Beyond the Shutter: The Art of Photographic Manipulations & Materialities

This panel welcomes papers with a capacious understanding of photographic processes—from the 19th century to the present—to think through artistic interventions in how the photographic image is constructed, how the print is developed, and how the resulting object is presented.

Sadakichi Hartmann’s landmark 1904 “Plea for Straight Photography” emphasizes that the medium should favor “legitimate photographic methods,” those “natural to photography.” His conception objected to “the use of the brush, to finger daubs, to scrawling, scratching, and scribbling on the plate,” among other techniques that strained the medium’s specificity. In developing the photography collection and exhibition program at MoMA, Beaumont Newhall further cemented “straight” photography’s central position for fine art photography. This panel seeks to celebrate, instead, methods Hartmann might have deemed “illegitimate”—modes of making that subvert traditional notions of the photographic process, emphasizing not the sanctity of the negative but photographic materialities and manipulations.

This panel addresses photographic making beyond the shutter, moving towards an expanded understanding of photography’s capacities and limitations. We invite papers that consider photographies that resist traditional modes of making, favoring play and experimentation.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:

-Alternative techniques for constructing the photographic image, including photograms and camera obscuras

-Darkroom processes of manipulation and distortion

-Atypical materials deployed in and out of the darkroom

-Queer and intersectional genealogies beyond the photographic canon

-Intermedial artworks that incorporate photography

-Digital interventions using Photoshop and other editing tools

-Nontraditional photographic display strategies