Workshop: “Nomadic Camera. Photography, Displacement and Dis:connectivities”

Processes of migration and flight after 2015 and their depiction, perception and distribution through photography are the starting point of ‘Nomadic Camera’.

We seek to investigate the relationship of photography and contemporary migration in technology, the media and aesthetics in addition to historical exile and flight as the pivotal discursive setting in which specific forms of mobility extending from the mid-19th century to today have been negotiated. The concept adapts the term ‘nomadic’ — a transitory form of existence — beyond static concepts of being and national boundaries (Demos 2017). ‘Nomadism’ refers to a form of mobility that converges with and diverges from other terms, such as ‘travel’, ‘displacement’ and ‘exile’ (Kaplan 1996). At the same time, displacements are intrinsically related to connective and disconnective experiences, including place-making and belonging, ruptures between life and work in the past and present, experiences of loss and challenges of beginnings. ‘Nomadic Camera’ will centre around the following questions: how do dislocations interconnect with the technical evolution of photography as a mobile medium? How do camera technologies presuppose and affect the visual formulation of exile, migration and flight experiences? What modifications in aesthetics and style, methods and practices of photography do temporary mobility, geographical relocation and resettlement imply?

Please register by 12 June 2023. A link will be sent for remote participation upon registration. For more information, please see the program flyer (PDF).

Programme

Tuesday, 13 June 2023

Venue: Historisches Kolleg, Munich

18:00 Annual Lecture of the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect given by T. J. Demos (Santa Cruz): Globalization, Dis/connection, and Migration: Critical Visual Cultures and Climates of Capital

Wednesday, 14 June 2023

Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect

9:30 Welcome Address and Introduction (Burcu Dogramaci, Winfried Gerling, Jens Jäger, Birgit Mersmann)

Panel 1 Techniques and Technologies

Chairs: Annette Vowinckel, Winfried Gerling

10:00 Svea Bräunert (Potsdam): Photography with a Little Bit of Motion, Film at a Standstill: The Stream of Migrant Images

10:45 Fabienne Liptay (Zurich): The Camera in the Service of Humanism and the Legacies of Neorealism

11:30 Coffee break

12.00 Noemi Quagliati (Munich): Reflections on Photography and Flight

12.45 Florian Krautkrämer (Lucerne): The Given Camera. Contemporary Documentary Concepts in the Context of Flight and Migration

13:30 Lunch break

Panel 2 Body, Agents, and Performativity

Chairs: Burcu Dogramaci, Annette Vowinckel

14.45 Lara Bourdin (Montréal): “I am not migrating to the USA”: Performing migrancy in Paulo Nazareth’s Notícias de América

15.30 Sabrina Moura (São Paulo/Munich, remote): Albert Frisch’s Representations of the Body in Early Amazonian Photography

16.15 Coffee break

16.45 Evelyn Runge (Cologne): The Nomadic Camera and Digital Visual Journalism: Ethical Considerations in the Making

17.30 Mette Sandbye (Copenhagen): Acting for those we left behind. The performance and exchange of family photographs by guest workers in Denmark in the 1970s

18.15 Talk with film director Fatimah Dadzie (Ghana, remote), Venue: Arena Filmtheater

19.30 Film screening Fati’s Choice (Le choix de Fati), Ghana/South Africa, 2021, Director: Fatimah Dadzie, 45 min., English/English subtitle

Thursday, 15 June 2023

Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect

Panel 3 Media Narrations and Narratives

Chairs: Birgit Mersmann, Eva Troelenberg

09.30 Anna Messner (Düsseldorf): “Nowhere in Africa”? German-Jewish Experiences of Migration and Exile in Kenya. A Family Photo Album

10.15 Sandra Mooser (Bern): Nomadic Nollywood ––Re-Narrating Migrant Stories

11:00 Coffee break

11.30 Ainslie Murray (Sydney): The Registry of Itinerant Architectures

12:15 Christina Tente (Gothenburg): Nomads and Spectres. Framing homelessness in pandemic photography

13:00 Lunch break

Panel 4 Circulation, Archive, and Memory

Chairs: Eva Troelenberg, Jens Jäger

14:30 Helene Roth (Munich): A Living Archive of Émigré Photographers in New York

15:15 Zeynep Gürsel (New Brunswick, remote): Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographing Never and Policing Return

16:00 Coffee break

16:30 Estelle Blaschke (Basel): Travelling Images, Disrupted Innovation: Emanuel Goldberg’s Contribution to the Modern History of Photography

17:15 Elizabeth Edwards (Leicester): Moving Archives and Liquid times: The work of Photographs in an Age of Decomposition

Organizers

Burcu Dogramaci (Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, LMU Munich)

Winfried Gerling (European Media Studies – University of Applied Sciences Potsdam/University Potsdam and Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies, Potsdam (ZeM))

Jens Jäger (University of Cologne)

Birgit Mersmann (University of Bonn)