10:00 até às 20:00
International Conference Photography and History

International Conference Photography and History

This is a hybrid event and the link for the online transmission will be provided in our website, where the full program can also be found: https://photographyhistoryconference.wordpress.com/international-conference-2021/program/
A Conferência tem «Validação pela DRE» em 15 horas de formação e o código ITG-2645/21.

Due to COVID restrictions, face-to-face participation will be subject to room capacity and requires prior registration via email: photographyhistoryconference@gmail.com


The relationship between the photographic medium and the discipline of history has been a topic for theoretical speculation and a source for analogies and rapprochements since the second half of the 19th century. However, the debate around the role of images in historiography implies also countless frictions and silences.

If due to its acknowledged transparency and realism photography is apparently a privileged index, being frequently considered a paradigm for the craft of the historian, however, due to its stillness and fragmentary characteristics technical images have generate throughout the 20th century a considerable heuristic suspicion.

Even though photography has been mostly considered as a documental and utilitarian tool, the renovation that technical images convey to the conception of history itself has lagged behind the expectations foreseen by Walter Benjamin in the 1940s.

To foster the debate on photography today, on its social uses, its circulation in a world of images with multiple meanings to history, aims at questioning concepts such as those of fact and event, visuality and truth, real and imaginary.

Hence the purpose of this conference is to envision the role of photography in different contexts – such as the institutional and personal archive, in social networks or in artistic practice -, as a means to stimulate history, here understood as a narrative that questions contemporaneity based on evidences and regimes of thought and visuality from the past.

A specific session of the conference will be carried out in partnership with PERPHOTO project (FCT/PTDC/ART-PER/31693/2017), aiming to foster the discussion on topics emerging from the relationship between photography and history in the context of performance theory and the performing arts.

The project Photoimpulse (FCT/PTDC/COM-OUT/29608/2017) is also a partner of the conference carrying out yet another session addressing the articulation between photography as a medium and the geographical and anthropological archive from the colonial era.


Organizing committee

Ana Gandum
NOVA Institute of Communication / EVAM Observatory

Isabel Stein
NOVA Institute of Communication / EVAM Observatory

Vítor Magalhães
University of Madeira / Council of Culture

Rita Rodrigues
Head of the Heritage Studies Section – Regional Directorate for Culture

Vítor Luís
Madeira Photography Museum – Atelier Vicente’s


Production assistant

Lisandra Faria
Madeira Photography Museum – Atelier Vicente’s


Scientific evaluation of proposals

Ana Gandum
NOVA Institute of Communication / EVAM Observatory

Isabel Stein
NOVA Institute of Communication / EVAM Observatory

Ana Lúcia Mandelli de Marsillac
Prof. at Federal University of Santa Catarina / EVAM Observatory

Alzira Tude de Sá
Prof. at Federal University of Bahia / ICNOVA / EVAM Observatory

Mônica Torres
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro / Instituto Nacional de Câncer (Brazil)

Ana Catarina Pinho
eCDR – University of South Wales / IHA – NOVA University of Lisbon


Scientific advisor

Margarida Medeiros
Prof. at Nova University of Lisbon – FCSH / ICNOVA
Recomendamos que confirme toda a informação junto do promotor oficial deste evento. Por favor contacte-nos se detectar que existe alguma informação incorrecta.
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