'Light Writing' - The Photographic Image Reloaded

The age of AI has been coming for a good 5-6 decades. Unfortunately, we humans have done very little work to help society understand, grow and acknowledge the nature and enormity of what this means. While popular culture, books & movies have explored narratives around robots as proxy for AI, we've entirely ignored how AI affects our collective understanding of what constitutes reality. 

This is the age of fake news, deep fakes (modified images to change ground truth) and revenge porn. It's also the age of access to medical imagery, 3D visualizations and generative networks that can help reconstruct lost histories, data and more. This talk explores the changing definitions of reality in an AI generated world.

In his preoccupation with borders, movement and all the various forms of differences they presuppose, he has more often than not encountered the question: how can imagery (and by extension photography) play a useful role in the restitution of our world towards more conscious and correlational human relationships? 

In attempt to address this question, his presentation will draw from his decade-long work with the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project. This project, since 2009, has brought African artists – photographers, writers, filmmakers – together to engage the question of borders as it relates the African continent, and to attempt an alternative gaze and narrative of realities therein.

The selfie has today become significant component of life itself since the mobile phone, which few people can do without, not only enables the taking of pictures at a moment’s notice but also blurs the distinction between the photographer and the subject. This presentation tries to look at the precursors of the selfie, chiefly the amateur family photograph, to examine the social role they performed in linking private space to historical time, private memory to historical time and hence to one’s position as citizens within organized society. It is significant that the selfie marks an era in which history as an agreed collection of public events marked by a chronology has itself been undermined by the internet, which through the ‘noise’ it creates, destroys consensus over public happenings as acknowledged ‘truths’.  

The selfie, coming at this time, is not a record or a documentation of an event linked to public memory but more an act associated with everyday living and an assertion of individual identity. The presentation looks at what the selfie could be doing to the notion of citizenship when the grand narrative of linear history is itself being obliterated by a bewildering multiplicity of narratives.

In the 1895 Lumiere brother's film The Photographic Congress Arrives in Lyon, the astronomer and chronophotographer, Jule Janson, stops in front of the cinematograph -- which is live-recording the responses of the photographers who have come to see this new machine -- and takes a photograph. This early encounter between the cinematograph or cinema and photography, is symbolic of the inseparable manner in which both forms are linked. 

While photo-artists have developed conventions such as narrative (more commonly associated with cinema) in innovative ways, photographers and photographs have equally played an important role in many films, the most iconic example of this arguably being Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up. In this presentation, I examine this most crucial role played by photography in constructing our very idea of cinema and stardom. What is the relationship between the still photograph, the moving image, and the cinema industry?

Our understanding of the living world has been inextricably intertwined with our ability to visualize and capture the structure and form of living organisms. Developments in modalities of imaging have closely paralleled our capacity to decipher secrets of the living world, providing new windows on life processes, with every advancement. 

In this talk Satyajit discusses, beginning with the discovery of lenses to enhance the acuity of our eyes in the 1600s, which led to the articulation of the Cell theory, unprecedented developments in imaging methodologies in the last two decades. These are leading us to interrogate living processes at temporal and spatial scales, never imaged before. 

Based on selected images circulated through photography books and the exhibition catalogues, this paper attempts to map the shifting tensions between the frame and the framed through following questions connected to the major historical moments of Sri Lanka: how was photography invested in the making of Sri Lanka as a colonial state and a place of paradise?  

How did the civil conflict and the violence alter the photographic gaze?  How did photography witness violence or expression of trauma? How does photography become a tool of resistance?

The Vietnam War was one of the most bloodied conflicts in the spectre of Cold War. This paper is based on a comparative reading of two iconic photobooks produced ostensibly to represent the viewpoints of the two Vietnams. The first photobook is Viet Nam in Flames (published c. 1969), involving photographers Nguyễn Mạnh Đan (b. 1925) and Nguyễn Ngọc Hạnh (1927-2017). The second book is War Time Photos (published in 2000) by Lâm Tấn Tài (1935–2001). While recognising the imprint of politics dividing both Vietnams, this paper attempts to resurface the parallel (and diverging) contexts that informed the production and afterlife of both photobooks. 

This is made possible by tracing the biographies of the photographers involved, their participation in the global milieu of salon photography, how they understood their involvements in the war efforts, and their lives after reunification. This reading aims to complicate our dichotomous impression of two Vietnams and to unpack the reach (and limits) of politics in photographic production.