Conference - Canadian Photography History Research Group

Six members of the Canadian Photography History Research Group, based in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, will be speaking at Meeting Places / Lieux de rencontre: An International Canadian Studies Conference held at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia and Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick from September 18 to 21, 2013.

This international Canadian studies conference engages the collaborative possibilities of place-based communities and cultures, bringing together academic, cultural, and artistic communities to reflect on how place-based communities work to defend and develop their particular identities and to resist the time-space compression that threatens to disrupt and overwhelm the significance of place. In Canada, where space and place have long been contested ground, the discussion of place-based cultures has moved beyond national boundaries to include global and transnational cultures. One of the goals of the conference is to study the dynamics, relations, and tensions between the local, the national and the global understandings of place. Conference keynote speakers include Andrea Bear Nicholas, Cole Harris, Tania Martin and Graeme Wynn.

Chaired by Concordia professor Martha Langford, panel participants Elizabeth Cavaliere, Philippe Guillaume, Karla McManus, Sharon Murray and Aurèle Parisien will deliver papers under the theme of Imaged Communities: Putting Canadian Photographic History in its Place. This panel addresses the idea that a consolidated history of Canadian photography has never been written. Taking both thematic and regional approaches, and broadening the archival scope to vernacular photography, the papers delivered will work to supplement the discipline's conventional formal and technical accounts with cultural histories of the medium as experienced by producers and consumers. The aim is to share the research group's discoveries of Canada as a network of photographic places

The Canadian Photography History Research Group has been working together since 2010 to develop historical accounts of Canadian photographic history from underconsidered sources such as archives, local history museums, science museums, and popular periodicals; and using various methodological approaches such as history from below, oral history, and the history of science. The ultimate goal of the research group is producing an electronic reader to be housed on the Jarislowsky Institute website which will support both the accumulated research of the group and future research projects on Canadian photography.