CONFERENCES & TALKS

Paper: The Distance Between Theory & Practice – Photography Next International Conference, Stockholm, 4-5 February, 2010.

Paper: Uncertain Wandering – The Constructed Environment International Conference, Venice, 17-19 November, 2010.

Paper: Photobook Poetry – The Tenth International Conference on the Book, Barcelona, Spain, 30 June -1 July, 2012.

Paper Abstract: In 1958 The Americans a small book of eighty-three photographs taken by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank was published in Paris. One year later it was published in America with a short introduction by Beat poet Jack Kerouac. This now iconic book of visual poetry would come to define the possibilities of the printed photographic book form, or Photobook. The edit, the sequence of images, the use of text and the pagination of white space, alluded to new possibilities of visual communication. The Americans was republished as a hardback edition in 2007 by Steidl.

Talk: Why Study Art & Design / HE Conventions, Liverpool & Staffordshire, 2010-14

Talk: Photography is Beguiling / UCAS Design Your Future Educational Fairs London and Manchester 2010-13

Talk: Photography a Cabinet of Curiosities / Staffordshire University Fringe Arts Festival 2012

Talk: We Begin Life in the Dark: Reflections on the Camera Obscura & Enlightenment Values – Staffordshire University Fringe Arts Festival 2013

Talk Abstract: Why are we fascinated by images and why do we also fear them? The camera obscura from the Latin; camera for vaulted chamber/room, obscura for dark, is one manifestation of our fascination to see the world as an image. This talk reflects upon how Enlightenment thinking used the obscura to produce scientific explanations for how vision, the noblest of the senses, might work and how after the First World War, a change and resistance to privileging sight would arise through Surrealism and particular strands of European intellectual thought.

Talk: We Begin Life in the Dark: Reflections on the Camera Obscura & Enlightenment Values – Macclesfield Philosophical & Literary Society 2013