Appel à communication : « The Ethics of Photography » (Iasi, Roumanie, 19-20 Mai 2016)

The Ethics of Photography (Iași, 19-20 May 16) Iași, Romania, May 19 – 20, 2016 Centrul de Fotografie Contemporana (Centre of Contemporary Photography) in Iasi (RO) is organizing the conference ‘’The Ethics of Photography and the Politics of the Image in Times of Crises’ in the framework of ‘CAMERA PLUS. Biennial of Contemporary Photography and Moving Image’. Venue: ‘Benjamin Fondane’ Hall at the French Institute, Iași (Romania).   Argument: In the last years, striated by a multitude of crises — economical, political and cultural crises —, the photographic practices have created ethical tensions and they have been politicized out of a necessity to speculate the opportunity of transforming the reality. The financial, governmental and axiological objectivities came to be reconsidered by narrative reconstruction, fictional manipulation of the representation and (self)caring techniques of subjectivization, facilitated by the freely use of editing and the invasive post-processing tasks accomplished by decisions of masking, cropping, retouching, filtrating. The relativity of the ethical judgment of an image could be given by the prevalent political nature of the message where both the justification of an interest to emphasize a fact and the argumentation of interpreting an action could be significant. In this case, the correctness comes to be discussed in relation with the acceptability and the responsibility would reach the situation of being exposed to an ideological deconstruction. Considering that the gray area or the blind spot of the photographic ethics could be constituted as object-objective of utopical exploration, new ways of understanding the politics of photographical practice could be configured, in the times of crises, beyond the motivation of the citizen journalism, as well as new ways of rethinking the constitution of an ethics of image from the perspective of a necessary production of reality, maybe even beyond the critique, using the impactful power of a composition.

Requirement: The proposal for the presentation in the conference should include a title, an abstract of 300 words and a short biography of the author. A presentation should take 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussions. The final papers will be published in a critical reader at the end of 2016.

The proposals should be sent to: contact@c-f-c.ro until April 20, 2016. Selection of the participants will be announced shortly thereafter.   Please note that funding is not provided for this event, so participants will be required to fund and arrange their own travels and accommodations.   The conference will be held in English and it will be open to the public. CAMERA PLUS, Biennial of Contemporary Photography and Moving Image is financially supported by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund in Romania, Institut Francais in Iasi, British Council Iasi, Deutschen Kulturzentrums in Iasi.