The conference will address, both theoretically and methodologically, how we might study and account for images that are inaccessible, whether through censorship, destruction or other interventions. What methods can be used to account for images in their absence? Historically, lecturers used ekphrasis to discuss images that they could not show. What techniques and approaches now might help us to analyse invisible, inaccessible or undiscovered images? Conversely, how might photographic techniques be used to represent or express the invisible? How have photographers attempted to use the medium to visualise the unseen? What can this teach us about the nature of the photographic media or about ocularcentric cultures? What are the institutions and their internal processes that restrict certain types of images? How might we respond when archival research yields nothing but absence? When should researchers refuse to show images and why? How and why might we bring unseen images to light and what are the ethical and theoretical dilemmas surrounding this? How are unseen images produced and stored, for what purposes and by whom?
Other possible topics include:
- Photographic latency
- What photography can ‘sense’ which is invisible to human eyes
- Operational and “invisual” images
- The “invisible” labour behind digital images
- The judicial status of images
- The ethics and aesthetics of unseen images
- Censorship and political interference in image production, consumption, and circulation
- The use of visual technologies by law enforcement, military, and the surveillance industrial complex
- Photographs of absence/invisibility/missing referents/spectres
- Institutions and image oversight
- Accessing and assessing absent images
- The affective power of inaccessible images
- Methodological inventions into unseen images
- The manipulation, redaction and destruction of images
