This conference is a collaboration with Open Eye Gallery, and is held at Open Eye Gallery, 19 Mann Island, Liverpool, L3 1BP. There is a limited capacity due to the size of the gallery, so please book as soon as possible. Booking details are at the bottom of the page. Please note, most, if not all, talks will be videoed and the videos made available via Open Eye. The conference will not be live-streamed.
Programme
DAY 1: JUNE 18
9.-9.30 registration and coffee
9.30 Welcome
10 am
KEYNOTE 1 Jordan Bear, ‘Lurking Unsuspected’: Visibility and Purity in Photography’s Media
11 am coffee
11.15 Panel 1 Archival Absences
•Tom Allbeson, Picture Post at home & abroad: Seeing and not seeing imperial citizens in postwar British photojournalism
•Patricia Hayes, Unseen: the underworld of unprocessed photographs from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa (1980s)
12.15 Panel 2 Concealment and Public Space
•Annie Rudd, Invisible Photographers: Walker Evans, Candid Cameras, and “Vanity”
•Godehard Janzing, An invisible Shooting Scene? Daguerre's “Boulevard du temple” and Fieschi's “infernal machine”
•Donald Weber, Infrastructural Walking: Photography as Residual Registration
1.45 lunch break
2.15 Panel 3 Latent Sensitivities
•Aindreas Scholz, Invisible Botanies: Anna Atkins’s Cyanotypes, Chemical Latency and Climate Change
•Ellen Yiwei Wang, Unseen Images and Latent Media: Thoughtography and Spirit Photography in Japan
•Sarah Edith James, Atomic Images: An Ultraviolet Art History of Afterlives?
3.45 tea break
4:00 Panel 4 Strategies of Recognition
•Laura Love, Using vernacular photography to ground an art historical approach to trans bodies in the UK
•Antonia Deus, Aesthetics of Image Censorship: Artistic Strategies of (In)Visibility in Contemporary Iranian Portrait Photography
•Emily Beswick, An archive of hybridity: photographs of mixed individuals and communities in early 20th century Liverpool
drinks reception for 6pm, followed by optional conference dinner at 7.30
DAY 2: JUNE 19
9.30-10 coffee
10am KEYNOTE 2 Estelle Blaschke, Entangled Invisibilities in AI Photography
11.am Panel 5 Archives and Coloniality
•Erin Pauwels, Invisible Backdrops and Archival Afterlives: Recovering Agency in Indigenous American Delegation Photographs
•Anne Cross, From Slave Auction to Art Auction: Disappeared Tintypes of the ‘Princess Madia’ and the Politics of the Unseen
12am Panel 6 Law Enforcement and Institutional Images
•Donna West Brett, Photographic Anxiety: Surveillance and the Unseen
•Kylie Thomas, Shallow Abyss
•Clara Trivellato, A Game of Hide-and-Seek: Microdots and Latent Images in the Stasi's Cold War Operations
1.30 lunch
2.00pm Panel 7 Images and Infrastructures
•Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Against “shadows of imprecision”: elucidating the “invisible” visual infrastructure of women peasants’ organizing against pesticides in Chile (1985 – present)
•Mi Zhou, Material Infrastructure of Personal Photography in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)
•Thale Elisabeth Sørlie, Uncovering an invisible and profound integration of photography in modern infrastructure
3.30pm Panel 8 Technology and Invisibility
•Franziska Barth, Capturing the RAW
•Yanai Toister, Potential Picturability
•Isabelle Lynch, Seeing Beyond Fifty Meters Deep: Photography, Electric Light, and the Rapture of the Deep
5pm end
Registration Information:
Conference fee: £90
Unwaged/ PhD students: £45
(fee includes lunches and refreshments across both days and a drinks reception, a conference dinner will also be organised which will be charged separately for those who wish to participate)
We are unable to offer fee waivers.
Registration booking link https://payments.liv.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/events-at-liverpool/school-of-the-arts/the-invisible-image-photography-and-the-unseen
Conference dinner booking link https://payments.liv.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/events-at-liverpool/school-of-the-arts/the-invisible-image-photography-and-the-unseen-2026-conference-dinner
Hotel booking link https://liverpoolcvbres.bzon.uk/event/ccel-international-conference-the-invisible-image/