14-16 July, 2022, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
International workshop organized by Alice Morin and Jens Ruchatz (subproject 5 of the DFG research unit “Journalliteratur”) as well as Hubert Locher (Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte – Bildarchiv Marburg)
In the last ten to twenty years, scientific interest in photographs published in periodicals has remarkably increased. On the one hand, the historiography of photography has known a marked inflexion towards the study of photography in print, growingly shifting from photobooks to more “trivial” appearances in magazines and acknowledging periodicals as sites of photographic developments since the medium’s inception. In the expanding field of periodical studies, on the other hand, textual content can hardly be considered separately from visual content—and photography has become a favored means of illustration since the rise of the illustrated news magazine in the mid-19th century, bringing about new reflections on specific aspects of photo-periodicals.
In this workshop, we will chart and assess the progress made in the convergence of photography and periodical research; and explore prospects, opportunities and obstacles for future research. Offering a platform to both a phenomenology of photo-periodicals and a phenomenology of the research dedicated to them, we will discuss and debate: 1. the theories, methods and concepts developed so far, their potential and shortcomings; 2. the questions that should be addressed at periodicals as objects of research; and 3. the evolving infrastructures for research, ranging from the availability of popular magazines in research libraries and archives and the various problems of digitization (standards, corpuses, …) to the challenges of publishing periodical research, to which copyright matters are central