On Thoughtphotography

What happens to images that appear haphazardly, are lost, or fall outside of the frame of (seemingly) familiar temporalities or visual regimes? Can cinematography revalorize roaming images and ‘uneventful’ time – or moving images that play with both promiscuity of detail and deficit in visual definition? Is there a ‘materiality’ to be reclaimed through photographic imperfection in the age of digital technology? Have the reconfigured capacities of manipulating and ‘finishing’ images within the larger conditions of digitalism effectively shaped our understanding of saving and archiving images – and, by extension, works of art? These questions urge an examination of artworks made to be abandoned rather than safeguarded, dispossessed works of art that evade the certainties of origin or provenance art historians have typically regarded as foundational.

Bringing together art history, cinema, photography, visual archeology, and media studies, this conference explores the interdependence of distortion and revelation, identity and itinerancy in the visual, in order to move beyond the dichotomies of opacity and transparency, intention and interference in the production and circulation, that is, in the life of images.