I’m beyond excited to share the news that a panel I’m organizing and chairing, "Camera-derie: Collaborative, Communal, and Collective Practices in Photography," has been accepted for the CAA 113th Annual Conference, New York Hilton Midtown, New York City, February 12–15, 2025.
CAA, or the College Art Association, is the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts. Updates about the conference will be posted on the CAA website: https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/
The panel participants are:
Alise Tifentale, CUNY Kingsborough: chair
Erina Duganne, Texas State University: discussant
Tommy Mintz, CUNY Kingsborough: speaker, “A Visual Timeline: Mapping Influences of Pictorialism and Modernism in New York and Seattle Photographic Clubs, 1900–1941”
Jessica Werneke, University of Iowa: speaker, “Joseph Aleksandrovich Schneider: A Case Study in P_rnography and Censorship in Soviet Latvia”
Nadya Bair, Hamilton College, speaker: “A Commercial and Educational Pursuit: Venezia ’79, the International Center of Photography, and the Photo Festival Circuit”
Hyewon Yi, SUNY Old Westbury, speaker: “Escaping Poverty through Photography: Wendy Ewald, Zana Briski, Nancy McGirr and Their Work with Children”
Organizing the panel has been one of the highlights of this year. I began drafting the panel abstract and sending out the first emails to invite participants already in February, exactly a year before the 2025 conference. I received the news about the acceptance in mid-July, 2024.
If you’re in the city, please come see our panel and be part of our conversation!
This is the abstract of our panel:
Camera-derie: Collaborative, Communal, and Collective Practices in Photography
Building on recent work on photography as a collaborative and networked practice, this panel focuses on a range of collective efforts in photography's history, including alternative forms of image circulation and moments of transcultural and transnational exchange. Through focused case studies of photographic communities from the early 1900s to the present, this panel mobilizes a discussion about photography as a social practice.
Papers in this panel examine the trajectories of stylistic influences shaping the creative output of the early twentieth-century Camera Club of New York and the Seattle Camera Club; image circulation, censorship, and political resistance in and around photography communities in the Soviet Union in 1957; the role of transnational collaboration in "Venezia '79," an international photo festival organized by Cornell Capa and the International Center for Photography; and the uses of the camera as a pedagogical tool to empower communities and foster visions of hope in the practice of contemporary photographers such as Wendy Ewald in Kentucky, Zana Briski in India, and Nancy McGirr in Guatemala.
Navigating between Vilém Flusser’s concept of the photograph as the ultimate technical image that has changed the course of human history as radically as the development of written language, and, on the other hand, photography’s troubling embeddedness into what Ariella Azoulay identifies as imperial violence, the panel examines how groups and communities of photographers have harnessed the camera as a tool for community building, social engagement, artistic innovation, and political subversion.
Keywords:
Collaboration, photo clubs, amateur photography, photojournalism, photographic pedagogy, aesthetic influence, community of practice, exhibitions