers are harnessing new image technologies and advancements in computing power to both reassess and reassert the status of video as usable evidence in advocacy and courts. If digital imaging technologies has brought on a crisis of photographic referentiality, we must also consider how they open possibilities for creating new kinds of documentary evidence and for laying newly vested claims to the truth of visual media – and what the significance of this is for the pursuit of accountability and justice, and the broader battle over truth in what is often termed a “post-truth” era.

Kari Andén-Papadopoulos is a Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. Her research broadly concerns the role of news and documentary images and image practices in the social and cultural (re)production of meaning, power, and memory, especially in times of war and crisis. In recent years, the focus has revolved around the increasingly important role that digital mobile cameras and online platforms play in the communication and conduct of war, political conflict and protest. At the Institute for Future Studies Kari Andén-Papadopoulos head the project Eyewitness Video and Human Rights Practice.

Almira Ousmanova

Photography is inextricably linked with death: they are brought together by the verdict of an instant, the irreversibility of the event, the mourning for the lost “object” and even an etymological relationship (at least in English, since "to shoot", depending on the context, may mean both an act of taking a picture and that of defeating with a gunshot). The archives of history preserve many traces and evidence of this unbearable intimacy. Meanwhile, war photography is not the only genre that captures death and records suffering. The aiming Gaze of a photographer records not only war scenes or the victims of other crimes, but also many everyday losses, and sometimes it reminds us that life after the tragic event can be worse than death. If we are inclined to think that tragedy is unrepresentable without Image, then photography proves the opposite, giving Form to death and unwittingly poeticizing it. Thus, drawing on the texts by Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Alain Fleischer and other authors, I would like to discuss a range of issues, related photographic Gaze, ethics and poetics of an instant, the limits of representation and the issue of dealing with visual protocols of death in historical research and curatorial practices.

Almira Ousmanova is a philosopher, cultural theorist and gender scholar. She is professor at the Department of Social Sciences, co-founder of the Laboratory for Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art Länk till annan webbplats. at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) and coordinator of the EHU Center for Gender Studies. Research interests: genealogy and methodology of Visual Studies, film theory, semiotics, gender representations in cinema and visual arts, the politics of knowledge in CEE, art and politics.

Marco Solaroli

This talk offers a critical historical reconstruction of major ways in which the notion of photographic realism has been framed in the discourse and practice of news & documentary photography in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Through a number of examples, it focuses on shifting technologies, styles, and values that negotiate and enrich the dichotomous tensions opposing objectivity and subjectivity within the professional field. The empirical material is mainly collected from an ongoing research project on the institutional role played by major press photo awards in consecrating practices and forms of visual production, and in framing ‘expressive realism’ as an organizing principle and discursive resource increasingly contributing to shape the hierarchy of symbolic value of photojournalism.

Marco Solaroli is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna. His research interests reside at the intersection of cultural sociology, visual culture studies, and journalism studies, focusing in particular on cultural production, innovation, and consecration. His current research projects deal with news photography and global crises; visual social media and political power; digital transformation and symbolic power in visual journalism.

Ilija Tomanić-Trivundža

The presentation addresses the increased reliance of news reporting on photographic images that have no direct connection to reported events and provides critical reading of this “iconic sidestep”. The “iconic sidestep” refers to the repetitive use of similar generic motifs, proliferating reliance on non-journalistic images (e.g. stock photographs), and increased willingness to the use of journalistic images as if they were stock photographs. Rather than offering additional information or providing visual illustration of the depicted event, such photographs base their storytelling on iconic and symbolic rather than indexical properties of the photographic medium. Although photography’s “special connection” to the real of photography was never as straightforward, one-dimensional and unproblematic as the notion of indexicality implied, the use of above-mentioned photographs in news reporting severs the connection to “the real”. Their use contributes to devaluation of photography as a meaningful factual narrator of events and privileges decorative over informative or illustrative role of images. Consequently, it changes nature of witnessing and eyewitnessing, which becomes increasingly reliant on invisibility rather than visibility, unwittingly contributing to the post-truth zeitgeist and erosion of journalisms tools for trustworthy narration and depiction of the world.

Ilija Tomanic Trivundza is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). His political research interest spans across the field of visual communication with special focus on the social and political role of photography in contemporary mediated communication. His published articles and book chapters focus on photojournalism, framing of news, visual representations of otherness and collective identifications.