Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 Conference

Introduction

Programmed by Julian Stallabrass (Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 Guest Curator), organised by Brighton Photo Biennial and supported by the University of Brighton, this important event brought together internationally renowned photographers, media theorists and art historians to discuss the production, exhibition and distribution of images of war, referencing historical and contemporary photographic practice.

Background

This one-day conference is part of the international Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 ‘Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War’ curated by Julian Stallabrass and open from Friday 3 October to Sunday 16 November 2008 at ten major visual art venues, organisations and higher educational institutes across the South East coast of England.

‘Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War’ sets out to examine the vast changes that have taken place in the making and use of images of conflict since the last great ‘media war’ in Vietnam. Since then, there have been profound transformations in the technology of image making and distribution and in the media bodies through which they are made public.

During the Vietnam War, the illustrated magazines brought weekly displays of colour news photography to their millions of readers and paid princely sums to the elite professional photojournalists who took them. Now such photojournalism has a more uncertain place in the 24-hour news industry and news stories are more likely to be covered by local photojournalists or even ordinary citizens with their own amateur equipment or phone cameras. While the mainstream media have become more conservative since the 1960s, a vast area of competing images, ideologies and publishing forms has emerged online.

Through this one-day conference, a mix of academics, curators, photographers and artists examined the representational, ethical, historical and political issues that this changed scene highlights.

Conference themes and key questions/issues

Among the major themes are:

• what changes are brought about in the use and memory of images by their new ease of making and circulation?
• how do these images change when seen in so many rapidly changing and antithetical contexts?
• how are the same images used in different ways by, for example, pro- and anti-war activists?
• what are the new conventions of online image display, and how do these differ from the print media?
• does the plethora of conflict images in the new media realm work against the emergence of highly memorable key images that seem to summarise an event (as famously pictures by Nick Ut, Eddie Adams and Philip Jones Griffiths did for Vietnam)?
• how have artists responded to the changed media landscape, particularly in placing large-format images of conflict on museum walls?