Where Photography Happened: Sites of Photographic Experimentation and Pedagogy, 1950–1980

This session seeks to provoke new questions about postwar photographic history by foregrounding the overlooked and decentralised spaces where photography was taught, made, theorised, and exhibited globally. What happens when we shift our gaze away from familiar narratives centred on national canons, major metropolitan art markets, and celebrated individuals? How might our understanding of photographic practices transform when we consider regional art schools, technical colleges, artist-run spaces, community darkrooms, activist collectives, and experimental pedagogical sites between 1950 and 1980? What critical insights emerge when the institutional, geographic, and infrastructural contexts are placed at the heart of photographic inquiry?

By focusing on these diverse infrastructures and geographies of photographic education and experimentation—rather than established centres of cultural capital—we aim to recover the institutional contexts that acted as crucibles for creative and conceptual innovation. Photography responded not merely to aesthetic considerations but also to pressing social, political, and environmental realities. Exhibitions, syllabi, critiques, publications, and ephemeral or informal practices became key sites for critical discourse.

Papers might address:

• The politics of photographic pedagogy and institutional critique
• The influence of Cold War geopolitics and decolonial movements on photographic practices and theories
• Networks and mentorship structures supporting women and other historically marginalised photographers
• Administrative, documentary, or duplicative aesthetics (e.g., Xerox art, typewritten texts, slide lectures)
• The impact of regional infrastructures on global photographic modernities

By seeing photography as a fluid and networked practice, this session seeks to challenge canonical narratives and illuminate the plural histories of photographic thought in a global postwar context.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham, Mark.rawlinson@nottingham.ac.uk