These talks will focus on current photo culture and the popularity of photo sharing with insight into the power of photography, the versatility that digital platforms offer and where technological changes are leading. RPS members, Redeye members and students receive a discounted ticket rate of £15.
CHAIR: Andy Golding
Andy Golding is Head of the Department of Photography and Film and teaches practice at undergraduate and postgraduate level. His skills in lighting, studio, constructed photography are renowned and he has collaborated on many national and international photographic projects.
Jason Evans is a British Photographer, writer, lecturer and curator. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and has written widely on photography. His series 'Strictly' is held in the Tate collection and his webpage thedailynice.com has a large and dedicated following. Some of his recent works are randomly generated sequences of his street photographs taken in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo as double exposures, made in camera on film. These images, published in book form have now been combined with a randomly evolving soundtrack and released as an app for iPad and iPhone.
Evans will discuss elements of his practice in relation to current photocultural and technological changes in the sharing of images, issues include, education, art / commerce, dissemination and kittens.
Roger Hargreaves
Small Cameras OK: Amateur photography and the 2008 US Presidential campaign. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was in part achieved through the strategic harnessing of amateur photography, shared on the internet. Obama’s on-line campaign, My.BarackObama.com, was co-ordinated by Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook. The strategy from the outset was to link the young, educated, demographic of online social networkers to Obama’s experience of Chicago machine politics; voter registration drives, phone banking and door-knocking. Amateur photography, made on digital cameras and cell-phones provided the perfect glue. This lecture will consider an overview of the campaign and will draw on an extensive archive of images posted during the campaign.
Roger Hargreaves is a writer and curator of photography as well a research fellow at the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the London College of Communication. His interests in photography are wide ranging and international spanning the early history of the medium through to contemporary practice.
Alexandra Moschovi
Androids, Apps and Snaps: Photography in a Connected Age
Greeted with great hype at its first demonstration over a year ago, Google’s wearable Internet-connected device, the Google Glass, equipped with a voice-operated 5-megapixel camera and capable of video recording, has recently spurred public controversy over surveillance and privacy fears, even before being released in the mass market. This talk aims to explore the rhetoric surrounding new image and communication technologies, concentrating on the cultural and social uses of photo-sharing in advancing social connectivity, cultural interaction and public engagement in networked societies.
Alexandra Moschovi is an art historian, critic, independent curator and the Programme Leader of MA Photography at the University of Sunderland. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet.
Dr Loplop
Cat Flu: How the great cat photography epidemic of 2006 changed the face of the internet
The presentation will focus on the serendipitous collision of circumstances and technologies around the year 2006. This led to the emergence of the contemporary photographic cat meme and its unforeseen consequences for the future of social networking. The talk will reflect on the extent to which the key characteristics of communicability and mutability mirror the changes taking place in the wider fields of visual information design.
Dr Loplop is a London-based cat photographer and internet celebrity. He is best known as the originator of the Somebody Else's Cat phenomenon, and is an administrator of the eponymous Flickr group.
This is the second event of two. The first event will be hosted by the National Media Museum in Bradford 25th October speakers Michael Pritchard, Patrizia Di Bello, Roger Hargreaves and Colin Harding.